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Education

What Is The Name Of The NASA Education Office?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
August 20, 2018
Filed under
https://media2.spaceref.com/news/2018/nasa.education2.jpg

Keith’s note: NASA Administrator Bridenstine says that NASA has renamed the NASA Office of Education as the Office of STEM Engagement. Yet if you look at the NASA Education website or the NASA Education Office website there is zero mention of that name change. Nor is there any mention at the NASA organization page.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

8 responses to “What Is The Name Of The NASA Education Office?”

  1. ed2291 says:
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    Contrast this NASA activity of renaming a descriptive branch of NASA to a non-descriptive branch of NASA with that of Elon Musk. There is much good about NASA, but also much inertia which has kept man in low earth orbit since 1973.

  2. fcrary says:
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    I can’t really blame the people working on NASA web pages or updating organizational charts. It looks like senior management is playing a game of Scrabble with the name for the office doing educational work. The people updating the website may not have gotten the message or they may be waiting for the dust to settle before making changes. Confusion and delays of that sort are common following a reorganization. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took months for all the web pages to be fixed and made consistent. That sort of mess probably affects the people doing the actual work as well, and that is one of the disadvantages of reorganizations.

  3. Neal Aldin says:
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    The office seems to produce a lot less than it used to and has a budget ten times smaller than it had 10 years ago. They are finishing up “a year of education in space” on the space station and their only real project was radio or TV interviews several times a week; it was great for the hundreds of kids who got to participate but the station doesn’t even exist for 99% of the tens of millions of school kids. Too bad NASA couldn’t produce some educational classroom materials.

  4. Daniel Woodard says:
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    The new name seems confusing to me. It consists primarily of an acronym which itself does not include the term education.

    • fcrary says:
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      They may want to distinguish themselves and their function from the Department of Education. Some people (and congressmen) don’t look beyond the name, and if the names overlap, then they’ll assume the work also overlaps.

      That might also explain delays in updating the web page. If it’s the same look and content with a different name at the top, then it would be fairly obvious that the name was the only meaningful change. They may want a whole new look and feel to avoid giving that impression (not that there is much variety in the look and feel of NASA web pages…)

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        So…. once again, form triumphs over substance?

        You bring up some interesting points. This is just my opinion of course, and worth even less than what you pay for it, but SFAIK the Dept of Ed. is responsible for federal policies and funding assistance to state and local educational programs and not, as one might expect, for education per se, so if the NASA Office of Education actually did education, than there would be no overlap at all.

        But your point about the websites is even more intriging, as NASA has made a years-long effort (with limited sucess, admittedly) to achieve total uniformity of website style across the agency, so if they are now changing the website style to give the impression that substantive changes have been made, they are also undermining years of their own work.

        • fcrary says:
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          I hate to say it, but how many people (or congressmen, for that matter) know what the Department of Education actually does? I wasn’t talking about actual overlap between the Department of Education and NASA’s Office of Education. I was talking about the appearance of overlap to people who don’t know more about them than the name.

          As far as web pages go, I was just guessing. But if I’m correct and NASA is trying to make the style of its web pages more uniform, that just makes things harder. Making the new Office of STEM Engagement’s page look different without changing the style or layout would mean changing the content. Of course, it would be on the same topics and probably convey the same information, but rewritten, with new images and graphics, etc. to make it _look_ different. That isn’t a trivial amount of work.