Triangle Coalition For Science And Technology Education

Last week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its Federal STEM Education Portfolio, the most comprehensive inventory of all federal STEM education programs to date. The inventory, developed as a result of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, was administered by the National Science and Technology Council Committee on STEM Education (CoSTEM). The committee, whose members included representatives from 11 Federal agencies and from OSTP, will use the findings to inform the development of a five-year strategic plan for the coordination and advancement of STEM education in the United States.

The goals of the report are to:

• Identify duplication, overlap, and fragmentation across Federal agencies
• Illustrate distinct characteristics of investments
• Identify potential areas for synergy
• Support the sharing of effective STEM education strategies and evaluation
• Increase awareness of education investments
• Support the development of a Federal five-year strategic STEM education plan

While the inventory does seek to identify potential areas of duplication and overlap, the report states that the critical issue in the analysis “is not whether the total number of investments is too large or whether today’s programs are overly redundant with one another. Rather, the primary issue is how to strategically focus the limited Federal dollars available so they will have a more significant impact in areas of national priority.”

In order to focus in on specific areas with similar issues, the committee defined STEM as including formal or informal education primarily focused on physical and natural sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, including environmental science education or environmental steward­ship, acknowledging, however, that STEM can also be defined in broader terms.

Among the major findings that will be used to develop the strategic plan:

• The overall Federal investment in STEM education for fiscal year 2010 was $3.4 billion, or about 0.3 percent of the Nation’s total education budget of $1.1 trillion.
• About one-third of that $3.4 billion directly benefits students from groups underrepresented in STEM.
• About one-third of the $3.4 billion funds 113 investments that are focused on specific workforce needs of various agencies, and two-thirds is spent on 139 broader STEM education investments.
• Of the broader investments, 87 percent of which are funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education:
  • 104 involve STEM-related internship opportunities;
  • 35 have as their primary objective the provision of training and certification in preparation for entry into the STEM workforce;
  • 99 either require or encourage public-private partnerships, and;
  • 24 support STEM teachers.

The five-year strategic plan, set to be released in early 2012, will identify approaches for creating a STEM Education portfolio that is coordinated across the Federal agencies and aligned to a common set of goals and evaluation metrics. Read the full report here.