Back in May Rep. Mike Honda and Sen. Barack Obama came together and presented the Enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education Act of 2008 (full text). After federal funding for STEM fields has been increasingly cut over the last few years, such an act provides hope. Groups like the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and the American Chemical Society have already come forward to show their support of the new policy effort. Now, other agencies are also standing up to back the legislation. One group The National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) who also endorsed groups like “Project Lead the Way, FIRST Robotics, DoD STARBASE” has come out strongly behind the new STEM proposal. NDIA support makes it clear that efforts to improve STEM education are important to industry and other private sector companies. To quote the retired Air Force Lieutenant and current president and CEO of NDIA, General Larry Farrell, “The inability to hire a security-clearable, adequately educated work force of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians will be the single most economically crippling issue facing the US defense industrial base in the coming decades.” NDIA is urging House and Senate members to quickly act in supporting the bill.

Among some of the top goals of this bill would be to get states to adopt similar STEM education standards, currently standards are left to the state to decide and vary across the country. Moving to national STEM standards would ensure that children all across the United States are learning the same things in school. It would also allow standards and material to go through the federal President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy for review. A final goal of the bill is to target curriculum innovation by funding research that potentially can improve STEM education.

Related Links: NASA Announces 2008 Competitive Grant Programs Project Lead The Way

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Education, Society, The National Interest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.