Policymakers, parents and stakeholders are demanding improvements in public education by raising metrics of academic success, pushing for progress in low performing schools, and raising the bar on teacher and leader effectiveness. Differences in funding formulas, allocations and revenue have created disparate funding across the states. These variations in spending per student impact the educational opportunities provided as states ramp up their educational reform. This session highlighted various options states can implement to address the critical budget deficits.

On Monday, President Barack Obama officially unveiled his budget for 2013.  As he spoke from Northern Virginia Community College, Obama highlighted the more than $65 billion in education funding focused on resources dedicated to transforming K-12 and postsecondary education to ensure students have the skills and knowledge to succeed in the future.

If you have a child somewhere in our education system, they have probably asked you offhandedly, “why do I need to learn how to do long division by hand when my calculator will do it for me?”  To that you probably said, “well, because it is important to know the basics before you use a machine to do it for you.”  But do you still believe that after a little in-depth thought on the matter?  Have you done long division by hand since finishing high school?  A better question might be: what are the “basics” that we say are so important?  Conrad Wolfram, the strategic director of Wolfram Research, challenges our current approach to math education and is pushing education systems to stop teaching calculating and start teaching math.

The National Research Council (NRC) recently released a revised approach to K-12 science education focused on “key scientific ideas and practices” important for all students prior to the end of high school.

Within the last 20 years we have gone from interacting with information by tediously sifting through thousands of pages of text at our local libraries to instantly accessing information whenever we want it, wherever we are.  We take this information at face value and seemingly put all of our trust in the first Google hit that we get in response to our search query.  While our increasing access to information is assuredly transforming our world for the better, information assimilated without understanding or review can quickly lead us to false paradigms that are difficult to change. 

With national initiatives in place to increase educational standards (specifically the No Child Left Behind Act) there comes the inevitable need for progress assessment.  Many class subjects lend themselves well to a more traditional “multiple choice” testing format, but science assessment has struggled to employ this technique effectively.  Science education combines a mixture of rote memorization, which can be tested by traditional methods, with an understanding of the scientific method, problem solving, and deeper scientific inquiry, which are difficult to summarize for the purpose of answering “A, B, C or D”.

The National Research Council (NRC) recently reaffirmed the importance of science in K-12 education by recommending that science receive the same emphasis as that currently being given to math and reading under the No Child Left Behind Act. The NRC’s Committee on Highly Successful Schools or Programs for K-12 Education released their suggestions due to the growing number of jobs, both inside and outside of the scientific community, requiring knowledge in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields.  The chair of the committee, Adam Gamoran, recently said, “the goal isn’t only to have a capable and competitive work force.  We need to help all students become scientifically literate because citizens are increasingly facing decisions related to science and technology – whether it’s understanding a medical diagnosis or weighing competing claims about the environment.” 

Although some of the fastest-growing and highest-paying jobs involve science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) skills, the number of women and minorities in these fields is lagging significantly behind white males.