NSF Hopes New Education Grants Will Promote Change

Now that the National Science Foundation's Strategic Systemic Initiative (SSI) is in its second year, with the second round of grants awarded on May 1, science educators have had a chance to assess the program's progress. And some of them are not pleased. Some critics contend that the initiative--an effort to foster widespread, comprehensive change in the way mathematics and science are taught in United States elementary and secondary public schools--is being hampered. The problem, they say, stems from Congress, which has not allocated enough money to elicit the type of voluminous changes NSF says are needed. However, in many cases, states with resourceful administrators are succeeding in making the most of the limited amount of cash, says Janice Earle, NSF program director for SSI. The SSI program was created, in the words of Luther Williams, NSF's assistant director for education and human resources, to be a "comprehensive and systemic effort designed to enable fundamental reform of science and mathematics education" (see accompanying story). n 1985, Congress requested that a $1.6 million study be conducted by SRI International, an independent research firm in Palo Alto, Calif., to determine how the National Science Foundation should assist the growth of United States precollege science education. One of the recommendations of that study, which was completed in 1987, was that the government institute a program similar to NSF's current Strategic Systemic Initiative (SSI) program, says Michael Knapp, a codirector of the study and now an associate professor of education, leadership, and policy at the University of Washington. "When we first made our proposals, NSF was, at best, lukewarm about them," Knapp explains. "But this has changed quite a bit. Now, projects like SSI are pumping a fair amount of money into states to boost science education." The money allocated to SSI, according to Knapp, is "probably enough to seed a planning process. But NSF can't fund any type of large-scale educational change. You need the state legislatures, other parts of the federal government, or the private sector." Knapp says creating comprehensive systemic change in education would require more than the traditional amount of money the federal government spends on precollege education, which usually falls in the 6 percent to 7 percent range of total government funding. --R.K. States receiving SSI funds--the first round was awarded last year--are spending their endowments on a vast array of educational initiatives. Some, like Montana, are using the money to purchase equipment such as graphing calculators; others, like New Mexico, are taking a more strictly pedagogical approach, instituting intensive summer science teacher training programs. This new round of K-12 funding, slightly under $109 million, brings the total monetary outlay to date for the SSI program to around $188 million for 20 states and Puerto Rico, an average of $1.9 million per year per state over the life of the five-year program (see table on page 8). However, there are clear funding disparities among the states. In the first batch of grants, for example, a densely populated state such as Florida received a five-year award of $7.9 million, while rural Montana's was slightly under $10 million. Program administrators in Florida have targeted 1,816 public schools and 62,000 teachers with their grant; this breaks down into expenditures of roughly $4,358 per school, or $128 per teacher over five years. "It's not fair, but that's the way it is," says Earle, who claims that while the money is uneven, so are a state's educational resources. She argues that larger states, like California, have significantly more learning tools and state instructional dollars than do less populous states, like Montana. "I know that's a rationale at best, but there's nothing we can do about it," she says. William G. Aldridge, the executive director of the Washington D.C.-based National Science Teachers Association, while acknowledging that the grant program is still in its infancy, says that "a state needs more than $2 million a year." "The real problem is the funding," Aldridge says. "The [U.S.] Senate has two members from each state... so it is appealing to senators when all the states are treated equally regardless of size. It's too bad politics enters into this. This is a national problem, and we need to compromise and work together to get things done." The five-year term of the SSI grants is sufficient time to accomplish the kind of changes needed, Aldridge says. However, he adds, "it isn't the length of time that's important, but the amount of money. There is no reason why we can't make the changes in even three or four years." Earle explains that because Congress has allocated only around $250 million for the program's entire run--with which program administrators hope to include between 26 and 28 states by 1993--NSF has tried to utilize the money constructively by encouraging cooperative agreements between the federal government and the states, and between the states and the private sector. "This is not enough money to get the job done ... we know that it is not enough," says Earle. "But it is enough to get the ball rolling.... The program acts as a catalyst for change." For example, in New Mexico, two major laboratories, the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, have teacher advisory programs, in which a bench scientist takes time off from the lab one day a week and teaches schoolteachers about modern scientific research. "SSI is filling the gaps in our science education by encouraging people to step into the voids," says David Colton, an SSI organizer and a professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. "It's an incredible opportunity to pull together and align a multitude of efforts that are already in place to better the way math and science is taught." NSF's Williams says that public/private sector partnerships are SSI's strong asset: "Maybe I'm being overenthusiastic, but I really see SSI as being almost revolutionary. Private companies have always been with us, but now they are contributing to the math and science education of the state...we are unleashing a whole new array of educational resources." The success of the programs, says Earle, largely depends on the state's commitment. To receive a grant in the first place, an interested state must develop a long-term strategic plan for how the SSI money is going to be spent. Each state has a different mechanism for building a proposal; some use state-sponsored committees, while others rely on teacher associations or groups at state universities. The proposal then goes through an NSF review process. Administrators associated with SSI regularly evaluate a state's progress with its plan, and if the state is slacking, the funding will be pulled. However, Earle speculates that this will probably never occur. "The first batch [from 1991] wrote their proposals in somewhat of a vacuum; there was a lot of confusion over even what the word `systemic' meant," she says. "But the second batch spent a lot of time in the field researching options ... they have used the year [since the program began] well in planning activities so they are not too far behind the first batch in implenentation."

NSF Hopes New Education Grants Will Promote Change

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