Details on The Gutting of NASA Education
Proposed STEM Education Reorganization Contained in the President’s FY14 Budget Request, Association of American Universities
“In follow-up to the discussion today at the Energy Sciences Coalition meeting, below is information provided by OSTP on the nature of the reorganization including a listing of the specific STEM education programs that will be eliminated/consolidated across federal agencies, as well as the new STEM education programs that the budget proposes.”
The really chilling part of this reorganization is the lack of any coherent transition plan. It’s all numbers and lists, with no timeline or structure for implementation. The government can’t just flip a switch and transfer the unique content and legacy of offerings from these 78 programs from their original agencies to NSF, Dept of Ed, and Smithsonian overnight. The infrastructure to take on this content isn’t yet established in those three agencies, and won’t be until they’ve had time to get new funding and apply it to creating the departments and positions that will handle the dissemination of mission agency educational offerings. A 2-3 fiscal year transfer period would make much more sense, with funding at the mission agencies gradually winding down and funding at the new overseers of government STEM education winding up in turn.
I work in STEM education, and completely understand the rationale behind a reorganization – leverage resources more efficiently, reduce fragmentation, use the agencies that reach the audiences to streamline efforts. However, this seems like a terrible way to do it. A lot of the legacy of these 78 programs (many of which actually represent dozens of sub-programs) will be lost without a coherent transition, and the audiences they’ve been reaching will feel that impact when the curricula, professional development, and other resources they’ve relied upon suddenly disappear until further notice – if they ever reappear under the new consolidated structure. This could very easily become a scorched earth approach to government-funded STEM education that sets many disciplines (especially space science) back a decade or more in terms of the breadth and depth of content offered.
Based on my reading of the CoSTEM five year plan for reorganizing federal STEM education, one of the assumptions they started with is that current federal STEM efforts are either broken, not measurably or ineffective. The plan is designed to address those issues. Nothing about that aprroach indicated that the CoSTEM committee deeply values the STEM education efforts as the stand of any agencies but NSF and ED. If you start from the position that current federal STEM efforts are failing to improve STEM education, it’s easy to see how you end up with a plan that doesn’t put much thought into preserving legacy materials.
I’m not saying I agree with that position, but it certainly looks like the mentality behind the reorganization.
Now that I’ve looked through the CoSTEM resources that you linked in another comment, and read more about their involvement in this budget proposal, that position definitely seems like it could be at the heart of this approach. That was fascinating to read, thanks for the link.
On the other hand, it sounds like CoSTEM does see value in leveraging and highlighting the content that is unique to NASA and the other targeted agencies. The committee may think the agencies’ existing education efforts aren’t worthwhile, but they purport to want to include the interesting things that are coming out of NASA missions and science in the post-consolidation programs. Given that the budgets that seem to have taken the greatest hits in FY14 and onward are the science and mission education budgets… I’ll be curious to see what mechanism is put in place to relay this content to NSF, Dept of Ed, and Smithsonian for dissemination in the new programs. It’s very different to see that content from in the trenches than from a distance like those other agencies will, and audience connections to real NASA science and missions may be diminished. I think that’s what I’ve always enjoyed about NASA’s education efforts – the places where people feel connected to NASA, and engaged directly in the exciting things that are going on.
To lose that is bleak and depressing.
I think you’ve summed up the CoSTEM idea of what education should be from the science mission agencies. Those agencies education efforts and funds are to be channeled through NSF, ED and SI. CoSTEM appears to believe that will raise the quality of the output and increase the impact while retaining access to the mission content and subject matter experts. It may even work out that way. Only time will tell. Meanwhile a lot of folks will lose the resources they are used to and scores of folks working with current federal STEM efforts will have to find other work. Those that remain under the plan will primarily work at interfacing with NSF, ED and SI to facilitate those organization getting their content out.
Since you seem to be familiar with the CoSTEM recommendations and what is being proposed, perhaps you can help clarify this – who is actually expected to create the resources in the reconsolidated STEM structure? From the drastic budget restructuring, it seems like NSF, ED, and SI will simply take over the work that has previously been done by NASA and the other agencies – create curricula, run trainings, run assessments, print and distribute resources, etc., with topics cherry-picked from the agencies who have given up their funding. But then it also seems from other things I’ve read that the structure at NSF, ED, and SI is going to be quite small and insufficient to perform these functions internally, and some of the affected agency personnel are under the impression that money will return to them to do the work under the direction of NSF, ED, or SI (though NSF cannot fund NASA, as far as I understand it). Do you know which scenario is really being proposed here? It feels like that classic equation: NASA will provide content – and then a miracle occurs – NSF, ED, or SI distributes something!
I hadn’t thought about the scope of the damage that these funding cuts will cause. Looking more closely, the cut list contains a number of grant programss that each represent dozens of funded educational efforts run by individuals at universities, non-profits, museums, schools, etc. God, the tendrils of this are going to be far-reaching. The more I look at this, the more I think that there’s no way for this to end well, even under optimal conditions and the best of intentions. I feel bad for everyone from the people who will lose their jobs in STEM education to the end users who are unaware of how soon they may lose resources they take for granted. Ugh.
Yeah, there still needs to be one or a few people in charge of education that are in the particular programs. They can be called an Education Proxy or something. It could be a role assigned to several people in the program as one of their secondary duties, or it could be given to one or two people as their primary job. It’s important to formalize something like that. They would be giving education relevant news and providing materials as they could to whichever agency is in charge. I still see the need to have someone close to the work as mentioned earlier in this thread. From there, you just have to hope that the NSF, Dept of Ed or whatever has the motivation to take those materials and run with them. Consolidation can lead to improvement, but it has to be done right.
Just my ideas. I am definitely no expert.
About all this affects is NASA science. While the NASA science education effort has been a bit disjointed, they have been producing. The benefit of having the individual programs producing educational materials was that they had a direct line to the technical content. The big problem was that each was stove-piped and producing what the projects wanted to see, and not producing what was best for use and needed in the classroom. What is also interesting is that human space flight, which has not been producing much content in the first place, is essentially unaffected by any of this and so will maintain their budget
Since in my experience most of the NASA education organizations are led by individuals who themselves have little or no background in education, I suspect none of the NASA management will put up a fight. I suspect most of them are just as happy to lose the educational responsibilities. Hopefully the DOE, NSF and Smithsonian will now be looking to hire many of the same people being displaced from NASA and other organizations having their budgets and people cut. They will need those people to steer how to better organize those efforts in the future. Of course, given that this budget submit from the Administration is so late, and not necessarily going to be approved, we could see a considerable gaping hole in between the shut down of NASA projects and their replacement by anything else. The Administration is doing this because they think they are dedicated to improving education, however I suspect they have shot themselves in the foot and will destroy more than they create.
Totally agree about shooting themselves in the foot!
Apparently NASA has already started cutting some of these E&PO budgets for next year even though this whole reconsolidation is just part of a budget proposal that will probably never be approved. So even if it doesn’t become a real thing, or it takes a long time for the new structure to be set up at DOE, NSF, and Smithsonian, these E&PO programs will just be gone. I don’t know how they can ‘restructure’ them if they’re gone and all the people who know about them are gone.
I’ve also heard that the new departments at DOE and NSF and Smithsonian are going to be very small because they’re supposed to be ‘coordinating’ and not creating things or actually working on all these programs themselves. So I don’t see how that can replace dozens or hundreds of jobs lost with these cuts, or do the work all those people do. Or even coordinate anything if the things to coordinate are gone!
Keith, is there any more information about the origins of that list on Spaceref? Is it up to date with the released budgets or was it part of the process for developing the budgets and recommendations? It’s just an email from a 3rd party so it’s missing a lot of information that would be helpful for understanding it.
The really weird thing is what is missing – there are a bunch of specific missions there, but I don’t see Curiosity, SDO, Stereo, MMS, Spitzer, Fermi, or a bunch of other current missions. However, I know in the detailed FY14 budget that’s going around for NASA education, ALL of the mission E&PO being done under the science mission directorate has been zero’d out. So you have a lot of missions that aren’t being funded in the new budgets but also aren’t on the list for consolidating?
Also this list and all of the info so far also has nothing about the ‘public outreach’ part of E&PO. The plan is to move all of the education (formal, informal, higher) to these other agencies (Department of Ed, Smithsonian Institute, National Science Foundation, respectively) but nothing is said about the outreach programs. Most of those are zero’d out too, because they get their money from the same place the educational programs do. The communications budgets seem to be untouched but they are something very different from outreach at NASA.
The reorganization plan is based on the federal STEM inventory created by the Committee on STEM (CoSTEM) of the National Science and Technology Council through surveys of federally funded STEM projects. Their inventory and strategic plan can be found on the OSTP CoSTEM site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/a…. I am only guessing -but I think in an informed way – that projects that are not listed in the inventory are not addressed in the plan. However, by default, any project not addressed in the plan won’t be funded through the proposed budget.
Thanks for the link, now I see that list comes from the ‘2010 Federal Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Inventory Data Set’ spreadsheet on the page, so that might explain why it’s missing a lot of more recent E&PO initiatives and entire missions completely. That gives me more perspective on where this list comes from, but I’m sort of flabbergasted that they’re using an inventory that was collected in FY10 and doesn’t include a lot of things that NASA has done more recently.
They’re also just using really broad new program like ‘STEM Accountability and Coordination’ – I’ve also seen that in the budgets but nothing seems to tell me what it even is.
I posted what I have and what I can post without revealing sources. There are some phone numbers on that memo ….
Within NASA its a cut of about 175 people +/-
The real troubling news is that there have only been 9 comments on this thread so far (April 18 at 3PM). If STEM educators and professional societies are as sanguine about this issue as this, then we may well deserve the STEM education programs we inherit in this proposed budget. Dont forget, most Americans think we are doing just fine in science and engineering, and many states like Alabama have little use for science. The next frew weeks will be very telling, but Im sure NASA will implement at least some of OMBs suggestions in FY14 regardless of how the battles are won.
It seems like there’s been really very little coverage of this entire restructuring in any sort of media or through official channels or anything – I wouldn’t be surprised if most educators are unaware of what’s going to happen. I’ve also already seen it written off as ‘just a proposal, so it’s not real’ or ‘just moving things around.’ Someone has to tell the stakeholders and the people who use these government resources what’s going on. If they don’t know much (or anything) about the proposal, then they won’t know or care. I’m only seeing anything with details on NASA Watch and Spaceref, which I don’t think most STEM educators are following.
I am a little baffled as to why we (SpaceRef and NASAWatch) are the only ones who seem to be concerned about this. I guess we’ll just have to dig a little deeper and push info out a little harder.
Keith, thank you for being a voice for STEM education when no one else is talking about this new budget and what it could do. Maybe it’ll start to make some waves soon. I wonder if some of the professional societies are still trying to figure out what to even say in response to this – there’s so little info that it’s hard to make some sort of position statement besides, ‘Wow, this looks bad, let’s not do this.’
It’s also important that people understand that NASA is not driving these cuts or the only agency impacted, this comes from the top and all sorts of things across government are affected. I already saw a few tweets saying ‘NASA, why would you cut these things’ but (for once) this cut isn’t NASA’s doing. So people need to be informed enough to know that they need to talk to their Congressional representatives to affect some sort of change here, instead of hounding NASA to somehow undo this when they don’t have the power to do that. They’re also unlikely to get it to be reversed entirely, so hopefully they pressure Congress to have this reconsolidation come with some sort of plan about how it could actually be done without immediate or long-term failure.
That said, NASA probably does have some choices they can make here about how to move ahead under this proposal, and I hope they make the right ones. I think some other agencies are making the right choice to speak out and fight back as much as they can.
By the way, those who are on the inside of NASAs EPO community and can say lots more, are under a powerful self-censorship to not spill too many beans about details to the extent that they are known. We just had a telecon with NASA where the budget was explained in some detail, but no one knows if this is public information or not .The telecon attendees were anonymous and there was no notation anywhere that the information was internal, priviledeged and confidential. Nevertheless we, especially contractors, are all afraid to say much in detail for fear of saying the wrong things or saying too mucn. Believe me,
As far as I know, NASA’s 2014 budget request is a matter of public record. There have certainly been plenty of attachments flying around the education community.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/1…
Could be it’s just me, but after reading through every word of the information provided, I had nearly as many questions as answers. There must be a lot more information associated with this than what Keith has been able to show us. As given, it seems like a classic You Can’t Get There From Here situation. Unless the plan is to deliberately make EPO flounder for a year or two and then cut funding completely because it’s not effective. That seems far-fetched, but not completely unlikely thee days.
NOAA seems to be more ready to discuss their share of proposed cuts that anything I have seen from NASA yet. They have described the proposed cuts on their website and slated a meeting for tomorrow: http://www.oesd.noaa.gov/an…. The news is just as bleak for NOAA, but you have to give their management credit for speed and transparency.
“A federal agency like NASA has a unique and important role
to play in motivating and inspiring students to consider STEM careers, and
citizens to become more knowledgeable participants in the scientific arena.”
http://www.nap.edu/catalog….
In the NASA authorization act
of 2005 (P.L. 109-555 Subtitle B-Education, Sec. 614) Congress directed the
agency to support a review and evaluation of its precollege education program
to be carried out by the National Research Council (NRC). The legislation
mandated that the review include recommendations to improve the effectiveness
of the program and address four tasks:
1.
an evaluation of
the effectiveness of the overall program in meeting its defined goals and
objectives;
2.
an assessment of
the quality and educational effectiveness of the major components of the
program, including an evaluation of the adequacy of assessment metrics and data
collection requirements available for determining the effectiveness of
individual projects;
3.
an evaluation of
the funding priorities in the program, including a review of the funding level
and trend for each major component of the program and an assessment of whether
the resources made available are consistent with meeting identified goals and
priorities; and
4.
a determination
of the extent and effectiveness of coordination and collaboration between NASA
and other federal agencies that sponsor science, technology, and mathematics
education activities.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The committee identified four broad areas that are
important for improving NASA’s efforts in K-12 STEM education: (1) the nature
of NASA’s role in K-12 STEM education, (2) continuous improvement of projects,
(3) partnerships and expertise in education, and (4) information and
communications technology. Additional, detailed recommendations for individual
projects are included in Chapter 6 (the numbering here follows that used in the
chapter).
NASA’s Role in K‑12 STEM
Education
Recommendation 1 NASA should continue to engage in education activities at
the K-12 level, designing its K-12 education activities so that they capitalize
on NASA’s primary strengths and resources, which are found in the mission
directorates.
These strengths and resources are the agency’s scientific discoveries; its
technology and aeronautical developments; its space exploration activities; the
scientists, engineers, and other technical staff (both internal and external)
who carry out NASA’s work; and the unique excitement generated by space flight
and space exploration.
Recommendation 2 The exciting nature of NASA’s mission gives particular
value to projects whose primary goal is to inspire and engage students’
interest in science and engineering, and NASA’s education portfolio should
include projects with these goals. Because engineering and technology development are
subjects that are not well covered in K-12 curricula, projects aimed at
inspiring and engaging students in these areas are particularly important.
Recommendation 3 NASA should provide
opportunities for teachers and students to deepen their knowledge about
NASA-supported areas of science and the nature of science and engineering
through educational activities that engage them with the science and
engineering carried out by the mission directorates.
Recommendation 4 NASA should strive to support stability in its education
programs, in terms of funding, management structure, and priorities.
Recommendation 8 The NASA headquarters Office of Education should focus on
leadership and advocacy for inclusion of education activities in the programs
of NASA’s four operating directorates, quality assurance, internal
coordination, and
coordination with other agencies and organizations. In the development of new
education projects, the office should partner closely with the
directorates or centers and consult with external education experts.
Generally I think NASA educational programs do well when they are programs like co-ops, oriented toward a small group of students who are really looking for space-related careers and gave them an intensive exposure of several months to a year, to actual potential careers. Programs that provided training for teachers and material of general usability by all teachers, and programs like robotics competitions with a relatively broad application where NASA sonly provided a relatively brief final competition and most of the educational experience was at the students’ home institutions. The big problem at one NASA center was that educational programs began to exist for their own sake. Dozens of different educational programs were created, each consuming administrative time and resources and serving only a handful of students, so that the total number of students was roughly equal to the number of NASA and contractor employees supporting them. This is simply too expensive in a society in which taxes are continually being cut, schools are being closed, teaching time is limited and many students don’t get the help they critically need.
I remember Sputnik. The response of Eisenhower and Kennedy was not to tell NASA to educate us. It was to actually provide billions of dollars for education in science and math (and physical fitness for all students, not just elite athletes!) Now we cut resources and concentrate on test scores and football scores. College has become almost unaffordable due to tuition increases and cuts in tax subsidies at state universities.
I simply don’t buy the argument that NASA can provide “inspiration” that will make up for crowded classes, limited resources and uninspired teachers. If you want to inspire students, give them better schools.
There is some additional information about the STEM reorganization at Sciencemag.org in Jeffrey Mavis’s article 2014 U.S. BUDGET: Wild Cards Remain After Proposed Reshuffle of STEM Education. The following are all quotes taken from the article published today and give some insight into the plans of what the President would like to see happen.
The Smithsonian wants to apply its windfall to its newly named Center for Learning and Digital Access which offers easy access to Smithsonian documents, photos, podcasts, videos, and other materials aligned with state standards in STEM fields and will eventually include materials from other agencies.
Department of Education wants to launch a $150 million competitive grants program to help local school districts prepare high school graduates for STEM majors and careers and plans to create a STEM office that would work with other federal science agencies.
NSF hopes to grow its prestigious graduate research fellowships program from 2000 new fellows a year to 2700. Some of the fellows would have a chance to develop “special knowledge or skills” in collaboration with
mission agencies.
NASA will continue to offer internships for undergraduates as well as funding students at colleges and universities with large minority populations.
To throw in my two cents in this discussion, rather than what politicos say on what priorities are, see where the money goes. Not just the NASA spenditures but entire federal spenditures (budgets are different than what is actually spent).
Some criticize NASA education offices for not being effective enough but sometimes they have constraints imposed on them or never really given resources they need, and a specific person in one of these education office be able to make a decision on their own? Or do they have to go through all kinds of horrible bureaucracy? Were they given sufficient training before sent out to schools? Are they free to take along an engineer or scientist from another division to help? Can this person be given some time away from their ongoing assignments? maybe bring along some pics and documents of what they really do (show the children what NASA people really do, it may look ugly and tedious but that’s the real world and better to let them know about). Do we get overly concern if items are ITAR or not? Lockup all kinds of good stuff like what was on NTRS?
I remember back in 70s when I bought a copy of Space Construction Database via STAR abstracts (600 pages of photocopy of basic diagrams and figures on examples of Shuttle based various structures), I didn’t really understand it all but it was cool to have! Just think of how many youngsters can become interested in space technology on getting stuff like this.
As bad as this is looking for NASA education, I’m also truly dismayed that public outreach funds are being yanked as well. It’s outrageous that the proposed federal STEM reorganization (good intentioned though it may be) would zero out the budgets for public engagement by NASA programs. You all do realize that, right?
The funds budgeted by NASA programs for “EPO” are not solely for STEM education. There are sizable portions of EPO budgets at NASA that were never earmarked expressly for education, but no one seems to be thinking that through. There’s an “E” in front of it, so the “PO” is collateral damage. Death by association, it seems.
On the memo this post links to, we see names like Hubble, Cassini, Mars program, Juno, Dawn, Chandra, MESSENGER… Starting Oct. 1 these and all other NASA programs will have ZERO funding to support things like:
– Websites and social media
– Printed outreach handouts (lithos, posters, bookmarks, etc.)
– Graphics and public presentations
– Videos, podcasts and animations
– Spacecraft models
– Travel to support public events and mission meetings
And much more. The fact is this: NASA’s missions and programs need people and funds to support public engagement. Folks in PAO can’t do it for them. The Smithsonian absolutely will not provide the direct, knowledgeable link to the missions that NASA’s outreach professionals provide.
Now, long-time NASA Watch readers and commenters are very familiar with the sometimes wasteful side of outreach. YES. Yes yes yes. Before you event say it, yes you are right. There are too many websites. There’s a truly embarrassing rubber chicken tweeting away. Swag has been produced that shouldn’t have been. BUT, take a look at that list above. Those are good, useful things that serve the public, inspire people of all ages, and help communicate what NASA does. It would be shameful to lose that just because no one bothered to protect the agency’s ability to do public outreach. It would be just as shameful if the only way for this work to be done is for missions to “creatively” classify their outreach as something else.
This is shocking. It is so shortsighted. It’s a mess and it needs to be fixed.
You do realize, don’t you, that there are others that have influence here, too, besides the president, others like members of Congress…. Partisan viewing rarely sees the whole story.
Despite what you might think, the President does not lead a monarchy. You should be asking why has it been so long since a budget has been passed.
My Blog, as a EPO Lab director dealing with these issues and their impact… http://astrojake.blogspot.c…
“The really chilling part of this reorganization is the lack of any coherent transition plan.”
We are talking about the same group of people both in the Administration and
in NASA management who shut down the NASA human space flight program without a plan for what to do next. These NASA managers didn’t whimper. They went on about their business. These are the same NASA managers who looked at the size and mass of the Orion capsule, $12 billion dollars ago, figured out that its parachutes could not hold its mass, and decided they’d take care of that problem sometime in the future. I think they figures that maybe by the time they were forced to take some action the program would be cancelled. Their safest course of action is to say nothing…do nothing…they know nothing…(remember Sergeant Schultz?) Their only interest is their own survival in the ranks of senior executives. So if anyone is expecting a plan for how to do STEM education I suspect we are all out of luck. This does not even register on the radar. Our senior executives are busy executing-but I think mainly they have shot us all in the backs.
The real concern if you read the Science News and other more detailed articles about this non-plan is that the Dept of Ed, Smithsonian, and NSF have no plans to do what NASA was doing at all. They say they are not in the business of operating missions or supporting missions. They all say they are intending to increase their own budgets for their own existing programs. Dept of Ed and NSF are not really producers and disseminators of information. NSF does studies of what others ought to be doing. Dept of Ed mainly just gives money in the form of grants to local school districts and stays away from technical content. A few tens of millions of dollars is a drop in the bucket for them and will have zero effect when spread across the states. Smithsonian does some information production of a historical nature, which means that once Curiosity is over and ready for the museum, then they get interested in capturing what it did. Even their magazine, Air and Space, appears to be contracted out to an external organization for production with no more than an occasional article contributed by a Smithsonian technical expert.
They say “eliminated/consolidated” and then “consolidated” here. So does everyone think they won’t continue the program in the new agency it moves to? Or a significant amount will be eliminated and those that are kept won’t be the same… or what?
I’m not against consolidation in general when I first heard of this but now I wonder if the place these disparate programs are moved to will know how or want to continue and have an effective program. I have to be convinced.
Given the reprogramming of the dollars to other agencies, it seems unlikely the existing projects will be migrated as they stand. One of CoSTEM’s starting assumptions in their charter was that the way the federal government is currently doing STEM education is uncoordinated, poorly assessed and of questionable impact. It’s just my interpretation, but that doesn’t sound like a recipe for continuing the current projects.