Science's Take on Education and the White House. (October 30, 2012)

The journal Science this week asked its staff to analyse what the President of the United States will face with regard to a number of issues involving science and technology when he enteres the Oval Office. Here we reprint Jeffrey Mervis assessment with regard to education.

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For better or worse, teachers have captured the lion's share of the meager attention given to education during this year's presidential election. Their political activism infuriates Mitt Romney, who would like to ban teachers' unions from making campaign contributions. In addition, his support for vouchers—channeling federal funding for low-income and disabled students to parents rather than to local and state agencies—is designed in part to blunt the influence of teachers' unions in making policy. In contrast, President Barack Obama has relied on these unions to help get out the vote, and he frequently mentions that funds from his massive 2009 federal stimulus package have kept hundreds of thousands of classroom teachers on the payroll.

But what do the two candidates think about the job that those teachers are paid to do? Both men have said that teachers are the essential ingredient in a good school. And although it may be easy to dismiss their comments as an applause line, their position also squares with a growing body of research on the powerful influence of good teachers on student learning.

Those findings could play a role in several pieces of legislation coming up for review as soon as next year. Two key reauthorizations are the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which former President George W. Bush branded “No Child Left Behind,” and the Higher Education Act, which governs student lending and teacher training. Also on the table are special education and technical education programs, as well as the Department of Education's research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. Scientists hope that research on teacher quality will get a boost regardless of which man is elected.

The federal government provides less than 10% of all funding for elementary and secondary education in the United States, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education receives a tiny fraction of that federal investment. Even so, Obama has probably spent more time talking about STEM education than any president in recent memory. His stump speech invariably includes his promise to train 100,000 more science and math teachers over the next decade as part of a broader effort to build a more technology-savvy workforce. Obama has also run on his record of fostering state-based educational innovations through a $4 billion Race to the Top competition for schools, as well as a public-private partnership, called Educate to Innovate, created to attract more students, in particular women and minorities, into STEM fields.

Romney hasn't ignored the subject, although he has much less to say about science and math education. He believes that Washington has no business financing implementation of the so-called Common Core, a voluntary effort by 45 states and the District of Columbia to adopt a similar curriculum in math and language arts, and a companion common assessment of student performance. That stance presumably would also apply to the pending next-generation science standards that have yet to be embraced by the states. At the same time, however, he backs efforts by states to hold teachers accountable for how much students learn, including losing their jobs if test scores stagnate.

The importance of science education to the Obama administration is no coincidence. Physics Nobelist Carl Wieman was the driving force for STEM education policies during most of Obama's first term before leaving the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in June for treatment of a serious medical condition. Wieman has spent more than a decade conducting research on two related issues: how to improve undergraduate science courses, and the training of future STEM teachers. He believes that both areas would benefit from an approach he calls “deliberate practice,” that is, treating the brain as a muscle that acquires skills through extended and strenuous learning activities. Two recent reports, one by a presidential advisory body on improving STEM education and another by the U.S. National Academies on discipline-based science education, strike similar themes on what needs to be done.

In short, a second Obama administration will likely continue its push to beef up federal STEM education efforts. Romney, on the other hand, would probably be content to see local authorities take the initiative.
 

—JEFFREY MERVIS