A recent panel discussion hosted by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, showcased the importance of an education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
The panel discussion was held during the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s (CBCF) Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C.
Former NASA engineer and co-founder of STEMBoard Aisha Bowe moderated the ALC panel discussion on expanding STEM opportunities for young minorities. (www.aishabowe.com)
Moderated by former NASA engineer Aisha Bowe, the co-founder of STEMBoard, the panel included STEAM ambassador and Patcasso Art LLC founder Patrick Hunter; Quality Education for Minorities CEO Dr. Ivory Toldson; Johns Hopkins chair and Surgeon in Chief Dr. Robert Higgins; and INROADS, Inc. President and CEO Forest T. Harper.
Congressman G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) kicked off the conversation, which was focused on increasing opportunities in STEM careers for underrepresented youth.
“The STEM field is important to our country, it’s critical to jobs in the 21st century—jobs that make the big bucks,” Butterfield told the excited students from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and Carver Technology Early College High School, who participated in the session. “To succeed, we need to draw from the best in our community.”
Butterfield continued: “The lack of African-Americans in STEM means that many of our best minds are not included.”
In 2016, Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and Carver Technology Early College High School formed a partnership with Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kaiser Permanente, and the University of Maryland at Baltimore for a P-TECH program that offers health science degrees in areas of concentration like health information technology, respiratory care, or surgical technology.
The program creates a school-to-industry pipeline for students in STEM fields.
Eugene Chung Qui, the principal at Dunbar High School, said the visit to the CBCF event excited his students, who are enrolled in STEM courses.
“Being that our focus and the mission of the school is to push our students into STEM fields, this is an excellent opportunity for the children to be able to talk with and ask questions of such an esteemed panel,” Chung Qui said.
Another panelist, Tamberlin Golden of General Motors, noted the company’s passion for STEM.
“Technology, right now, is disrupting everything in the industry,” Golden said. “Now, people are looking for connectivity, autonomy, electrification, and convenience. We have to monitor thoroughly how we manufacture our cars.”
Tamberlin continued: “If you want to make a good wage from ‘Day 1,’ you want to go [with STEM]. GM has been very invested in this and we want to partner with many organizations.”
A report released, earlier this year, from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration revealed that there were nine million STEM workers in the United States in 2015.
About 6.1 percent of all workers are in STEM occupations, up from 5.5 percent just five years earlier, according to the report.
Employment in STEM occupations grew much faster than employment in non-STEM occupations over the last decade—24.4 percent versus 4 percent, respectively—and STEM occupations are projected to grow by 8.9 percent through 2024, compared to 6.4 percent growth for non- STEM occupations.
STEM workers command higher wages, earning 29 percent more than their non-STEM counterparts.
Further, nearly three-quarters of STEM workers have at least a college degree, compared to just over one-third of non-STEM workers.
The report also revealed that STEM degree holders enjoy higher earnings, regardless of whether they work in STEM or non-STEM occupations.
“When I was in high school, I was a truant and I was unfocused, because my parents were going through a nasty divorce and I just wanted to go hang out with my friends,” said Bowe, an aeronautical engineer and entrepreneur who manages multi-million dollar defense contracts and private-sector technology clients.
“I started with pre-algebra,” Bowe shared, then speaking directly to the students she said, “We want you to understand that in entering STEM, you’re entering into an unlimited field.”
Source: Center for Public Education, Originally published February 21, 2017
We recently released a report on school segregation in the U.S. While we think that following national trends are helpful, and that lessons can be learned from one region to another, we also acknowledge that segregation looks different in each region, state, and metropolitan area. So, even though racial balance overall has been improving over the past 10 years as an average of all metropolitan areas in the U.S., the reality is that it’s been getting better in about 65 percent of cities and getting worse in the other 35 percent. We should definitely be working to learn best practices from those who are improving student integration to apply to areas that are getting worse.
Brown v. Board of Education really addressed de jure segregation, or laws that required that black and white students attend different schools. These laws were on the books in 17 southern states at the time of the landmark 1954 court case. States didn’t truly begin to integrate schools until the late 1960s, as the courts enforced Brown v. Board, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1968 court case Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. As the graph below shows, the South saw the greatest decrease of black students in racially isolated schools of any region from 1968 to 1989, as they were the ones that originally had segregation laws that were overturned. Court orders were in place in many southern school districts through the 1980s, with a few still being in place today.
What should also be noted in this graph is that the Northeast has the highest rate of black students in isolated school settings. Some of this may be attributable to having smaller school districts, which allows for more sorting and separation of students of different races and less ability for school district leaders to truly integrate schools if they have little diversity within their borders. However, Maryland has one of the highest rates of isolated schools for black students, despite having large, county-wide districts (Maryland also has a high proportion of black students). It may also be due to large, segregated urban areas that have greater impacts on statewide segregation rates. For example, New York City public schools have very few white students, which means that black students are isolated, weighing heavily on racial isolation statistics for the entire state. Nearly two-thirds of black students in the state of New York attend schools that are less than 10 percent white, making New York the most isolating state for black students. Chicago has a similar impact for Illinois.
Of the largest 25 metropolitan areas, Chicago has the highest dissimilarity rate between black and white students; 79 percent of black students would have to move to a school with more white students in order to achieve complete racial balance (in which all schools have equal proportions of each student group). While this, of course, is not practical, as families often live in segregated neighborhoods, it highlights the separation between students living in the same metropolitan area.
We can do better. We did do better, but we let gains in integration slide. School leaders need to start thinking innovatively across attendance zones and district boundaries to ensure that all students are exposed to a diverse set of peers and equal resources. That means having community support from parents who understand that diverse schools benefit all students.
The great education thinker John Dewey claimed that art is not the possession of a recognized few but the authentic expression of individuality for all. Among those who care about education, few would deny that the arts now struggle to survive in our nation’s schools. The visual and performing arts frequently are marginalized as fringe subjects, taking a back seat in school curricula when funds are tight or teaching time is usurped by subjects that count toward school accountability measures.
Yet a growing number of researchers and educators are in agreement that participation in the arts should become a central component of schooling, as research suggests that the arts can be a significant factor in improving academic outcomes. This premise may cause some arts advocates to bristle, believing that arts experiences are important for the sheer joy of human expression and that educators should not have to justify access to the arts as a way to increase learning.
That may be true, but it is hard to ignore the growing body of research that correlates arts experiences with multiple domains of learning, including academic achievement, motivation, and thinking skills. Moreover, using art forms as a pedagogical tool in teaching other subjects—known as arts integration—is showing promise for enabling students to learn and retain academic content, according to a thorough literature review by Gail Burnaford and other researchers published for the Arts Education Partnership. Students in schools that offer arts-integrated learning are more likely to show better academic outcomes, transfer knowledge from arts to nonarts domains, and demonstrate greater motivation and engagement in learning.
Despite those findings, some educators resist using the arts as a way to teach and reinforce content. In my experience leading schools, offering professional development, and teaching graduate and doctoral-level courses, I have encountered reluctance for incorporating the arts into instructional practices. Three common scenarios stand out for classroom teachers:
“Arts provide another vehicle for students with limited language or lower academic skills to demonstrate mastery of academic content.”
The teacher would like to use more arts-based activities, noting that students remember more content and seem to enjoy the subject matter better when the arts are incorporated into lessons compared with using only traditional methods. The teacher worries, however, that using arts activities will reduce the time needed to cover all the required curriculum.
The teacher believes that she is not very artistic and finds it hard to imagine the kind of arts activities that would enhance learning math; it is easier to follow traditional teaching strategies.
The teacher worries that low-performing students need more time in remediation and would not learn as much without highly structured curricula that offer repetition of essential content and skills.Noting the concerns of educators and the dearth of research that explores the causal effects of arts integration on memory for academic content, our research team at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education conducted randomized control trials to test the efficacy of arts-integrated science units (the treatment condition) compared with conventional science units (the control condition). We designed treatment and control units using the same science content and designed arts activities that would require the same amount of teaching time as in conventional lessons.
In this package, Education Week has convened a range of researchers, professors, and practitioners to argue their case for arts education’s path forward. Despite their many contrasting opinions, these experts all agree on one thing: Arts instruction is key to American schooling and is worth supporting, researching, and protecting.
This special section is supported by a grant from The Wallace Foundation. Education Week retained sole editorial control over the content of this package; the opinions expressed are the authors’ own, however.
We also matched the mode of delivery (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) to assure active learning experiences in both conditions. In the course of the studies, we provided professional development for teachers to show that robust arts-based teaching can be easily incorporated into lessons. For example, using songs, movement, and visual vocabulary does not require extensive arts training or elaborate materials.
In our studies, each randomized group of students received a science unit in either the treatment or control condition and a second science unit in the opposite condition. According to the results of delayed post-tests, arts-integrated teaching showed an advantage for long-term retention of science content. That increase in retention in the arts-integrated units was especially strong for students at the lowest levels of reading achievement. We believe, therefore, that the arts provide another vehicle for students with limited language or lower academic skills to demonstrate mastery of academic content.
Our studies provide some preliminary causal connections between arts-integrated learning and memory for content. The findings also raise some interesting questions about whether learning through the arts transfers residual benefits. We observed that students who experienced the arts-integrated units first performed significantly better in subsequent conventional units compared with students who had not yet experienced the arts-integrated units. That made us wonder if students who were taught using arts-integrated instruction may have later applied arts-based strategies, even when not taught through the arts.
These observations open interesting possibilities that warrant further investigation. Do the arts aid in thinking dispositions and problem-solving skills, as some researchers have suggested? Perhaps the current focus on 21st-century skills of creative problem-solving will lead us back to the arts as a fruitful alternative to conventional teaching—as Dewey suggested at the start of the 20th century.
Mariale Hardiman is a professor of education and the vice dean of academic affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. She is the co-founder and the director of the Neuro-Education Initiative, a cross-disciplinary program that brings educators relevant research from the learning sciences to inform teaching and learning.
The education field can always count on shifting priorities. Over the past 20 years, in an attempt to “fix” what many people dub a broken public school system, everyone from politicians to famous athletes to business moguls to education leaders has tried to find and repair the gaps in student achievement. But many educators are skeptical of new initiatives that come down the pike. Is a revamped approach really meant to help prepare children for the future, or is it just people outside of education sticking their noses where they don’t belong?
That certainly rings true in the STEM vs. STEAM argument of the past decade. In recent years, science, technology, engineering, and math have been at the center of our schools’ change fabric. These fields are desperate to fill jobs that didn’t exist before the 21st century. According to the 2016 U.S. News/Raytheon STEM Index, there were more than 230,000 additional STEM jobs and less than 31,000 additional graduates in these fields in 2014-15 alone. To help close that gap, President Barack Obama rolled out investments and initiatives to increase STEM education.
As schools expanded into high-tech gadget hubs, many educators argued for the integration of arts into STEM learning to bring needed creativity to the learning process. Others pushed back for keeping the arts separate, saying that adding the arts to STEM subjects simply created more distraction. While the STEAM movement has gained momentum, educators are still divided on arts integration…
Thomas B. Fordham Institute
1016 16th St. NW
7th Floor
Washington>, DC 20036
United States
Now that states have submitted their ESSA plans and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos begins to issue her stamp of approval, what happens next? It’s time to put these plans into action; which states are most likely to see significant achievement gains in the coming years? Who has the ambition, coherence, and strategy to drive their systems toward meaningful improvements?
Join us on October 3rd, as we identify states with strong plans and distinct approaches and hear state superintendents and education advocates make the case that their work will lead to greater student success. At the close of the event, audience members will vote on who they think will show the most achievement gains in coming years. We’ll be back four years from now to see if they were right.
Moderator:
Michael J. Petrilli
President
Thomas B. Fordham Institute @MichaelPetrilli
Participants:
Matthew Ladner
Senior Research Fellow (Representing Arizona)
Charles Koch Institute @MatthewLadner
Candice McQueen
Commissioner
Tennessee Department of Education @McQueenCandice
Glen Price
Chief Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction
California Department of Education @glenprice
John White
State Superintendent
Louisiana Department of Education @LouisianaSupe
Register here for the event, and follow the discussion on Twitter with @educationgadfly and #ESSAChallenge. Please visit this page at 3:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, October 3rd, to watch the proceedings live.
The Texas Education Agency submitted its ESSA plan to the U.S. Department of Education. Belton Independent School District Superintendent Susan Kincannon expressed her concern about some aspects of the plan. “The (ESSA) plan includes an overly complicated methodology for evaluating and rating schools and continues to be detrimental to campuses with a higher concentration of economically disadvantaged students.” However, Kincannon also said the broader elements of the plan look helpful. “I appreciate the strategic priorities outlined in the state plan, especially those that are focused on professional development and increasing teacher knowledge and skills in order to improve instructional practices in the classroom.”
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) formally submitted to the U.S. Department of Education the state’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) consolidated plan on Sept. 25, 2017. The U.S. Department of Education has 120 days to review Texas’ state plan and will conduct a peer review as part of the process.
ESSA in Texas
ESSA provides a unique opportunity for the Texas Education Agency (TEA) to chart a path for shifting key decisions related to accountability, school improvement, teacher quality, and funding back to the state and local level. Commissioner Mike Morath is embracing this opportunity to maximize the new policy flexibility ESSA offers. Under Commissioner Morath’s leadership, TEA is advancing a key goal to establish one vision for the future of the agency, aligning key decision points in developing systems to support ESSA implementation with a new TEA Strategic Plan that will guide all TEA work. Tapping into the new opportunities that ESSA provides will allow for a singular focus on key state priority areas leading to greater levels of student achievement throughout our state.
Stakeholder Engagement
Stakeholder engagement has been an important part of the development of the Texas state plan for the implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA returns a significant amount of decision making back to the states, requiring them to establish their strategic vision and determine how they will implement provisions in the statute. TEA is acting on this opportunity to design and implement a broad, statewide vision and develop policies responsive to the needs of students, educators, families, and communities in our state.
TEA, in collaboration with the Texas Comprehensive Center (TXCC), designed and carried out a comprehensive, multi-pronged engagement strategy beginning in January 2016 to collect stakeholder input and feedback to help shape the agency’s strategic direction, inform the development of innovative education systems, and create a unified framework across state and federal policy. This feedback contributes to the foundation of TEA’s Strategic Plan and the Texas ESSA Consolidated State Plan and will inform ESSA implementation as it begins in the 2017–18 school year.
By Stacy M. Brown (NNPA Newswire Contributor)
Michael J. Petrilli
Matthew Ladner
Candice McQueen
Glen Price
John White
