This document has been archived. Title : NSF 93-70 - Beyond National Standards and Goals: Excellence in Math. & Science Ed., K-16 Type : Report NSF Org: EHR Date : May 7, 1993 File : nsf9370 Chap Number51 Issue102 Table of Contents Agenda i Opening Plenary Session Opening Plenary Session Introduction (Luther S. Williams) 1 Opening Plenary Session Address (Walter E. Massey) 3 Second Plenary Session Second Plenary Session Introduction (Luther S. Williams) 11 Second Plenary Session Keynote Address (Roy Romer) 12 Second Plenary Session Keynote Address (Ray Marshall) 18 Question and Answer Session 25 Group Sessions 33 Luncheon Address (Luther S. Williams) 45 Workshops 55 Exhibits and Demonstrations 61 Thursday Morning Plenary Session 67 Thursday Discussion Groups 81 Advice to NSF 91 Briefing Papers National Standards for Mathematics and Science Education: Opening the Door to the Future 97 Choosing The Path: Needed Steps on the Road to Reform in Mathematics Education 105 Science Frameworks and the National Standards Building on the Past—A View to the Future 109 The Role of Faculty from the Scientific Disciplines in the Preparation of Mathematics and Science Teachers 118 Overcoming Barriers to Systemic Change: Developing a Comprehensive Reform Plan 123 1993 Invitational Conference Participant List 131 1993 Invitational Conference NSF Staff List 149 BEYOND NATIONAL STANDARDS AND GOALS: Excellence in Mathematics and Science Education K–16 National Science Foundation Invitational Conference February 9–11, 1993 Washington, D.C. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. REGISTRATION AND CHECK-IN Ballroom Lobby 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. OPENING PLENARY SESSION Grand Ballroom Opening Address Walter E. Massey, Director National Science Foundation Opening Activity Philip Daro, Executive Director California Mathematics Project University of California, Office of the President Beth Black, Edmonds Elementary School, Edmonds, Washington 8:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. RECEPTION Grand Ballroom WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10 8:00 a.m. – 8:45 a.m. CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST Grand Ballroom 8:45 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. SECOND PLENARY SESSION Grand Ballroom Welcome Luther S. Williams, Assistant Director National Science Foundation Education & Human Resources Directorate Keynote Address Honorable Roy Romer, Governor of Colorado Chairman, National Governors' Association Keynote Address Ray Marshall, Professor Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs The University of Texas at Austin 10:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. BREAK 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. GROUP SESSIONS: ISSUES OF SYSTEMIC REFORM OF EDUCATION K–UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. LUNCHEON Grand Ballroom Luncheon Address Beyond Goals and Standards: NSF's Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Agenda and the Economy Luther S. Williams, Assistant Director National Science Foundation Education & Human Resources Directorate 2:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. BREAK 2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. REPEAT OF GROUP SESSIONS: ISSUES OF SYSTEMIC REFORM OF EDUCATION K–UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS The same sessions held during the 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. time period will be repeated with the same presiders and participants in the same rooms. 3:45 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. BREAK 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. WORKSHOPS, EXHIBITS, and DEMONSTRATIONS Exhibits & Demonstrations Exhibit Hall The Exhibit Hall will be open from 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. BUFFET RECEPTION Exhibit Hall THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11 8:00 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. Continental Breakfast Grand Ballroom 8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Third Plenary Session Grand Ballroom Panel Discussion: Breaking Barriers to Systemic Reform Moderator Lida K. Barrett, Senior Associate, NSF Education & Human Resources Directorate Panelists Eve Bither, Director, Programs for the Improvement of Practice, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education Kenneth Hoffman, Associate Executive Officer for Education, National Research Council Theodore Sizer, Chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools, Brown University Dorothy Strong, Director of Mathematics, Chicago City Schools 10:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. BREAK 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. DISCUSSION GROUP SESSIONS: OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO SYSTEMIC REFORM In these groups, participants will devise strategies for overcoming barriers to systemic reform and advise NSF on ways it can lead and support the reform effort. Leaders for these discussion groups are NSF division directors and program officers. Last Names Beginning Group Leaders Location With Letters A – Ba Hyman Field / Barbara Butler Room 2 Be – By Pierce Hammond / Julia Wan Room 3 C William McHenry / Peter Braunfeld Room 4 D – E Joe Danek / Roosevelt Calbert Room 5 F Mike Haney / Ivo Lindauer Room 6 G – Ha Alice J. Moses / Wayne Ransom Room 7 He – Ja Jim Lightbourne / Carolyn Girardeau Room 8 Je – La Elizabeth Teles / Eric Robinson Room 9 Le – Me Janice Earle / Joyce Evans Room 10 Mc – O Larry Enochs / Deh-I Hsiung Room 11 P – Rol Peter E. Yankwich / Lura Jo Chase Room 12 Rom – Sp Don Ely / Arturo Bronson Room 15 St – V Rose Marie Smith / Mary Bahns Room 17 W – Z Marjorie Enneking / Ray Collings Room 19 12:00 p.m. – 12:15 p.m. BREAK 12:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. LUNCHEON Grand Ballroom Summary of Participants' Group Work Luther S. Williams, Assistant Director, National Science Foundation, Education & Human Resources Directorate Panel of Respondents Moderator Frank Newman, President Education Commission of the States Panelists Eleanor Baum, Dean of Engineering, The Cooper Union Paul Hill, Senior Social Scientist, The RAND Corporation James Oglesby, Assistant to the Chancellor, University of Missouri, Past President of the National School Boards Association {SYMBOL 168 \f "Symbol"} {SYMBOL 168 \f "Symbol"} {SYMBOL 168 \f "Symbol"} {SYMBOL 168 \f "Symbol"} Members of the National Advisory Committee The Honorable Roy Romer, Governor of Colorado Gordon Ambach, Executive Director Council of Chief State School Officers James L. Powell, Chief Executive Officer, The Franklin Institute Diana S. Natalicio, President, The University of Texas at El Paso Frank Newman, President Education Commission of the States Ray Marshall, Professor, LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas Peter Gerber, Director, Education Program, MacArthur Foundation Select scenes from the opening videos courtesy: {SYMBOL 183 \f "Symbol"}Linda Goldberg, Principal; Rebecca Williams, Teacher; and all students in Ms. Williams' fourth grade class at Hunters Woods Elementary School – a Fairfax County (VA) Public School in Reston, Virginia {SYMBOL 183 \f "Symbol"}The Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development {SYMBOL 183 \f "Symbol"}Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation Opening Plenary Session Introduction Luther S. Williams Assistant Director, Education and Human Resources National Science Foundation DR. WILLIAMS: Good evening. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the opening plenary session of the National Science Foundation's first invitational conference devoted to systemic reform in mathematics and science education. We have important work to accomplish together, as was indicated to you in the communications prior to the conference. In particular, we want to focus on charting the future for systemic reform of math and science education. I ask you, the practitioners, policy makers, university professors and researchers, and business and industry leaders, to collaborate over the next several days with the Foundation as we seek to move beyond goals and standards the Nation has set for itself to the very challenging task of ensuring a standards base in math and science for all students, kindergarten through the undergraduate level. It is our view that together we can address the barriers that remain as related to systemic reform, and we can develop the strategies for an effective systemic reform effort. This, of course, is our primary mission. However, this gathering provides us with additional unique opportunities. One is the opportunity for the National Science Foundation to hear your recommendations on how the Foundation can better force systemic reform and make progress, substantive progress, toward the goal we all desire for the Nation. And the second is the opportunity for you to view and review the NSF-funded products in the instance of curriculum, instruction, materials, and technology that have proven successful in systemic reform of math and science education. The past four years have been watershed years for education reform with, in particular, bipartisan adoption of national, not federal, goals and standards. Building on that foundation, we have the opportunity in the next four years to make the requisite progress in the pursuit of excellence in math and science education for all students and thereby in a fashion that truly breaks rank with the status quo. It is possible for all youth to learn mathematics and science, which they will need to ensure the economic security of the country and the social well being of all citizens into the 21st Century. It is this responsibility that we invite your participation. It is now my pleasure to introduce the speaker for the opening plenary session. Dr. Walter Massey was appointed the Director of the National Science Foundation by the President in March 4, 1991. As you know, the National Science Foundation is the lead federal agency for the support of both research and education in mathematics, science, and engineering. Prior to coming to the Foundation, Dr. Massey served for several years as the Vice President for Research of the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratories. In the instance of the latter organization, he served as the Director of the same for several years. Prior to his tenure as Director of the Argonne National Laboratories, Walter held several teaching and administrative positions at Brown University, moving through the professorial ranks, and serving as the Dean of the College at the institution for several years. Prior to his tenure at Brown, he was an Assistant Professor of physics at the University Illinois and was a post-doctoral fellow and a staff physicist at Argonne National Laboratories. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Mathematics from Morehouse College and a Doctoral Degree in Physics from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to coming to the Foundation, he served with distinction as a member of the National Science Board, the governing unit of the Foundation, and has served as a member of a score of boards and directorships including the First National Bank of Chicago, AMOCO, Motorola, etc. He served, again before his tenure at the Foundation, as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is the past-President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Vice President of the American Physics Society. He holds an array of much deserved awards and a score of honorary degrees. He is acquainted with the agenda that will occupy our attention for the next day and a half, for during his tenure at Brown University as a physics professor and an administrator, he was, in fact, a grantee of the National Science Foundation, looking at teacher preparation in the physical sciences, and he has been very involved during his tenure in Chicago with education from a variety of perspectives. It is my distinct pleasure to present to you the Director of the Foundation, Dr. Massey. Opening Plenary Session Address Walter E. Massey Director, National Science Foundation DR. MASSEY: Thank you very much, Luther. Well, it is indeed an honor to open this session this evening. It's a great pleasure to welcome you all to Washington. This is a propitious time to be in Washington—a time to observe change, and, we hope, influence change. Often when people gather in Washington, they are discussing problems. So for me it is a special treat to be here tonight to open the discussion not of problems, although they abound, but of solutions. That's what this conference is all about. It's an opportunity for people deeply engaged in the process of improving mathematics and science education to share what they have learned. That's what we have invited you here for—and that's what will happen at this conference—to share what you've learned with others, to show what works, to understand, even more importantly, why things work, so that they can be replicated and built upon, and hopefully to pass on useful tools for reforming our educational system into one that truly serves the needs of our children. We don't start from scratch. We are lucky that educational reform has ranked high on the public agenda for the last several years, almost a decade now, and that there has been some real progress made, at least in identifying the problems that need to be solved, and in many cases actually solving key problems in science and math education, especially at the primary and secondary levels. We saw a number of advances during the 1980's, a number of publications, conferences, and the like that set the tone for this agenda that we are addressing now. These included: the President's and the National Governors' Association's report on national education goals; the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics'(NCTM) curriculum and evaluation standards; the Project 2061 report, "Science for All Americans," which describes reasonable and achievable school learning outcomes in science; and the National Science Teachers Association's "Content Core: A Curriculum Guide for Secondary Science." There are many more, and I don't single those out for any particular reason, except to remind ourselves of the variety and scope of activities that have taken place. The Nation is now prepared—and I think we are—to move beyond standards and goal-setting into implementation. You in this room will be agents of that change, and we at the National Science Foundation hope to be your eager partners in carrying out and effecting that change. The time is right for change, not only in mathematics and science education, but in the full spectrum of activities influenced by science and technology policy. The ending of the Cold War has prompted a full rethinking of these policies both inside and outside of the Government. And now with the changing of the guard in Washington, the federal bureaucracy is poised to embark upon a fresh beginning. But in order to do that, it needs the support and involvement of all of you who are actually carrying out and implementing programs. The Foundation is also poised to accept its role in this new environment, and we have been preparing for our role in a changing environment. As many of you know, we recently received a report from a Commission on the Future of the National Science Foundation, and that commission stated in its report that "change is part of the national agenda." Tonight, I would like to say a few words about the commission's report and about NSF's role in this area, what we hope to do in the future, and focusing on our role in education and human resources development. Let me say a few words about this commission, because it's important for the Foundation's long-term strategies. The commission's report—and if you have not seen it, it is available, and we can get you copies—is entitled "A Foundation for the 21st Century." The report was part of a strategic planning process for the National Science Foundation that I began over a year ago in conjunction with our Board, the National Science Board. The planning process started as an internal procedure, but subsequently upon my recommendation it became broader when the Science Board created this Commission on the Future of the National Science Foundation. The Board, in creating and charging the commission, asked for a no-holds-barred assessment of the Foundation's current directions and future possibilities. The commission, co-chaired by an academician and an industrialist, Robert Galvin, the former CEO of Motorola, and William Danforth, Chancellor of Washington University, presented its report to the Board in November, and the Board is now in the process of digesting that report. But we've already learned some lessons from its conclusions. While focusing primarily on our research-related activities, the commission report strongly reaffirms the importance of the Foundation's involvement in all aspects of education and human resource development. In particular, it recommends that we continue to sponsor efforts over the whole spectrum of education, K through 16. The commission has acknowledged that the new demands for more competitive civilian research, now that the Cold War has ended, and better mathematics, science, and engineer education will be fueled by a changed civilian, commercial, and competitive environment, one in which the relative strength of the United States in terms of our product development and in terms of our workforce can no longer be taken for granted in an increasingly competitive international environment. The report concluded that the National Science Foundation can contribute to the Nation's economic success, but that that success requires, and I quote: "That success requires an enlightened federal science and technology policy that touches all relevant agencies, a determination by industry to reach out for talent and knowledge, and the development of appropriate links." A key aspect of the commission's vision for the Foundation's future is our responsibility for promoting closer working relationships between participants across all sectors of the research and education enterprise. This role is, I think, a logical consequence of the National Science Foundation's position. We are a unique agency in terms of our relationship not only to the federal establishment, but also to the academic, research, and education community. The new Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, Bob Reich, has said in one of his writings, and I quote: "In the emerging economy of the 21st Century, only one asset is growing more valuable as it is used, the problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic brokering skills of a nation's citizens." He has pointed out on my occasions that the competitive advantage that any nation will enjoy in this modern world will reside in its citizens. Well, these are the very same talents and aptitudes that the National Science Foundation now taps and develops through its support of academic research and mathematics and science and engineering education. Problem solving, problem identifying, are, in fact, the essence of research. For over 40 years, the Foundation has encouraged and enabled generations of academic scientists and engineers to identify and solve key problems in a vast array of areas ranging from the development of lasers and fiber optics, polymers, DNA, viruses, the discovery of the ozone hole, and on and on and on. Drawing on that experience, we have learned that the individuals closest to the problems are those best able to identify the problems first and also those best able to solve the problems. And that has been the essence of our mode of funding research in education activities. It has been investigator-initiated and driven throughout the history of the Foundation. Through the investigator-initiated and driven part of our system, coupled with a merit review process, the Foundation has strengthened its ties to academic researchers and has called upon them throughout its history to assess for us, for the Foundation and the Nation, the importance of the problems, first of all, and the proposed solutions to those problems that need to be solved. Over the past two decades, this approach has gone further. It has enabled scientists and engineers who are in research establishments and universities to provide their valuable intellectual and professional backgrounds and their skills and talents to areas that go beyond their particular areas of research. They have become more and more involved in NSF-sponsored projects that have created opportunities for students to learn these unique problem-solving, problem-identifying skills that are so necessary and required for training future generations of researchers. With the support of the Foundation, the university scientists have become more and more involved in education activities outside of their research agenda with goals not only of preparing future generations of professionals in our disciplines and activities, but, in fact, preparing a future workforce of an educated American citizenry. As Bob Reich describes it in his other writings, he uses the term "strategic broker." The Foundation is learning and trying to play the role of strategic broker in many of these areas. A strategic broker, according to Reich, is one who brings together those who have identified problems with those who have the resources and the skills to help solve those problems. A strategic broker provides not only money in terms of resources, but serves as a catalyst for new ideas and processes. The Foundation wants to play that role. Let me explain how we are trying to play that role in some of our programs. Perhaps the most ambitious effort in this area of being a strategic broker, a catalyst, and bringing individuals and institutions together is through our relatively new program called the Statewide Systemic Initiative, the SSI, which was begun in 1991, as many of you know, because many of you here are part of those efforts. Through the SSI program, the Foundation now assists 20 states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and their Governors, in achieving comprehensive educational reform in their state's science and mathematics education programs from K through 12. And it does this by requiring the states to involve all the interested and important agents—school districts, parents, teachers, unions, industry, and universities. The strategy, though relatively new, is very straightforward in principle and in theory. The Foundation asks the Governor, as the leader of the state, to first articulate a vision of what an effective science and mathematics education system would be in their particular state. That's first, to have a vision. Second, we require them to identify the specific elements, the important elements in their system, which when taken together can make that unique vision for their state a reality. The Foundation doesn't provide the vision; we do not provide most of the resources. Our role in this context is to prompt, urge, cajole, and persuade the policy makers to consider new approaches over a wide variety of areas that will be needed to achieve systemic reform: setting curriculum goals and content, developing instructional strategies, putting into place—and this is very important, and we are making this a key for all of our activities—putting into place assessment activities to assess whether or not the strategies are, in fact, working in assessing student learning. We are also asking them to develop new structures from decision-making, to have a vision involving the important elements, and to have an assessment activity in place—all are important, but unless the structure for implementing that is actually put into place, none of it will happen. We ask them to address a broad range of areas, ranging from equity issues throughout the system and plans to involve those students who may have been overlooked in the system in the past. We encourage them to look at their state's commitment to improvement in terms of resources and focus, and then we ask for a plan to implement and evaluate the result of these reforms. Now that's a lot to ask, and we only contribute a modest amount to the total resources that are available. But we are finding just in the two years that the program has been underway that states are responding very favorably to this enterprise. Policy makers, educators, scientists, mathematicians, engineers, parents, communities, business, and industry have come together in the states where the SSI's are now in place. The Foundation has a long-term commitment. We commit up to $10 million over a five-year period and will go beyond that if we are successful. Now we've recognized that even if all of these SSI's are successful, that in many states they will not address other important issues, because in many states the problems connected with urban areas are very different from those with the rest of the state. So bearing that in mind and being encouraged by the response to the SSI, this year we will begin a similar program focused on urban areas, large cities, which will be called an Urban Systemic Initiative. That's one program where we believe our role as a strategic broker can be very effective and very important. We act similarly as a strategic broker for K through 12 education reforms in other areas. One is our Comprehensive Regional Center for Minorities. In that program, we have linked universities, four- and two-year colleges, school districts, and community and business leaders in a unified effort to try to improve primary and secondary math and science education in those areas that have significant minority populations. Another effort focused on minority groups is our Alliance for Minority Participation, where we also bring together all the important actors in an area and build in numerical goals with quantifiable assessment activities to test whether those goals are achieved. The Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation is yet another example of a coalition-building that the Foundation can assist in by acting as a strategic broker. Our success in these endeavors is primarily based on our special ties to the community represented here this evening, those of you who are educators, scientists, and engineers, who with the support of the Foundation, and not the Foundation alone of course, are able to actually carry out these programs. We like to think that we bring to this effort a repository of special talent, a repository of resources, and a wealth of experience. And in that regard, we think we can play a key role as a strategic broker in helping to craft solutions to the Nation's education and human resource needs. We do not want to design, devise, carry out, and implement programs from Washington, D.C. What we want to do is to provide an opportunity to assist, catalyze relationships, form partnerships with those of you who actually carry out programs, and generate the resources necessary on behalf of the Federal Government that will be needed to implement those programs. In closing, I would like to say welcome again, and I wish you every success in what I can tell is going to be a very enjoyable, stimulating, and very productive conference. Second Plenary Session Introduction Luther S. Williams Assistant Director, Education and Human Resources National Science Foundation DR. WILLIAMS: For the second plenary session and to launch our important work today, we are fortunate to have two outstanding speakers. One will address the political challenges of systemic reform, and the other will link labor and the workforce policy issues to mathematics and science education. Governor Roy Romer of Colorado is truly an outstanding education governor. Fortunately for the country, Governor Romer is also a national leader in systemic reform of education in general, and math and science education in particular. As the first Chairman of the National Education Goals Panel, he led a group of governors, and members of Congress and the administration, in a search for (1) proper assessment by which to monitor progress in the pursuit of the national education goals and for (2) ways to spur the national effort toward achieving the requisite excellence obligated by those goals. Currently, being the Governor of the State of Colorado, Governor Romer serves as the Chairman of the National Governors' Association. I know from published information, as well as private conversations, that education is among his four major agenda items and is a state and national priority for his tenure as the leader of the Governors' Association. Governor Romer is well informed on math and science education issues, as you will shortly realize for yourself. The second speaker, Dr. Ray Marshall, holds the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Centennial Chair in economics and public affairs at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs for the University of Texas at Austin. Some of you will know him best as the Secretary of Labor during the Carter administration. I have admired his work from a distance for years, but I know Ray Marshall best as a member of the National Advisory Committee to the Directorate of Education and Human Resources at NSF, where his service and contributions have been invaluable. He is no newcomer to education, workforce issues, or math and science education, in particular. Beyond his efforts with the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee, he is a member of the National Council for Project 2061, and he has been one of the major players in the Carnegie Corporation of New York's effort dealing with broad issues of workforce, education, and equity. Will you please welcome both Governor Romer and Dr. Marshall. The order of the presentations is Governor Romer and then Dr. Marshall, with a pause in between. Second Plenary Session Keynote Address The Honorable Roy Romer Governor of Colorado Chairman, National Governors' Association GOVERNOR ROMER: When I walked in the room, I asked some of my friends who all of these folks are, and I asked them if I would get too simplistic in my communications, and they said, "well, there are a lot of college presidents and others and, you know, start anywhere you want." The reason I posed that question is that I need to communicate about standards to a wide audience. I am trying to communicate to people in Colorado about what standards- based education is. I have found some useful ways of doing that and they may be simplistic, but I would like to share a couple with you. First, I am really pleased to be invited here. I believe education is the most important business of this Nation. Let me put that in perspective: As Chairman of the National Governors' Association, I have been working with the administration on trying to reduce the deficit, trying to get health care costs under control, and trying to get us reinvesting in the right things in America. Because, you see, we really cannot prepare for the future in terms of raising our skill levels and broadening our knowledge base, unless we get control of other costs in our society. So there is a very, very strong link between education, reinvestment, and controlling the national deficit and health care costs, and I just want to make that link before we start. Let me put it in terms of Colorado's budget. We have a $180 million in new dollars to work with out of growth in this fiscal year and $108 million of those go to Medicaid. That is a disproportionate sharing of one's wealth in terms of how we allocate resources. Now, let's jump into education. I absolutely believe that standards are the foundation of systemic reform in education, and I have felt that for some time. I am not an educator. It is just simple common sense. You need to know where you want to go before you can organize how you are going to get there, and we just haven't thought through clearly enough what it is that we want a youngster to know and be able to do, and what kind of knowledge and what kind of skills youngsters should have. And if we don't clarify that, we are simply not going to be effective in organizing this educational enterprise. Last night, I was reading Measuring Up. It is the first time I really had a chance to go through this book, but it is a wonderful illustration of the kind of knowledge and skills that we really are trying to create with new standards in math. If we do not understand that clearly, if we do not have the whole system which we are dealing with focused upon the right results, it is just common sense that you're not going to get your job done. So I am very focused upon content standards, teaching standards, and assessments, and I want to compliment the National Science Foundation and all of those who are affiliated with it. When you undertook the assignment of developing standards for science from the Department of Education, you insisted upon it being a package of content and teaching and assessment, because you can't separate them. Now, I used to run a flight school, and the simple way that I communicate to somebody on the street in Colorado about what a standard is, is to talk to them about flying an airplane. In order to fly an airplane, there are certain things you need to know and be able to do. They are there. It may take you 36 hours of flight instruction to learn it, or it may take you 46 hours of flight instruction. But what is fixed is what you need to know and be able to do. What is variable is how long it will take you to learn it. I believe all students can learn, but in education we quite often reverse this. What is fixed is how long we sit in the seat, and what is variable is what we know when we get out. Now, people on the street understand that. They know that, and if they don't get it, you draw a bell curve and you say, look, how many of you want to fly with an above-average pilot? Above-average means you're a little better than this half of the curve. They want to fly with somebody who knows how to fly the plane. And by the time I have finished that paragraph, they know what a standard is. The standard is something you need to know and be able to do. Well, the next thing is you have got to know when you are there. A standard is like the destination. The assessments are a compass that tells us how well we are focused in the direction of that destination. So the next question, when I try to communicate to somebody in Colorado about the importance of standards-based education, is to take a standard like that in abstract and try to apply it to math, to English, and to geography, and then the going gets a little more difficult. What we need is to have a great deal more good communication, such as Measuring Up, such as the other things that we need to develop based upon the NCTM content standard manual—so that not only the educators, the teachers, and the students, but also the parents and the business people in the communities will know why it is important to know that, and what it means to know that. So I want to say right out front, standards-based education in my judgment is the foundation upon which we must build systemic reform. Next, it quickly follows that we need to develop a new system of assessments that can accurately measure what it is that we want youngsters to know. They are packaged together. If your assessments are not aligned to the standards, it just doesn't work, and a good assessment will help you redefine what the content standard is. Here I would like to share another simple metaphor that has helped me communicate, and that is I use standards and assessments somewhat like a sandwich. The top layer of the sandwich comprises the standards and the bottom comprises the assessments. But what is really critical is what is in that sandwich—what has to happen in that classroom and in that youngster's experience in order to acquire learning, to take you from where you are to where you want to go. Now, let me spend a moment on the assessment issue. It is very challenging for us to find a way to get this done. When the panel that I chaired on standards and assessments got into Congress, we got into the equity issue, and there was great debate saying, "Governor, it's not fair to set these high world class standards and then begin to apply assessments, when youngsters have not had the opportunity to encounter an educational experience that would lead them there." I understand that. In the name of equity, I understand that argument. But what Congress had a tendency to do was to say we're going to authorize you to continue to do your work on standards, but we're not going to let you do anything on assessments until you "get a delivery system that is fair and equitable." That is fallacious thinking. It is just bad thinking. What we need to do is we need to develop standards and assessments simultaneously. They are interrelated. We need to be very careful about how high stakes we make them, but you simply need to have them go along in a parallel fashion, because they are interactive. I think one of the most inequitable things we could do to any group of youngsters in the United States is not to tell them what it is you really need to know and be able to do in order to be a useful citizen. I think the greatest inequity of all is not to confront a generation of youngsters with what a true assessment of their condition is. Quite often, I would use the analogy of a CAT scan. You know, when you go to a hospital and you take a CAT scan, what you want to know is what is health. You want to know where you are what you need to do to close the gap. I think a good assessment is of a similar nature. A standard tells you this is what educational health is, and then the assessment tells you here is where you are and then it helps you close that gap. Let's move on then to the middle of the sandwich. What is the middle of this sandwich and how can we get systemic reform in our individual states? Let me back up, before we get to that: How do we communicate these standards which you and others are working on—math and science, geography, history, and English? How do we communicate that and implement them in these United States with the dispersed system of education we have? That is a real challenge. I think that there are a number of things that we can do. Let me start from a state level. In Colorado, we have a legislative act that is currently under debate in the legislature in which we are trying to move our state rather rapidly into standards-based education. This act will set out certain time lines and say the State of Colorado will officially adopt standards in five areas by a certain date. It is about two years out. We are waiting for the science standards to be available. We are not going to take them without revision. We will take them and we will adapt them to ourselves, but they will be the core. Then each district, we have 176 districts, probably one of the most locally based educational systems in the United States. This law will say all you districts, you're on your own, you've got to go develop your own standards, do it within a certain time line, and we give them about a year after the state time line. But we say, "Your standards need to meet or exceed those that we have adopted at the state level." Now, it gives freedom, but it gives kind of a managed freedom, and we will tell you after a while how well this works. We are then going to adopt standards, have districts adopt them a little later, but we are not going to stop there. We are going to create a resource bank of tasks somewhat based upon the new standards methodology. We are going to put into this bank—and this is purely voluntary to districts—we are going to put into this resource bank all of the useful information we can to help a district develop appropriate assessment methods and materials such as you have in Measuring Up and others. Then the only enforcement that we have, since we are very dispersed in our educational accountability and authority, will be that each district would adopt standards at least equivalent to that which the state has. Then we would have a statewide assessment that we need to develop on a matrix sampling basis, not with any enforcement on how much money you get, but simply as a way of letting everybody know how well you're doing for informational purposes. Now that is our beginning in Colorado. There are a lot more bells and whistles to this, but even that is just a small step. What we really need to do, if we are to get standards-based education to be effective, is to bring the people along, to have the citizens in the community understand this is what math power really is, and this is why it is important to have it, and here is what ought to happen in the school building down the street for those kids to acquire it. Now, for that really to happen, who has to come along? Obviously, the teacher in the classroom is the most critical person. The administration of the school also needs to understand that. But the parents and the community, in my judgment, eventually have got to be with us or we are not going to succeed. So one of the real challenges is how can we get these kinds of understandings more broadly understood, accepted, and supported in these United States. Now let me turn back to the 50 governors and the President. In many states, governors are not the key person possibly in education. You may have a chief school officer, depending on how you are organized. But no matter how you are organized, the governor is the one that has the power of the bully pulpit. All you need to do is go measure the inches of newspaper space a governor gets on a normal day and the U.S. Senator. It is ten times in favor of the governor. In terms of the chief school officer, it is probably a hundred times. So no matter where you are in your state in terms of where the governor is on the official constitutional assignment of responsibility, he or she is a very key person to mobilize that state and focus that state on what really is important not only in all policy matters, but particularly in education. Therefore, our challenge I think is to work together to get states, governors, and other elected officials to understand how critical this item is to systemic change. It is the foundation of change, and because there is an awful lot of other educational experimentation we need to do and a lot of change that we need to accomplish, if it's not based upon great and good reform in the area of standards and assessments, I don't think it is going to get us to where we want to go. Lastly, let me talk about the new President. Bill Clinton was very involved in the initiation of the national goals. He was very involved in the National Governors' Association and in his own state in educational reform, and he thoroughly understands this issue and believes in it deeply. Right now, he has obviously got his plate full with a number of other issues. You will see in the first 100 days of this administration a very strong concentration on the economy, a short-term stimulus package and a longer-term package to help us reduce the national deficit, but with an overwhelming focus upon health care costs, because they are critical. But as we get through that initial surge of focus on those areas, it would be a wonderful opportunity for this President to come back and, in the area of education, take a point position in helping us take standards to the people of this country. Let's dream a moment how that could be done. I haven't talked with him about this. You and I are going to set an agenda for him. Okay? Remember Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats? You understand how well and how good a communicator Bill Clinton is in terms of the economic summit at Little Rock. How could we get a conversation going between the President of this country and the citizens of this country on math? Think about it. I don't think you're going to get this job done, unless you have parents understand why in Measuring Up you put those kids through this first exercise on graphs and charts. Now, let's dream a moment: How would we do this? Take a Monday evening, and you've got this great marvel of electronics. How can you engage a parent who doesn't know very much about math? How can you engage that parent into this subject matter? First you've got to start with how critical it is, because the American people are smart. They know where their bread is buttered and they really will focus upon something, if you get to them and say this is critical to the quality of life you're going to lead. So we need to figure out how you get inside that. Then the next thing is, okay, so it's important, how can you keep my interests? There has got to be a way in which we can present the subject matter which is intriguing and fun. Third, there needs to be a way in which you can do it with the parent and the children and the family. You know, maybe when the President speaks at this fireside chat, over this great marvel of electronics, we have a simple document in our hands in which we follow along. Let me stop there with the analogy, but I am just fascinated with how we take this the next step. If this is the foundation for systemic reform, namely, good standards and assessments, then we need to get it really up-front in the minds of Americans. We need to have Americans then walk down to that institution and that organization called the local school and demand, demand that it begin to reform itself to produce this product. I have spent a lot of times in schools this last week, and I should have brought this. I was in a school in Cherry Creek District in Denver, and they were going through Interactive Math—a program that originated out of California. I walked in and spent a couple of hours with a classroom that was very much like the one that you saw here, except it was in a high school, and I was just fascinated by what had changed in that classroom. The instructional materials were creative. The instructor was not standing up like I am lecturing to somebody. The instructor was sitting in the back of the room letting the youngsters work at tables of four. The students were going to the center of the room, making a presentation, and giving their reasoning, and there was more than one way to solve the problem. And it was a class in which high-order thinking skills were being acquired. It was an exciting class. The bell rang and the kids wouldn't leave and they had to shoo them out so we could get another group into the classroom. It was a wonderful experience to see. Well, how can we, working together, communicate to this Nation that there is a way to do this? I believe that standards and assessment are critical for the foundation or kind of the spinal cord of the skeleton upon which we need to build a lot of other systemic reform. And I think that if we do our job right, this can become a movement, a revolutionary movement that can radically change education in this country. Finally, I think that math and science needs to lead the rest. I think, as a citizen of this country, I am equally interested in other academic areas, but I somehow feel that the kind of cutting edge change that is possible in math and science can get a constituent base better than any other subject matter area and, therefore, I am pushing it hard. Let me close with a quote from Stephen Hawking that emphasizes why this knowledge of math and science is critical for all of us, all of us in the society and not just a few, and I do believe it's critical for all of us. Hawking said in the book A Brief History of Time the following: "Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is, to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in the broad principle by everybody, not just by a few scientists, then we shall all be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it will be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we will know the mind of God." I just close with that quote, because I think of the thirst for understanding, the thirst for meaning that all of us have, the thirst to live the good life. In my judgment, education is the key to that, it's the tool. It's the tool to the good life. Everything that I have been able to do in my own life was dependent upon somebody giving me those skills, that understanding, helping me know the history that preceded me, helping me to know who it is that occupies this world with me, their language, their culture, their traditions. Helping me to understand how to reason, how to organize my mind, how to adventure, but most of all, helping me to acquire a set of values, a set of values that enables me to live in community with others and to sort out what is more important and what is less important. Because without that skill, then all the tools of math and science do not lead to an end that satisfies me. Thank you very much. Second Plenary Session Keynote Address Ray Marshall Professor, Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs The University of Texas at Austin MR. MARSHALL: Well, I am glad to have the opportunity to share this platform with Governor Romer and to be with all of you. Let me state some propositions I would like to develop in greater detail. One of the most important of these is that, before we can compete successfully in a global economy, our people must learn to think for a living. Unfortunately, an outdated assumption that rudimentary skills are sufficient for a lifetime of work still haunts the Nation's education, industry, and labor systems. At an earlier time in our lives, basic skills were sufficient because the United States had no serious international competition and production had a larger natural resource content. But today, when the latest technology is readily available to every country in the world, and where almost everything of value has a large knowledge content, high incomes depend heavily on higher-order thinking skills. In other words, all of our people now need to have the skills that previously were reserved only for the few managerial, professional, and technical workers in our society. It has also become very clear—and I think this is an extremely important point on equity—that we will not have a world-class economy and a higher quality of life for most of our people, or perhaps even for any of our people, unless more people have higher-order thinking skills and all have access to these skills. A way to say that is: How well off we are going to be depends heavily on what kind of team we've got in this country and how we collectively are able to perform in the kind of world that we are in. Math and science are central to these higher-order thinking skills, partly because of knowledge and content, that is, because of the subject matter itself, but also because of the habits of mind that math and science convey and inculcate in people. The intellectual competence about learning that comes from the mastery of math and science is extremely important to the learning of everything. The obverse of that is: If people believe they cannot master math and science, they also doubt their intellectual competence and, therefore, do not believe they can learn. Once they believe that, many people make it a self-fulfilling prophecy and are unable to enjoy the benefits of a higher standard of living. It is also important to emphasize, however, that we should not view math and science as discrete subjects apart from life. The world does not divide itself up like we do university departments. We have to use math and science in all of our activities and should not conceive of it as a black box or a discrete subject that has little relevance to the rest of what we do. Now, let me take those propositions apart. I think it is instructive to look at our history in order to see how we got to be the world's leading economy during the early part of this century, what habits of thought we developed that cause us some trouble now (and what we should do about them), and, most importantly, what role a standards-driven education system will have in improving our learning systems. There were three things that made the United States the world's leading economy by 1926, and the first was having an abundance of natural resources when natural resources were much more important than they are now. Second, the U.S. had a large and growing internal market, which made it possible to have mass production and economies of scale. That was the system that allowed us to easily improve productivity and living standards, as illustrated by the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford reduced the cost of a touring car from $850 to $360 in 6 years, just before the first World War, with his mass production system. Now, that mass production system organized work so that only a few people needed to manage and think, while most people did routine work that was fragmented so that you could get very good at, for example, putting Bolt No. 35 on a rear left wheel. This work was fairly automatic. The system minimized the importance of thinking for front-line workers and emphasized the importance of being able to do routine work. People had to be literate to work in Ford's factory, because they had detailed instructions, but if you had basic skills and were willing to work hard, you could earn a very good living working for Ford Motor Company or for most other mass production industries. That mass production system was very important. The third factor was supportive institutions and policies, since we had a system that permitted the growth of a large internal market. One of the supportive processes that contributed to the success of the American system was mass education. Henry Ford's system was applied more rigorously to the schools than to any industry I know of, and the basic idea was to mass produce literates, take people right off the farm or the boat and transform them into literate people who could work on our farms and in our factories. As a result of that system, we developed a reputation for having the world's best-educated workforce. In fact, if you had conducted a poll in 1960 in the world and asked people who has the best educated workforce in the world, they probably would have said the United States of America. I need not tell you that would not be the case today. There are very few people who would say the United States has the best educated workforce in the world. In fact, almost no knowledgeable observer would argue that point. Most experts would say we have the worst educated workforce among the major industrialized countries, especially for our front-line workers. The only people in our system who are world class are college educated and scientific people, not most front-line workers. But the mass production of education and products earlier contributed to the longest period of sustained prosperity equitably shared in human history, from the 1930's and into the 1970's. Now the questions are: What happened to cause that system to come unglued, and why are we no longer necessarily regarded as the world's most effective economy? We are still the world's richest economy, but we are not necessarily regarded as the system that other countries want to emulate in terms of our management system and the way we operate the economy. Well, the main thing that happened was technology greatly undermined the causes of our traditional strength. How did it do that? The first thing it did was to greatly reduce the significance of natural resources, because the essential economic point about science and technology is that technological improvement is really all about substituting ideas, skills, and knowledge for physical resources. That is illustrated by the work of Theodore Schultz at the University of Chicago, who got the Nobel Prize in economics for demonstrating that the return to human capital was higher than the return to physical capital. Schultz and his students pointed out that we have fewer physical resources in American agriculture now than we did in the 1920's, as we acquired less labor, land, and capital; yet we have tripled and quadrupled output, depending on the crop. Why? We substituted ideas, skills, and knowledge for physical resources. Another illustration is that people working in the human capital tradition of Theodore Schultz have tried to ask the following question and answer it with the best tools available to us, and that is: What accounts for improvements in productivity? That is the key, of course, to improvements in wealth and improvements in our standard of living. What they found, fairly uniformly, is that 80 percent or more is due to ideas, skills, and knowledge or to technology and human capital; 20 percent or less to physical capital, i.e., machine capital; and zero to natural resources. So what previously was an important advantage has in many ways become a serious disadvantage. It is not a coincidence that many countries with very limited natural resources are doing very well. They were forced by geography and history to develop their people, which is the key to success in the world that we are in today. Science and technology also globalized our economy and, therefore, took away the advantages of mass production. Mass production was available to American companies because they had the American market to themselves. Now they don't. Everybody has the American market and, therefore, what was previously an advantage has suddenly become a disadvantage if companies are unable to adjust to the economic realities of this world. And what are those realities? The main reality is that you have got to be competitive now. What does that mean? Well, economists don't agree on a lot, but we agree that when it comes to being competitive, you as an individual, a state, a nation, or a company have two choices. You can either compete by reducing your income, mainly by cutting wages, or you can compete by being more productive, and that is it. There are no other options. In the United States, because we have not had a strategy, we have backed into low-wage policies as a way to compete. The low-wage strategy is a loser in the minds of most people, because, first, there are always countries with lower wages, but this option also implies lower and more unequal incomes and wages. We already have the most unequal distribution of income of any industrialized country, and it is becoming more unequal. Why? Well, mainly because the people who have the higher-order thinking skills are doing very well. Most of our people are not. Only 25 percent of our people are college educated, and they will do relatively well, but most people who are unable to compete in this world will not be able to do very well. A very important limitation of a wage strategy is that it limits the extent to which you can improve your income, because the only way you can do it is to work harder, and there is a limit to how hard people can work. With declining real wages, the only way we have sustained family incomes in the United States is with more women working. Now, that is obviously self-limiting. There are not many families with another wife to put into the workforce, and the slowdown in the growth of our workforce means that the whole country will be in trouble, unless we change. The other option is improving productivity, which gets us closer to our story, because what that really means is to substitute ideas, skills, and knowledge for physical resources, which puts you on a very steep earning and learning curve. We don't even know what the limit to that is, because we really never have tried it, but we know that it's very steep and much less limiting than trying to pursue the low-wage strategy. If you are going to be more productive, though, you have to do some things. First, you have to have a strategy. The reason we have a low-wage strategy in this country is not because we had a big debate and said let's go for low wages. It is because we didn't believe in a strategy. A productivity strategy requires high performance work organizations that emphasize quality, best defined as meeting your customers', students', or clients' needs. Henry Ford's factory was producer driven. Henry Ford is reported to have said that you could have any color car that you wanted, so long as it is black. Obviously, nobody would say that today, because we are in a consumer-driven world, and once you concentrate on your students and your customers, you change the operation of the whole system. Quality therefore becomes extremely important. Second, we have to think about efficiency in the use of all of our resources. Economies of scale caused us to be lazy and to build in a lot of slack that we can no longer afford. We had too many people, a large bureaucracy, to run the system, and that has become inefficient. We had inventory, because we made the assumption we are going to make a lot of mistakes. That builds in inefficiency. Now we have to have productivity in the use of all of our resources. Third, we also must have flexibility. Our traditional system tried to get security through contracts and rules and regulations. In the world that we are in today, we get security through flexibility and adaptability, not through contracts and rules and regulations, and that is a very difficult thing for a lot of people to understand. Fourth and finally, you need to have what we have come to call high-performance organization. What does that mean? First, it means you have a lean, participative management system, because information technology is inherently decentralizing. It is best used at the point of production, as the Soviet Union learned, as General Motors is learning, as most of our institutions are learning and, therefore, it is very inefficient to use it from a central point. Second, you have to develop and use leading edge technology and have highly skilled workers. Why? For a very simple proposition: The old model used standardized technology and unskilled labor. Obviously, that work will not be done in high-wage places. We are not going to pay American workers $10 or $15 an hour to do the same work on the same machines that you can get done in Mexico for $1 or $2 an hour. That technology will seek out those low-wage places. The question for all of us is: What do you do about that? The initial reaction for a lot of Americans is, well, we will automate, we will make these machines idiot-proof, and we will have Star Wars and illiterates. Wherever that was tried, it was a disaster. Why? People have to give wisdom to the machines. People have to improve the performance of the machines and, therefore, the basic model is smart machines/smart people, not smart machines/untrained people. What kinds of skills have we found from our work all over the world that we need? Well, the list is now uniformly accepted almost everywhere. The first thing you need to be able to do is to impose order on information, because the machines give us a lot of information. If you don't know what to do with the information, it is worse than not having it. If you know what to do with it, you can improve whatever you do. You can run a better household, be a better teacher, improve the quality of products, and solve problems; therefore, those math and science skills of imposing order on information become very important. Increasingly, information work is group work. We have turned putting Bolt No. 35 on over to a robot, and now people are involved in group work, and that means interpersonal and communication skills become extremely important. Third, and often neglected, one of the most important skills anybody can have in the world we are in today is learning skills. It is amazing how little attention traditional mass production schools give to learning. Very few people have ever had any systematic instruction in learning. Very few of our schooling processes give much evidence that they understand how people learn. Yet, we have learned more about learning in the last 10 or 15 years than in all of our previous history. And if people are able to learn, they are able to deal with change or to assimilate technology. If they are efficient learners, they can improve whatever kind of work they are doing. Learning therefore becomes a very important skill. Another higher-order skill is the ability to deal with ambiguity. One of the problems with our learning systems is we often teach people that there are answers in the back of the book. Well, in life there are no answers in the back of the book, so you must be able to deal with the ambiguity. You have got to be a self-manager. You have got to have an experimental frame of mind to solve problems and learn and develop new information. All of this, of course, means that you must give heavy attention to the kinds of habits of mind that we get from math and science. Now, another characteristic of a high-performance system often overlooked in many activities, including in our learning systems, is a positive incentive structure. There are two kinds of incentives, basically. One is negative, which means you do what I want you to or I will punish you, and we use that a lot in our systems. You will never get excellence with that incentive. A second is perverse, and we have a lot of that. Perverse means you do what I want you to and I will punish you. You see, most American workers believe—and we have polling data to show this—that if they improve productivity, they will lose their jobs. Well, that is a perverse incentive. Many of our schools allocate money on the basis of average daily attendance for a couple of weeks in October. We used to do that in Texas. We would put on contests during those weeks to get people to show up, and if you did, you could win a door prize. After that, we didn't care if you showed up or not. And guess which students we hoped didn't come back? The ones who needed it most. Now, that is a perverse incentive, if you are worried about dropouts. Incentives are very important in our learning systems and we need to pay a lot of attention to that. Now, our learning systems have a lot of problems, and let me just mention those, and then list the things. Governor Romer has done a good job of talking about the importance of standards, so I won't spend a lot of time on that. But let me tick off what seem to me to be the major problems that we face and what role a standards-driven system could play in that. First, as he emphasized, our most important learning system is the family, and we have a larger proportion of children in poverty than any other industrialized country. And with some amazing exceptions, poor families ordinarily are not good learning systems. The good news is that we can cause them to be better learning systems by involving parents in the learning process. Second, our schools are still geared to mass producing literates, and we do a fair job of that. They are not geared to turning out people with higher-order thinking skills. We have more tracking in our system than any major industrial country I know of, and yet we tend to be against tracking. Now, why do we have tracking? We don't wait until they are teenagers in the United States to track them. We start doing it at birth. Then when people get in school, we decide some are going to college and others aren't, and we see that those that are going to college get courses that prepare them for college, and those that we don't think are going to college are put in the general track or the vocational track and don't receive higher-order thinking skills. We also do almost nothing for people who are not going to college. We have the worst career preparation system for non-college students of any major industrial country. We do more for people who are going to college, but less for people who are not. The success of the American economy will depend mainly on what we do for people who aren't going to college, and no more than 30 percent of our workforce will be college educated by the year 2000. Now, what do we need to do? The answer is that we need to have high standards for people who graduate from high school, and we need to create standards for occupation for people who are not going to go to college. We also need to remove the financial barriers to people getting an education, because, oddly enough, we have more barriers than most of our major competitors. In Germany, education is a free good, because they believe what we learned from our GI Bill and what Ted Schultz and his students discovered through scientific research; that is, the return to human capital is higher than the return to physical capital. What role would standards play? First, of course, it would eliminate tracking. If we had high standards everybody had to meet, then we couldn't track, and schools would be responsible for ensuring that people met those standards. Second, you would have some way to measure the restructuring of a school for higher performance, because the high performance system applies to schools just as much as it does to companies and for the same reasons. We need to decentralize the work of teachers and create incentives for people to make student achievement the main objective of schools. Third, we need to provide motivation for students to learn. You see, in our system, if you are not going to college, there is no motivation to take science and math or to make good grades. If we had high standards, there would be motivation. Fourth, we should provide information to people about what the system is doing and improve the efficiency of the whole system by linking learning systems. Standards are important elements in systemic efficiency. Why? Well, we spend the first two years of college in this country doing what most countries consider to be high school work. Why? Because there are no standards for graduation from high school. If we had high standards, we would have more efficiency. Many companies spend a lot of money teaching subjects that should have been taught in high school. Why? Because there are no standards. Company training programs could be a lot better, if we had standards and if the employers knew what was required of students before they leave high school. We therefore need a standards-driven education system if we want to be a world-class country with high incomes, and it would be hard to think of a subject that is more important for our national standing in the world, as well as the personal quality of life for our people. Thank you. Question and Answer Session DR. WILLIAMS: I thank both of the speakers for their excellent presentations which really complemented each other quite well. We have time and they have consented to take a few questions before our break. Are there questions, anyone? None? Yes? I will try and repeat them. QUESTION: [inaudible] GOVERNOR ROMER: I think the best way to work with legislators is to get them hands-on onto the subject matter. We have in Colorado what we have called an Education Achievement Council, and it includes six members of the legislative leadership. What we do with this council is provide a way in which the executive, the legislators, and the educators can come to the table on educational policy. We took the standards education bill through that council over a period of months, and the level of discussion has really risen. We went through, for example—and let me just illustrate this—outcome-based education. As you know, that is a very interesting term we use educationally, OBE. I am extremely suspicious about using that term as we relate to standards, because I like to keep close to content. I know it needs to be interdisciplinary. But we went through several sessions of discussion on this, and the legislators became quite familiar with the language and the concepts; I think, therefore, they have become focused upon standards-based education. Let me say this another way: Educators tend to get their own lingo; all professionals do—deconceptualization, decontextualization, and all of that stuff. We really need to find language that communicates with people in the ordinary world. I get angry when people come into my office and begin to use words that are deliberately devised to keep me from understanding, and I think legislators have the same turnoff. So if all of you could help us to communicate in language that we all understand, I think it will also help bridge the barrier with legislators. MR. MARSHALL: I think that is a terribly important question, because that is obviously the next stage in our process. We have a lot of exemplary programs and a lot of exemplary schools, but, to my knowledge, not one exemplary school system in the United States. The question then is how do we move from these exemplary schools and programs. We know how to teach math and science, don't we? And we know how to teach it to poor kids, don't we? We know that any poor kid can learn math and science, and we have experiments all over the country where that has in fact been the case, and yet we don't do it, either in the Nation or in systems. How do you do it? I don't know. A good hypothesis about it would be as follows, and we have recommended this to President Clinton as a way we get started in the whole country: First, it is terribly important to have these successful examples—I try never to recommend anything I can't give somebody an example of—and to have the experiments, because what the examples help you with is overcoming the skeptics. You see, there are a lot of people who will say, "Well, you are right. We need to do something, but there is nothing we can do." But if you show them there are things that can be done, then you are likely to be able to move it forward. Then you need to recognize that we have a political and media problem. I am sure it is not that way in Colorado, but in Texas we define a politician as somebody who is busily trying to get to the left of the Republicans, to the right of the Democrats, and in front of the cameras. If you can focus the media on the problem, which is one of the ways a lot of people learn, then you might get politicians to do things. The most intransigent groups you have to deal with in any system are the vested interests. These are people who believe that the status quo is one of their options, and if it is, they will never move. Well, how do you move them? The only way to do it is to convince them that the status quo is not one of their options, that things will get worse for them, and I think they will. Now, our recommendation for President Clinton is that we take these things that we know work, develop some standards, and then say to state and local school districts that want to restructure along these lines, we will give you some money and we will waive all regulations except the essentials. It wouldn't be hard to specify what the standards should be. We are much more likely to be successful in a state or the national process than trying to mandate change; that probably won't work because there is no one best way to do things everywhere. Anyway, it seems to me that is a process that might work. QUESTION: It seems to me that much of what has been said is appropriate and useful. It does seem that a great deal of effort is on motivation, and motivation is clearly needed among all of these constituencies. But there is a lack in discussion of theory about how it will be done. You briefly mentioned the use of learning and learning strategies for schools, we are getting part of that, but it seems to me that we also have to emphasize theoretical issues just as much as motivational issues. MR. MARSHALL: Theories are statements of causal relationships and therefore are very important for policy. If you do the right thing on the basis of the wrong theory, it is just because of luck. And I'd much rather rely on the scientific method than luck. In fact, I have got a book about this that I commend to your attention and my profit. It is called Thinking For A Living, published by Basic Books last September, co-authored with Marc Tucker, and I think that is absolutely the case; you have got to have a theoretical understanding of how people learn. If learning systems are not based on our understanding of how people learn, then they are not likely to be very successful. And a lot of what purport to be educational reform movements are not based on any understanding of how people learn. A lot of the work being done in the choice movement, for example, is a theory of organization, but not a theory of learning and, therefore, I think choice alone is unlikely to be able to deal with the problem. Now, I think you also need to have a theory of how organized group activity takes place, and that is my theory of a high-performance organization, which applies as much to a school as to business or government. We have experiments to show this. That is, if you have a school that stresses student achievement and that drives the school, it will be a very different school from one that stresses average daily attendance or process, which is mainly what we do to satisfy the bureaucracy and for administrative convenience, rather than to improve student learning. We also know that if you develop and use leading edge technology in the school, you can improve learning. We have experiments to demonstrate this conclusion. We did this in the Job Corps, for example. When I was responsible for the Job Corps, we found that about 20 percent of the high school graduates coming into the Corps were illiterate. Now, what do you do for them? Well, using the learning technology, we were able to make it possible for people to learn, and we have been doing it over a long period of time. When I left the government in 1981, with 90 hours of instruction, we could move students on that technology two years in reading and two in math. Now, with 28 hours of instruction, using that technology, which has continued to be perfected, they can move students 1.4 grade levels in math and one in reading. We have made more progress with math than with reading with that technology, and you would expect that. Now, these experiments show that you can improve learning by decentralizing work to the classroom, or the point of production. Another part of the theory of high performance organization is that you have a lean, participative management system. We have evidence to show that most of the education dollars in this country go to administration, and some of that is useful. But what I would do in the administration is the same thing I recommend automobile plants do: get rid of a lot of managers, decentralize the decision-making to the school house, turn the work over to school professionals, change the name of management, and call them support workers to help the teachers in the classroom. Another part of our theory is that you will do what you have always done, unless you learn to do it a different way. That is the reason you can tie an elephant down with a rope. When an elephant is little, they tie it down with chains. They keep trying to get away and can't ever do it. Then when they are grown, you don't have to use a chain, because they don't think they can get away. That is also the reason they put a place for the buggy whip on the first automobile, because that's just the way you do it. Now, our experiments show that if you just tell teachers to become a high-performance system—as happened in Dade County, Florida—they don't know what that means. Well, you need to have some way to help them with that. And we also know that a very important part of any organized activity is the kind of incentives you build into the system. As noted earlier, the essence of a high-performance system, whether it is a school or any other organization, is to improve productivity and learning. What you really do to improve productivity and quality is to substitute positive incentives and standards for rules, regulations, and bureaucracies. That is the theory of the organized activity, but it has to be informed by the people who are in the classroom, and the whole system has to understand more about how people learn. It is useful to have a child development specialist as part of the team doing the work, as Jim Comer does in his schools, beginning first in New Haven, Connecticut—and I commend Jim Comer's work to you. Your point is the same one that Jim makes, namely, unless you have a theory of learning, the system won't work. And what he found out is that very few teachers knew much about child behavior, because they didn't know the theory of it. Teachers told him the worst thing you could tell a psychiatrist—he is a psychiatrist—when he asked why these kids were misbehaving. The teachers said some kids are just bad. Well, psychiatrists don't believe that. They believe kids do things for a reason. Why aren't they learning? And the teachers told him some kids can't learn. Now, that is comfortable, if you are in a bureaucratic school system, isn't it? Whose fault is it, if they don't learn? The kids. Now, if you are a professional, whose fault is it if they don't learn? Yours. It is your job to see that they learn. You cannot see that they learn unless you know how they think, unless you understand their culture and how they see the world, which is an important part of learning, unless you can get on the same frequency with them. All of that and more is a part of our theory of putting a school and the learning system together. Yes, sir, in the back? QUESTION: [inaudible] MR. MARSHALL: I wish I could give you a lot of them, but I can't, and not that I haven't tried to find them. The question was, could I give examples of a lot of business and industry mobilizing themselves to receive students with higher-order thinking skills? Many industry leaders are involved in the restructuring movement, but they are the exceptions, not the rule. I co-chaired the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, and we did detailed work in the United States and six other countries—two in Asia and the rest in Europe. The United States was unique. We asked people the following question: What is your strategy for competing in this global economy that we are in? We knew that they only had two options, improved productivity or low wages. Five percent of the American companies said they were going for high productivity. A great majority of the employers in every other country said they were going for high productivity. Why? If you are in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Singapore, or Japan, you can't use the low-wage strategy, because they don't want you if you can't pay a living wage. Their theory is, why should we subsidize companies that cannot pay people enough to keep them alive, because if we do, then we subsidize inefficiency. So they have high minimum wages, empower workers, and have well-trained, well-educated workforces. The second question that we asked is: What are the educational implications of your strategy? Do you perceive a skill shortage or do the schools turn out the kind of people you want? Only 15 percent of the American respondents said no. A great majority of the respondents in every other country said no. And of that 15 percent, when we probed, two-thirds of them said what we mean by schools not turning out the kind of people we want is people who will be disciplined, who will show up on time, not people who could impose order on chaotic information or people who could learn. They didn't even think about that. And only 5 percent said that they had a shortage of people with higher-order thinking skills. Now, I think we have been deluded in this country into believing that business is out there demanding people with a lot of high skills. But if you are following a low-wage strategy, you don't demand people with high skills. And I think what we have to do is turn that around. Of course, another thing that these employers said to us, which I think is part of the chicken and egg-type problem, is that they understand what you mean by high-order thinking skills and a high-performance system, but they can't find students coming out of our schools who can do that. A German employer told us that he quit selling his most sophisticated machine tool technology in the United States because American workers could not even learn to use it in a reasonable time. Motorola has moved one of its important chip-making operations to Japan. They are not doing it in Austin, Texas, where I live and where they are operating, because they couldn't find people who could do the work. When I first got back from the government, I found that Texas Instruments had hundreds of teachers on their payroll to teach elementary arithmetic to Texas high school graduates. Now, you don't do high-performance work with people who have limited math and science achievement. Most workers in Korea or Japan have math through calculus, have 6 years of math and science, and are at least equivalent to community college graduates in the United States. In Japan, Toyota takes high school graduates with those skills and gives them two additional years of schooling before they work full-time on the assembly line. Well, that is the competition and that is the problem that we face. So I think that we see the same group of business people who are out front on this issue, but they are the exceptions. It is like the police official in the movie Casablanca who said, "Round up the usual suspects." We hear a lot of talk by the same group of business people all the time, and I applaud them, but I notice it is the same group, and that if you really get serious in most places, there are not many of them, and I think that is part of our problem. Yes, sir? DR. WILLIAMS: I am sorry, you are going to have to stop. I regret that, but we have to have a break before the start of the sessions. The Governor had to leave. He sandwiched participation here between the trip in Washington and a very important effort in Colorado. Ray will be here for a short while, and perhaps some of you can talk with him privately. Thank you very much. Wednesday Group Sessions (Session Leaders and Descriptions) GROUP 1: The Role of National Standards in Systemic Reform GROUP 2: Innovative Instructional Materials for Systemic Reform GROUP 3: Challenging Conventional Wisdom: What Research in Teaching and Learning Tells Us GROUP 4: Assessing Student Learning: Leading and Ensuring Reform GROUP 5: Teachers: Agents of Systemic Reform GROUP 6: Revitalizing Undergraduate Education Through Cultural Change GROUP 7: Innovative Learning and Teaching Communities: Created and Sustained with Technology GROUP 8: Systemic Approaches for Increased Participation of Underrepresented Groups in the Nation's S&T Enterprise GROUP 1: THE ROLE OF NATIONAL STANDARDS IN SYSTEMIC REFORM Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Presider: Gerhard Salinger; Program Director Division of Elementary, Secondary and Informal Science NSF Education & Human Resources Directorate Participants: Shirley Hill Professor of Mathematics University of Missouri, Kansas City James Leitzel Department of Mathematics & Statistics University of Nebraska, Lincoln Audrey Champagne National Research Council Washington, D.C. Henry Heikinnen National Research Council Washington, D.C. Description: The mathematics community has been very successful in developing and gaining acceptance for the Standards for Curriculum Development and Evaluation for School Mathematics. This was followed by the Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics. The science community is now engaged in a similar exercise. The technology education community is considering developing standards as are other non-technical disciplines. This session will try to answer the questions of "What are Standards? Why have them? What are standards for curriculum development? What are standards for assessment and evaluation? What are professional teaching standards?". The assumption will be that while members of the audience have heard of the Standards, they are not really familiar with them. The majority of the discussion will be on how Standards provide a basis for system reform, using, for example, the Mathematics Standards. Progress on science standards will also be reported. Themes: _ The need for Standards in content, teaching, and assessment _ The process of establishing Standards _ The role of Standards in guiding system reform Major Questions: _ What are Standards? _ Why have Standards? _ How are Standards established and modified? _ What is the role of Standards in system reform? GROUP 2: INNOVATIVE INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS FOR SYSTEMIC REFORM Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Presiders: Margaret Cozzens; Director Tony Kring; Visiting Program Director Division of Elementary, Secondary and Informal Science NSF Education & Human Resources Directorate Participants: Cornelia Tierney Technical Education Research Center Cambridge, Massachusetts Diane Resek Department of Mathematics San Francisco State University Karen Worth Educational Development Center Newton, Massachusetts Phil Sadler Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Cambridge, Massachusetts Susan Goldman Vanderbilt University Nashville, Tennessee Sylvia A. Ware American Chemical Society Washington, D.C. Description: Participants will view a variety of instructional materials (print and multimedia), examine their content and integrated themes, and discuss how they can be implemented in schools. Participants will also learn how to find quality materials and how their use will change the learning/teaching process. Themes: _ Nature of instructional materials requires alternative instructional strategies and vice versa. _ Preparing and supporting teachers in the use of innovative instructional materials. _ Expanding the definition of appropriate instructional materials. Major Questions: _ What are the characteristics of contemporary science, mathematics, and technology instructional materials? _ What changes are needed in the educational system in order to use these innovative materials effectively to improve learning and teaching? GROUP 3: CHALLENGING CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: WHAT RESEARCH IN TEACHING AND LEARNING TELLS US Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Presiders: Ray Hannapel; Former Program Director Barbara Lovitts; Program Director Division of Research, Evaluation & Dissemination NSF Education & Human Resources Directorate Participants: Patricia Campbell Department of Curriculum and Instruction University of Maryland College Park, Maryland Elizabeth Fennema Department of Curriculum and Instruction University of Wisconsin Madison, Wisconsin Joseph Villani Associate Superintendent Montgomery Co. (MD) Public Schools Beth Warren Technical Education Research Center Cambridge, Massachusetts Robyn Mathias Rolling Terr. Elementary School Takoma Park, Maryland Honi Bamberger Columbia, Maryland Mazie Jenkins Madison, Wisconsin Public Schools Description: Research advances over the past ten years have yielded important new insights into children's mathematical and scientific thinking and into teaching processes that make children's thought the central focus of instruction. Researchers and practitioners at the forefront of these efforts will provide examples of science and mathematics instruction at its best and its implications for systemic change. A panel of researchers and practitioners that represents all levels of the system will discuss one school system's efforts to bring about fundamental reform in mathematics education for low-income, minority children. Themes: _ The development of children's scientific and mathematical thinking. _ The development of teachers' understanding of children's scientific and mathematical thought processes. _ Instructional strategies and contextual factors that promote scientific and mathematical thinking. _ How research findings from teaching and learning are informing systemic change. Major Questions: _ What is research telling us about how children think about scientific and mathematical concepts? _ How does knowledge of children's thinking impact teachers' pedagogy? _ What do we know about changing the classroom and school environment in order to promote the growth of children's scientific and mathematical thinking? GROUP 4: ASSESSING STUDENT LEARNING: LEADING AND ENSURING REFORM Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Presider: James Lightbourne; Program Director, Division of Undergraduate Education NSF Education & Human Resources Directorate Participants: Stephen P. Klein The RAND Corporation Santa Monica, California Donald Koretz The RAND Corporation Washington, D.C. Kathy Comfort California Department of Education Sacramento, California Description: Participants will engage in assessment activities that illustrate the impact of alternative assessment procedures on instruction. They will learn about effective strategies for assisting teaching professionals in utilizing alternative assessments and will discuss the policy issues that arise with the implementation of assessments. Themes: _ Reforming instruction through use of assessment of student learning _ Ensuring quality, valid assessment of student learning with a variety of approaches to assessment Major Questions: _ What strategies related to assessment of learning promote systemic reform? Can these strategies reduce the effect testing has had as a barrier to reform? _ What are the criteria for assessment that (a) provide teachers with information with which to improve curriculum and instruction, and (b) provide students with information with which to improve their own learning? _ What principles should guide appropriate allocation of time and money for low and high stakes assessments? GROUP 5: TEACHERS: AGENTS OF SYSTEMIC REFORM Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Presider: Costello L. Brown; Program Director Career Access Opportunities Program, Division of Human Resource Development NSF Education & Human Resources Directorate Participants: Gail Burrill Whitnall High School Greenfield, Wisconsin Doug Lapp The Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C. Ann Grady Boston Public Schools Boston, Massachusetts Description: Participants will learn how teachers are creating programs, networks, and forums for their own professional development from teachers who are Presidential Awardees in Mathematics and Science. Participants will also study one successful model of professional development that combines content and pedagogy study with building of teams of teachers and administrators in pursuit of improved science instruction school-wide and district-wide. Themes: _ Changing the school culture to increase teacher professionalism. _ Teachers as active participants in systemic change. _ Characteristics of high quality professional development programs in mathematics and science. Major Questions: _ How can teachers become agents of systemic change in their local schools as well as in regional, state and national levels? _ What responsibilities do each of the following have in assisting teachers to adapt to the changing role of teacher in the classroom: teachers themselves; school administrators; policy makers; professional societies; government agencies; and higher education faculty? _ How can all of the nation's teachers access high quality professional development programs? GROUP 6: REVITALIZING UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION THROUGH CULTURAL CHANGE Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Presider: Robert F. Watson; Director Division of Undergraduate Education NSF Education & Human Resources Directorate Participants: David Lomen Department of Mathematics University of Arizona, Tucson Celestino Fernandez Vice President, Undergraduate Academic Affairs University of Arizona, Tucson Angelica Stacy Department of Chemistry University of California, Berkeley Jack Lohmann Associate Dean of Engineering Georgia Tech University Debbie Yoklic Professor, Dept. of Mathematics Pima Community College Tucson, Arizona Laura Hoopes Associate Dean of Faculty Occidental College Description: This session will focus on how NSF has acted as a catalyst for systemic change in different but complementary ways. Through a variety of grants to single institutions or through grants to multiple institutions through a single program, NSF projects are changing the culture within departments so that more institutional resources are flowing into educational activities and the reward structure is changing to reflect attention to education. In addition, leading mathematicians and scientists and their professional and scientific organizations, engaged in focused NSF conferences and workshops, have begun to encourage a greater emphasis on integration of teaching and scholarship. The session, led by faculty and administrators who are involved in such efforts, will provide opportunities for participants to discuss these and other strategies for change. Themes: _ Integrating teaching and scholarship; creating institutional climates in which scholarly activities, including teaching and curriculum development, as well as research, are valued and rewarded. _ Preparing a scientifically literate society; mathematics and science for all students. _ Increasing diversity in the work place by encouraging the participation of qualified women, minorities, and people with disabilities in science, engineering and mathematics. _ Preparing teachers of tomorrow: mathematics, science, and engineering. Major Questions: _ What are the cultural changes needed to focus faculty and institutional attention, talent, and resources on improving teaching and curricula for all students at the collegiate level? _ What are strategies for achieving these needed cultural changes? GROUP 7: INNOVATIVE LEARNING AND TEACHING COMMUNITIES: CREATED AND SUSTAINED WITH TECHNOLOGY Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Presider: Beverly Hunter; Program Director Division of Research, Evaluation & Dissemination NSF Education & Human Resources Directorate Participants: Bob Tinker Doris Cyrus Chief Science Officer Marshall Middle School Technical Education Research Center Beaumont, Texas Cambridge, Massachusetts Linda Maston John Richards E.M. Pease Middle School Director, Co-NECT Design Team San Antonio, Texas Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Inc. Cambridge, Massachusetts Connie Stout Texas Education Agency Austin, Texas Description: The forum will illustrate several approaches to research, development, proof-of-concept, and infrastructure-building with computer-and-communications technology. Individuals representing three "networking testbeds" will address these issues and, with participants, seek answers to the challenging questions. The networking testbeds are consortia enabling students, teachers, scientists, educational researchers, and school administrators to collaborate on systemic reform using the National Research and Education Network (NREN) and related telecommunications technologies. Themes: _ Linkages and synergy among learners, teachers, experts, communities, and resources. _ Teacher participation in the processes of change and innovation. _ Interdependence of technology and the processes of scientific inquiry. Major Questions: _ How can we employ computer-and-communications technologies to help ensure that diverse efforts at innovation and reform will advance the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of learning and teaching for all citizens? _ How can individuals and groups identify, link with, contribute to, and build on each others' work? _ Can a new national system of networking and information exchange emerge from ongoing diverse efforts? GROUP 8: SYSTEMIC APPROACHES FOR INCREASED PARTICIPATION OF UNDERREPRESENTED GROUPS IN THE NATION'S S&T ENTERPRISE Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. Presiders: Joseph G. Danek; Division Director Roosevelt Calbert; Deputy Division Director Division of Human Resource Development NSF Education & Human Resources Directorate Participants: Steven Ritter Dean of Engineering University of Texas at El Paso Lloyd Cooke Consultant White Plains, New York Alfredo de los Santos Maricopa County Community College Tempe, Arizona Jane Kahle Miami University Oxford, Ohio J. Ray Bowen Dean of Engineering University of Washington Seattle, Washington Dorothy Strong Director of Mathematics Chicago City Schools Chicago, Illinois Description: Recognized leaders in designing and implementing comprehensive initiatives for increasing access to, and attraction and entry of, women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in SEM careers will discuss their views on how to bring about coherent change within academic institutions and school districts/schools, including regions of the Nation with large minority populations. Attendees will be actively engaged in the discussion. Themes: _ The Nation's K–16 educational system in SEM has proven particularly inadequate for women, minorities, and persons with disabilities. _ Small, disconnected equity-oriented approaches have not made a significant difference. _ Systemic approaches that alter institutional policies and practices and build effective linkages across educational levels are needed. Major Questions: _ How do institutions and organizations start the process of assessing and refocusing their efforts to enhance underrepresented groups and establish and monitor quantitative outcome measures? _ What are the factors, characteristics, and programmatic elements that contribute to effective change? _ How does one extend beyond a given institution/organization to involve all key players in a region in the development and support of a comprehensive plan? Beyond Goals and Standards: NSF's Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Technology Education Agenda and The Economy Luther S. Williams Assistant Director, Education and Human Resources National Science Foundation Introduction I welcome this opportunity to meet with so many distinguished leaders of U.S. science, engineering, mathematics, and technology education—kindergarten through undergraduate—and discuss elements of the National Science Foundation's agenda. In the context of the new Administration, there is no better time for such a discussion—local, state, and national funding and other constraints notwithstanding. Why? In an idea or knowledge driven era, education for all students is mandatory; the extant National Education Goals serve to ensure a public policy and resource allocation framework. Math and science education is now inseparably coupled to the scientific and technical workforce, critical technologies, and the state of the national economy in a competitive global arena. A vast world market opens a wealth of opportunities; it demands of us all, however, greater competence. Consider the kinds of work which we have previously thought of as outside the realm of science, which now increasingly rely upon it. Consider how: •computers have changed the nature of accounting; •statistics, environmental science, and risk analysis are transforming the legal profession; •robotics have transformed the shop floor of our automobile industry; and •laser technology has changed the job of a supermarket manager. We are going to need people who understand science, are facile with mathematics, and are conversant with technology. Moreover, and without debate, as our future workforce expands, its composition will be increasingly female and minority. Clearly, in order to increase our technical workforce, we must draw new entrants from these underrepresented groups into science and engineering fields. In a recent book, Secretary of Labor Robert Reich described the new composition of the workforce in America. He distinguished between three kinds of workers: those who fabricate products; those who provide personal services; and those who define problems, solve problems, and broker the solutions. America's competitive advantage lies in the third category. The ability to develop this type of worker is the strength of our university system. Scientists and engineers are a vital part of that cadre. Most importantly, the transformations needed to meet the challenges of leadership, economic progress, and social equity will be forged by the problem solvers. Taking our rightful place among that cadre of problem solvers is vital if we are to assume a substantive role in making the key decisions that will shape this Nation. The extent to which any group succeeds in participating in that process will determine its influence on American society and the world. Goals and Objectives Because of the demands of the new workplace, NSF has decided that resource acquisition or programming must affect the transition from programs, per se, to results. We must accommodate this literal and profound change in the basic paradigm. This accommodation acknowledges the shift from inadequate, insufficient, and perhaps even ill-defined objectives to an emphasis on documentable measures of progress toward the achievement of specific goals for programs of appropriate scope and scale. In these efforts, we are responding to the challenges of the present and the future in a manner that entails a quite fundamentally different type of resourcefulness and productivity expectations. Through our programming, we seek to disallow less purposeful, less connected, and "entrepreneurial at the margin" activities that serve to reinvent the status quo. Rather, we seek to contribute to the development of contemporary, agile, and competitive workers (problem solvers) throughout the K–undergraduate continuum—consistent with demands for greater yields, turnaround times, development cycles, and appropriate costs in the marketplace. NSF's strategy in achieving these objectives is to attack critical points in the education pipeline. Base Programs At the graduate level, we have doubled our graduate fellowship program from 500 to 1,000 new students per year, with special consideration for women and minority students. We have recently initiated a graduate research traineeship program with funds to support more than 200 students in the first year of the program. At the undergraduate level, NSF is expanding funding of programs to develop new undergraduate curricula. Specifically, we are developing new courses and curricula in engineering, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, and computer science, and we are expanding research experiences for undergraduate programs. We have doubled expenditures for instrumentation and laboratory improvement while expanding access for more two-and-four year schools. We have made nearly 4,000 grants under our laboratory improvement program, and we are initiating new programs to enhance undergraduate teaching. Although we continue to make efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels, NSF is placing a major emphasis on precollege math and science education. The NSF FY 1993 budget provided a 10% increase for education and human resources. Since 1990, the EHR budget has more than doubled (an increase from $220 million to $487 million). The precollege sector programs' budget for FY 1993 is more than $300 million. NSF funds precollege programs in support of national reform efforts in math and science curricula, assessment techniques, and science standards; and in support of materials development. Precollege Education Development In precollege math and science programs, NSF is involved in developing a national consensus on what students should know at each of the elementary, middle, and high school levels. Through our materials development program, NSF is actively engaged in the support of innovative, engaging curriculum materials development and dissemination efforts. (We realize the importance of disseminating the results of successful projects so that adaptation of materials and use of human resources developed by NSF projects are possible. Therefore, each funded project in NSF's education program area is required to include a dissemination plan as well as explicit evaluation components.) Recent emphasis has been given to elementary science and middle school science and mathematics, as well as high school science and math curricula. K–12 curricular development follows a continuum of elementary science education, middle school science and mathematics, and, lastly, high school science and mathematics. NSF also supports precollege programs for teacher preparation and enhancement of teacher training. In-service teacher enhancement programs now serve about 24,000 teachers annually, and teacher preparation focuses on institutional collaboratives. NSF is expanding support for assessments of student performance linked to curricular revisions and teacher enhancements. We want to do away with simple multiple choice tests and develop more effective assessments of student performance while engaged in scientific and mathematical activities. Another key element of NSF's precollege agenda is to encourage and support local, state, and federal roles in precollege math and science education for underrepresented minorities. For example, NSF has established 12 Comprehensive Regional Career Access Centers in metropolitan areas to promote increased integration of minorities into precollege level math and science education programs. Currently, more than 30,000 minority, precollege students are served by these programs. These Centers work through university, school system, and private sector cooperation to reach and teach minority students at the elementary and secondary levels and nurture their learning success. NSF's future agenda for precollege math and science education includes support for: •increasing the use of computers and other advanced educational technologies; and •programs in research addressing teaching and learning: how students learn complex concepts in science and mathematics, how they apply these concepts effectively in real problem-solving situations, and how teacher cognition—that is, a teacher's knowledge and beliefs about the nature of the subject and the learner—relates to effective classroom instruction. Alliance For Minority Participation (AMP) The Foundation's recognition of the need for fundamental change in education and human resources and the attendant workforce requirements is evidenced by the undergraduate programs that address the underrepresentation of minorities in science and engineering. NSF support for each regional alliance is up to $1 million per year for at least five years and supports the design and implementation of innovative strategies at the precollege and undergraduate levels. Funded programs are expected to meet the following goals: •effectively attract and retain minority students in science and engineering undergraduate majors; and •ultimately, increase the number of minority science and engineering bachelor degree recipients to a level several-fold greater than the currently accepted low rate. Currently, there are 11 such AMP programs, and more than 10,000 students participate in these efforts. The Statewide Systemic Initiatives Program (SSI) This program is designed to immediately broaden the impact, accelerate the pace, and increase the effectiveness of improvements in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education at precollege and undergraduate levels through comprehensive systemic changes in the education systems of the states. The NSF support for a project is for five years, and each funded project involves a partnership of executive, legislative, educational, business, and public leadership and must address objectives that include: •adoption of more effective science and mathematics curricula; •use of better instructional material and development of new educational technologies; •appropriate assessment procedures; •higher student achievement in science and mathematics and increased interest in related careers; •improvement of science literacy and citizen understanding of science-related issues; and •adoption of new methods and standards for the preparation and continued development of teachers. Ten states received awards in FY 1991: Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Montana, South Dakota, and Louisiana. Statewide systemic initiative awardees for FY 1992 included California, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia. Five additional awards will be made this fiscal year (FY 1993). Urban Systemic Initiative (USI) USI will begin with a solicitation for proposals from a limited number of cities for catalytic support of integrated, systemic changes in their education systems that will broaden the impact, accelerate the pace, and increase the effectiveness of improvements already underway in science, mathematics, and technology education, and initiate additional changes necessary for lasting comprehensive reform. Partnerships In addition to sponsoring its own programs, NSF works with other federal agencies in an effort to accomplish its objectives and overcome the intellectual, organizational, and financial economies most agencies face. For example, the recently executed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. Department of Education and NSF is representative of such a partnership in math and science education: it exists in full acknowledgement of shared vision, goals, investments, roles, and benefits. Accountability, intellectual programmatic integration, and excellence are obvious expectations of collaborative actions taken under the MOU. A comparable set of expectations attends the partnership between NSF and the National Institutes of Health in the joint support of precollege and undergraduate programs for minorities. NSF also participates as one of 16 federal agencies in the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET), Committee on Education and Human Resources (CEHR). The FCCSET/CEHR is a substantial effort involving interagency collaborative ventures on program priorities, attendant budget integration processes, and the formulation of a five-year strategic plan with specific milestones against which to measure the progress of the federal sector investment in K–undergraduate science, engineering, mathematics, and technology education. Plan for the Future In light of our current efforts, NSF has developed the following framework as a plan for the future. The fundamental indices on which this plan is based are: •Future programs will be designed to accommodate fully the extant demands of the science and technology workforce (at all levels of employment) and thereby ensure optimal connectivity between the educational and economic systems. •Without exception, all K–12 (precollege) mathematics and science education programs will be grounded in the fundamental notion that all minority students be afforded resource-adequate, intellectually challenging, and comprehensive mathematics and science curricula taught by a highly competent cadre of elementary and secondary teachers. •National standards for program outcomes should serve to promote rapid and orderly dissemination of program models, thereby accelerating replication without the financial inefficiencies caused by redundant program design and development activities. •All programs will, by design and operation, acknowledge the urgency and the innovative action(s) required to accelerate progress toward the achievement of specific goals. An idea for an NSF Institute for Science Education is being considered to provide a "think tank" environment for addressing issues in SME, examining education priorities that are of importance to the EHR, and identifying needed areas of basic and applied research in SME education. In the context of milestones, we will focus on the U.S. scientific workforce, priorities being advanced technicians and K–12 teachers. Scientific and Advanced Technology Workforce By giving workers the skills to function in high technology jobs, we ensure not only their personal competitiveness in the workplace but that of the Nation as well. The needs of this workforce include both the training of future workers and the continuing education and retraining of the existing workforce. The area of the educational pipeline central to training of the technical workforce encompasses approximately grades 10 through 14. The development of high-quality educational experiences, cutting across the last two years of high school and the lower division college level, is necessary both to produce a cadre of skilled technicians for industry and to prepare those students seeking more advanced technical training. The principal sites for this activity are the Nation's two-year colleges, with special attention paid to promoting communication between these institutions and the workplace, secondary schools, and four-year colleges and universities. The Foundation proposes a major effort in this area that has two principal thrusts: (1) expansion of existing program activities, e.g., course, curriculum, and materials development (including laboratory experience) and faculty and teacher enhancement; and (2) the creation of new initiatives. These new comprehensive projects will allow a broad strengthening of two-year colleges in cooperation with four-year colleges and universities. National and regional centers for lower-division and technical education will be established. Such Centers will produce and disseminate instructional products and strategies. Centers may have foci such as advanced technology, lower division science education, opportunities for women (including re-entry), minorities, and the physically disabled, and articulation with schools, other segments of higher education, or both. The milestones under consideration for the scientific and advanced technology workforce are: •by the end of 1995, 10 National Centers for advanced technician training. •by the end of 1995, comprehensive projects to strengthen two-year college capability in science, mathematics, and technology operating in the majority of states. •by the year 2000, a significant increase in the active projects in the Nation's two-year colleges at a level comparable to that of other types of institutions. These projects will affect both the quality and quantity of the skilled workforce. K–12 Teacher Workforce The Foundation increases the content and pedagogical skills of in-service teachers through intensive summer educational experiences with academic year follow-up and development of leader teachers who become agents of reform in a variety of settings that range from schools to districts and broader regions. These teachers are critical to the implementation of the new curricula produced in response to the newly developing national standards. These enhancement activities are critical to meet the needs of those students who will enter the skilled workforce. NSF proposes to explore the concept of Teacher Enhancement Centers, staffed with experts, that will provide technical assistance to client school systems. Such Centers, operated under cooperative agreements, will be designed to develop teacher training strategies specifically suited to the school systems' needs. Through these Centers, NSF would also immeasurably improve its ability to service areas (e.g., rural and urban) that do not directly benefit from other Foundation systemic reform programs. Investment in the future teacher corps is essential to break out of our current situation of compensating for teachers who are poorly prepared and to ensure a high-quality teacher corps in the long term. The Foundation proposes to establish major regional collaboratives for systemic reform in teacher preparation that link schools of education, academic departments, and school systems. The milestones under consideration for the K–12 teacher workforce are: •Under the FCCSET/CEHR strategy, NSF will strive to provide support and leadership to ensure that, by the year 2000, 75 percent of all K–12 teachers will have had appropriate disciplinary and pedagogical experiences. •By the year 2000, NSF seeks to expand the best teacher enhancement projects so that one-half of the existing workforce will have benefitted from teacher enhancement activities and will have become agents for systemic change and curriculum implementation. •NSF intends to establish one or more Teacher Enhancement Centers that will provide intellectual and practical guidance for those who want to initiate major teacher enhancement projects. •By 1997, NSF hopes to have 25 major regional Teacher Preparation Consortia in place. •By the year 2000, NSF intends that one-half of all new K–12 teachers of science and mathematics will have benefitted from NSF teacher preparation activities. Diversity in the Workforce Math and science education for minorities is increasingly important to give them the skill necessary to become part of the technical workforce. It is therefore important to establish educational milestones for these groups. Specific milestones include: •By the year 2000, racial and ethnic differentials in student achievement in elementary science and middle and high school science and mathematics will be reduced by one-half. •By the year 2000, the elementary and secondary level instructional workforce will show a three-fold increase in the number of minority science and mathematics teachers. •By the year 2000, the number of minority students enrolled/interested in science and engineering in two-year institutions that successfully transfer to four (4) year institutions will increase four-fold; the number of undergraduate degrees awarded annually to minorities in science and engineering will increase to 50,000. Conclusion Achievement of the aforementioned goals will require a substantial increase in the financial and human resources devoted to the enterprise. It will also require appropriate and effective partnerships for engaging the education establishment and various other sectors (e.g., communities, schools, industry, government, foundations, parents, and professional organizations). It is vital to recall that major gains being made in local communities or individual projects are important; however, they do not equal a national enterprise. What is needed is a mechanism to ensure that the enterprise becomes nationwide. If we can effectively conjoin individual experiences, knowledge bases, programs, and resources, the Nation will be afforded a reasonable opportunity to address a complex problem. A lack of resolution to this problem will serve to further decrease the Nation's wealth and thereby constrain the quality of national life for all citizens. We invite you to participate in this multifaceted venture as agents of systemic reform, thereby contributing to the national wealth and quality of life. Workshop Descriptions Workshop 1: Regional Collaborative Ventures 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Louis Dale, University of Alabama, Birmingham Gary Keller, Arizona State University Steven Ritter, University of Texas at El Paso Ernesto Ramirez, Maricopa County Community College District Learn about partnerships and collaborative ventures among regionally affiliated organizations that can have exponential effects on the education and success of minority students and how barriers to success can be alleviated or removed. Workshop 2: New Approaches, New Frontiers: Women in Science and Technology 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. Patricia Campbell, Campbell-Kibler Associates Jane Daniels, Purdue University Ellen Wahl, Girls Inc. Karen Wetterhahn, Dartmouth College Learn about current and new strategies for recruitment and retention of women in science and technology, focusing on the future of "intervention" projects and their structure and incorporation into an institution's infrastructure. Workshop 3: Inclusion of Students with Disabilities in Science and Technology Education and Career Development 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. Ray Bowen, University of Washington George Kerscher, Recording for the Blind, Inc. Lawrence Scadden, National Science Foundation Judith Tamburlin, SUNY — Buffalo Learn how to remove physical and attitudinal barriers to science and mathematics education so that the talents of persons with disabilities are no longer lost to the scientific community. Workshop 4: Alternative Performance Assessment Systems 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. Stephen Klein & Donald Koretz, The RAND Corporation Kathy Comfort, California Assessment Program Learn principles for developing hands-on science assessment tasks and techniques for administering and scoring them for precollege students. Workshop 5: Assessment in Service of Students 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. Susan Agruso, New York State Department of Education Experience alternative assessments in science and learn first hand of the policy issues related to their design and administration at state and local levels. Precollege level. Workshop 6: Interactive Mathematics Project 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. Diane Resek & Teresa Hernandez-Heinz, San Francisco State University In a cooperative learning environment, delve into an activity illustrative of the problem-based secondary mathematics curriculum based on families of problems developed at the IMP project based at San Francisco State University. Workshop 7: Project STAR 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. Phil Sadler, Harvard — Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Using mathematics and science, participants will solve problems in astronomy that illustrate that science and mathematics are ways of making sense of the world. Problems and materials are designed for secondary students. Workshop 8: Insights 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. Karen Worth, Educational Development Center Touch for yourself the hands-on elementary science materials designed to improve urban students' abilities to think critically, use language, and solve problems using the natural world as an experimental base. Workshop 9: MathFinder 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Mark Driscoll, Educational Development Center Learn how to access a vast array of existing mathematics materials referenced to the NCTM mathematics curriculum standards (K–12) via a CD-ROM. Workshop 10: National Science Education Standards 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. and repeated from 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. Kenneth Hoffman & Elizabeth Stage, National Research Council Let your voice be heard! Critique the science standards emerging from the working groups of the National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment. Responses will be forwarded to the working groups for their consideration in the next stage of development. Workshop 11: Interactive Mathematics 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. David Lomen, University of Arizona Deborah Yoklic, Pima Community College Experience the "Battle of Trafalgar" and Pico Fermi Bagels and be shocked by "Startling Statements" as you learn that mathematics at the middle school, secondary school, and first-year college is not just a pencil and paper activity. Workshop 12: AIDS, Interest Rates and Pollution 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. Deborah Hughes Hallett, Harvard University David Smith, Duke University Calculus as you never dreamed – interesting, relevant, realistic, engaging, and challenging questions/problems lead students into developing their knowledge of calculus. Calculators and computers permitted. Workshop 13: Administrators Lead Cultural Change 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Eleanor Baum, The Cooper Union Sadie Bragg, Borough of Manhattan Community College Celestino Fernandez, University of Arizona Laura Hoopes, Occidental College Jack Lohmann, Georgia Tech University George Peterson, National Science Foundation Revitalization of undergraduate education requires a campus culture that values teaching and curriculum development as well as research. Come learn how administrators can create environments in which faculty can focus on improving teaching and learning at the undergraduate level. Workshop 14: No More Lectures! 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. Priscilla Laws, Dickinson College David Sokoloff, University of Oregon Ron Thornton, Tufts University Physics with use of a specially designed computer-based laboratory system allows students to learn physics with real and easily displayed data. Workshop 15: Changing School Perspectives 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. James Ellis, Biological Sciences Curriculum Study Discover how teacher development centers and a collaborative of science educators can break barriers to secondary school science reform. Workshop 16: Putting More Atmosphere in Your Classroom 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. Robert Weinbeck, Joann Mulvany, Fay McCollum & Steve Carlson American Meteorological Society Find out how a national network of master teachers and atmospheric education resource agents has captured student interest in science with atmospheric studies. Workshop 17: Creating Math-rich Worlds in Schools 6:00 – 7:00 p.m. Ann Grady, Boston Public Schools Discover how one school district is empowering its K–8 teachers to create math-rich worlds for their students with a lead teacher program based on the NCTM standards. Workshop 18: Tracing the Development of Children's Thinking About Proof 4:00 – 5:30 p.m. Robert Davis & Carolyn Maher, Rutgers University A Rutgers University project has documented and analyzed the different methods of proof (proof by cases, indirect proof, and mathematical induction) used by children. Workshop 19: Modeling Instruction in High School Physics 5:00 – 6:00 p.m. David Hestenes, Arizona State University An Arizona State University study shows that student-centered instructional activities that are laboratory based, computer assisted, and coupled with an emphasis on models and modeling give high school physics a coherence that is lacking in other approaches. Workshop 20: Science and Technology for Children 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. Doug Lapp, Sally Shuler, and Joyce Weiskopf National Science Resources Center Experience hands-on science instructional materials developed by the National Science Resources Center and learn about the NSRC's Elementary Science Leadership Institutes for leadership teams from school districts across the Nation. Exhibits and Demonstrations 4:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. EXHIBIT HALL Exhibit 1: The State Systemic Initiatives (SSI) Program of NSF Thomas Ubois Statewide Systemic Initiatives (SSI) is the major effort by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to encourage improvements in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education through comprehensive systemic changes in the education systems of the states. Profiles of the twenty-one initiatives will be available. Exhibit 2: Comprehensive Regional Centers for Minorities (CRCM) Ernesto Ramirez Steven Ritter Eric Hamilton Patrick Weasel Head Materials and information on designing and developing systemic approaches to increase access and performance of minority students in science, engineering, and mathematics at the precollege level will be provided by four CRCM projects — Maricopa County Community College District, University of Texas at El Paso, Loyola University of Chicago, and Montana State University. Exhibit 3: Alliances for Minority Participation (AMP) Louis Dale Gary Keller Materials and information on designing and developing systemic approaches to increase the access and performance of minority students in science, engineering, and mathematics at the undergraduate level will be provided by two AMP projects — University of Alabama, Birmingham and Arizona State University. Exhibit 4: TERC Projects in Mathematics and Science Ricardo Nemirovsky Beth Warren Featured at this exhibit by the Technical Education Research Center (TERC) are results of studies of "sense-making" in biology for language minority classrooms and studies of how elementary, high school, and college students develop intuitive concepts about calculus. Exhibit 5: Cognitively Guided Instruction and the Primary School Elizabeth Fennema Mazie Jenkins A University of Wisconsin, Madison project focused on how inservice and preservice teachers use knowledge about children's mathematical thinking in making instructional decisions, and how teachers' cognitions influence their instruction and children's learning. Exhibit 6: PROJECT IMPACT: Increasing the Mathematical Power of All Children and Teachers Patricia Campbell In this University of Maryland project, a model for primary mathematics instruction (K–3) to enhance student understanding and support teacher change in predominantly minority public schools has been developed and evaluated. Exhibit 7 and Demonstration: TENET: A Communications Infrastructure for Reform Connie Stout The Texas Education Network (TENET) has linked practitioners within school campuses, school districts, and across institutional boundaries in support of systemic reform of mathematics and science education. Exhibit 8 and Demonstration: Catalysts for Project Centered Learning Robert Tinker At TERC, a new paradigm for learning and teaching is emerging through projects such as NGS Kids Network supported by a developing telecomputing infrastructure. Exhibit 9 and Demonstration: Creating Teacher Communities John Richards With "Explorer Science Series," a powerful simulation system enabling teachers and students to author their own experiments, and "Explorer," "mail-enabled" software permitting easy classroom-to-classroom sharing, participants will connect via Internet and confer with teachers in San Diego and Boston. Exhibit 10: Brain Teasers Beth Porter A collection of problems and challenges developed by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry can be used in informal science exhibits as well as in classrooms to stimulate interest and develop problem solving skills in mathematics and science. Exhibit 11: MathStart Phyllis Katz On exhibit will be kits of inexpensive manipulative materials designed to engage very young children in activities based upon mathematics. These kits are used in preschool programs, including Head Start. Exhibit 12: ChemCom Rebecca Simmons Materials centered on chemistry-related technological issues confronting society capture student interest in the study of chemistry. Materials are part of ChemCom, the one-year secondary introductory chemistry course. Exhibit 13: Integrated Activities for Technology, Mathematics, and Science Jim LaPorte Based on "design under constraint" principles and developed at Virginia Tech, these materials permit middle school students to create their own solutions to problems involving science, mathematics, and technology. Exhibit 14 and Demonstration: Jasper Series Susan Goldman Video-based materials developed at Vanderbilt University feature Jasper Woodbury whose life-like problem situations give students opportunities to develop problem formulation as well as problem-solving skills in mathematics. Exhibit 15 and Demonstration: Used Numbers Cornelia Tierney Used Numbers, activities developed by TERC, engage elementary school students in data analysis that include counting, comparing, classifying, looking for patterns, finding central tendencies and variation, and predicting trends. Exhibit 16 and Demonstration: Active Learning in Mathematics: Calculus Reform Deborah Hughes Hallett David Smith This will be a complete display of texts, lab manuals, instructor's manual, and student reports from the Harvard University and Duke University calculus reform projects. In addition, there will be a computer presentation of the project's Toolbook. Exhibit 17 and Demonstration: Active Learning In Introductory Physics Priscilla Laws David Sokoloff Ronald Thornton View four 20-minute demonstrations of active learning in physics: (1) analyzing sport and dance movement, 4:00 p.m.; (2) using physics to understand karate feats, 4:30 p.m.; (3) using a motion detector to plot graphs with a computer as you move, 5:00 p.m.; and (4) exploring the sounds around you, 5:30 p.m. Exhibit 18 and Demonstration: Making the Invisible Visible Fred Goldberg Kathleen Fisher In physics and biology courses for prospective elementary teachers at San Diego State University, students construct explicit connections between everyday and laboratory experiences and scientific terminology and symbolic representations. Computer and computer-videodisc programs, including SemNet, used in these courses will be demonstrated. Physics demonstrations are at 4:15 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. Biology demonstrations are at 4:45 p.m., 5:45 p.m., and 6:45 p.m. Exhibit 19: Innovative Freshman Chemistry Angelica Stacy In a course that is centered on environmental issues and based on a discovery approach, students at Berkeley do site-based sampling, analyze samples with modern instrumentation, and analyze data with computer-assisted programs to solve problems and answer questions. Exhibit 20: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics James Clayton Eileen Erickson Peruse the NCTM standards, new standards-based instructional materials for students and teachers, and publications designed for those involved in the preservice and inservice education of teachers of mathematics. Exhibit 21: International Technology Education Association Kendall Starkweather Thomas Hughes This display will feature the ideas of technology education and their links to contemporary mathematics and science education. Thursday Morning Plenary Session "Barriers and Ways Past Them" [What follows is an edited selection taken from the transcript of the panel presentation on Thursday morning.] MS. BARRETT: Good morning. I want to thank you very much for the time and the investment and the effort that you have put into our conference. We realize that we have worked hard and that you, too, have worked hard. You've invested your own resources, your institution's resources, and your valuable time. This morning we want to give you an opportunity to tell us what the appropriate next steps in education reform should be. The title of our conference, Beyond Standards and Goals: Excellence in Science Education K–16, describes our subject. A simpler statement might be: "Where do we go from here?" The statement I like best, and which I think states the problem in its fullest context, is: "How do we find a dynamic model for education in a rapidly changing world?" Let us consider the educational system as a large airplane, and all the players in the educational system are on board. On the airplane is a group of children. They are the children already in the schools. On the airplane are the teachers. They are the teachers already in the schools. On the airplane are the educational leaders—those of you sitting in this room. (We're not talking about how to get someone else to solve problems.) There are also individuals from business, industry, nonprofit organizations, and profit organizations. We are all on the plane together, and we're on the move from 1993 to the year 2000. Two points are important. One is the cast of characters has been defined. The other is that the airplane is in flight. We will have to create a new structure that is more powerful, more effective, and leads to educational excellence while we're in the air and moving ahead. With our panel discussion this morning we will launch the morning session, and in the small groups that follow you will have the opportunity to address the question of what comes next. On our opening panel are four leaders who will reflect on their experiences. First, each will talk about the barriers that they have seen in bringing about real systemic change. Then each will tell us how they have begun to make the changes needed to remove these barriers. While you are listening to the panel, think not so much about the specifics of the panel—but don't ignore them—but think about the issues, the kinds of barriers and the kind of strategy. In particular, consider whether there is an approach or a technique for solution of the particular problem that is a strategy that could be utilized in your case. Let me briefly introduce the panel. Eve Bither is head of the Programs for the Improvement of Practice at the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) at the Department of Education. She formerly served as Commissioner of Education for the State of Maine. She began her career as a high school physics teacher. Ted Sizer is the Chair of the Coalition of Essential Schools. He is the author of two books on Horace's school. He is a professor at Brown University, and he was headmaster at Phillips Andover. Dorothy Strong is the manager of Mathematics Support for the Chicago Public Schools. She is the co-principal investigator of one of the NSF/CRCM centers in Chicago. She has been on the board of NCTM and President of NCSM and has been a member of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board. Ken Hoffman is the Associate Executive Officer for Education of the National Research Council. He is a mathematician and has been a college professor and head of the Mathematics Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. First, Eve Bither. MS. BITHER: All of us here ought to feel really proud of the fact that mathematics and science is leading the way toward systemic reform. Think about systemic reform, including such things as national goals, standards, curriculum frameworks that support the standards, teacher preparation programs that are being planned to support the curriculum frameworks, and then student assessments. There is reason to be positive about everything that is happening. I want to share with you a publication that came out a little more than a year ago which many of us have been thinking about and talking about ever since. It's called Crosstalk: The Public, the Experts, and Competitiveness. It was published by the Public Agenda Foundation and by the Business and Higher Education Forum. It talks about the insights that this group gained through two years of public opinion research and a great number of intensive focus groups in talking to the public about competitiveness, education, and training connections. This group found that there are major gaps in what the public understands about the inter-relatedness of competitiveness and education and training; that the public's mind and its assessment of these issues is startlingly different from that of who they call leaders and experts, people like us in this room. Let me give you a few examples of what they found. They found, for instance, that the public does not consider the trade gap as especially alarming. And if no international crisis is at hand, Americans do not really believe that the trade deficit is a particular threat to them. They immediately blame Japan. They blame foreign investment in the United States. Some blame the fact that we give foreign aid. All condemn cheap foreign labor. And they confirm the need for all of us to buy American. If the public thinks about problems in the workforce, they focus on what the study calls the moral issues and the moral aspects of the issue. They believe, for instance, that attitudes and motivation rather than skills and higher knowledge are what is really important and at the core of the whole problem. They talk about the wrongness of the permissiveness and the lack of standards in our schools, the lack of values, as the most important elements needed to regain our competitiveness. If leaders like us focus on programs and talk about new services needed for better skills, the message often misses the mark. When leaders like us say that more and better programs and services are needed (as we have said here and as I am sure all of us believe), along with better teacher preparation programs, more pay for teachers, professionalism for teachers, the need for more scientists and engineers, and better curricula in our schools, the public, according to the study, turns us out. Instead, one of the focus group participants said: If you have the will, you can get the skills. The will comes before the skills. They also believe that if the will is present, our situation can be turned around very quickly, and that's also very different from what all of us know to be the truth about the need for change to expand over time. There also exists a great gap between the public's belief that what is really needed are basic skills and that most of the attention needs to be placed on K–12 education and our recognition that the skills needed for the 21st century are drastically different from the basic skills of the last 10 or 15 years—all the things that Ray Marshall talked about yesterday. In fact, one of the respondent groups objected very strongly to the use of calculators in mathematics classrooms. And as all of us know, this is one of the hottest and most controversial recommendations of the NCTM standards. They also found that the respondents saw very little connection between advanced skill training for the workforce that is now at work, and saw very little need for advanced training and increased support for undergraduate and graduate education. And I think I'll stop here. MS. BARRETT: Let's move to Dorothy Strong. MS. STRONG: Thank you. I'm going to start off by saying, Eve, that was very nice of you to start with the positive, and I've survived the Chicago holocaust dealing with the positive. But I do still know that the negatives are there, and I think that we have to really look at them with a real eye. For example, you mentioned the standards, but those standards are in our hands and in the hands of the people here. But the people who really need those standards, do they have them? And I think that is a question that we've got to address; that it's nice to have things written. Everybody in this room owns a Bible, but you have to ask the question: How many read it? And until we get the standards at the point where they are really something that people really are able to deal with, we have a problem. Those standards are wonderful, but the question is: How do we get them out? Then the other thing, coming from a public school position, the question that we have to ask of ourselves is: Do we have a master plan? If someone came to us and said you can have all the money you want to do what you want to do, do we know what we would want to do, or would we have to go and get a cup of coffee? And I'm afraid that that's one of the things that we most certainly need to address. Then another thing that I think needs to be addressed is that the instruction that is provided and the students that we try to teach are disjoint sets, because the instruction too often does not take into consideration the student that is to be taught. We need to address that. That needs to be a part of our master plan. Then one of the other interesting things—you talked about the cooperation between the public and us. I think a bigger cooperation problem is the cooperation between us, and that we too often see each other as the enemy. And we are afraid with knowing that collectively we have far more to offer than we have individually. So I most certainly think that that's a problem. And one of the biggest ones that I see is expectations. We say all children can learn, but do we really mean it? Because if we mean it, then we're going to use all of the skills in this room to develop programs that make that happen. But if we're satisfied to teach the students in the 50th to 90th percentile, since we put the others in the 10th to the 50th percentile, then we have decided that those students cannot learn. And until we address that, then we're going to have a problem. And beyond all things, I'll look at the problem that I address: the politics. That is extremely important in urban school districts. As we sit here, in the last two weeks two of the three largest school districts in this country just dismissed superintendents, which means that those school districts are left without leaders. And we know that the next one that they bring in will last, at the most, three years. We cannot wait to get the political act together, because I guess they figure if I cannot last but four years, you might as well not last but three. But we've got to really help them to decide that our agenda has to be their agenda, or it's not going to work. These are the kinds of things that I think that we need to address, and these are issues that I think stand between what we are doing and what we want to do. I'll have more to say. MR. SIZER: Let me mention two barriers. We have not learned well enough from our experience in the 1960's. Some of you in this room—I certainly was involved in my situation at ESI and EDC with Gerald Zacharias and Gerry Bruner and that group at Harvard with Project Physics, with Gerry Holton, Jim Rutherford, Fletcher Watson, with Edma Weiss and SMSG. And there isn't an awful lot left. We should attend to the reasons for that, as scholars such as Seymour Sarasin at Yale has done. Sarasin's work, as you know, points out that education is a synergistic system; schools are synergistic systems. Everything important affects everything else. And if you say we're just going to worry about the curriculum and the rest will kind of follow from that, we will make an awful mistake. And the extent to which the current reform movement ignores the lessons of the 1960's and ignores the synergy involved is the extent to which there is a profound barrier. Today's curriculum reform is called assessment, and we're talking a lot about assessment. And there's nothing wrong with that. Some of the work in assessment is first-class, just as PSSA physics, the Project Physics physics, SMSG and so forth, was enormously interesting. But the extent to which we do not understand the interactions, as Dorothy was talking about, is the extent to which once again we will fail. So one barrier is we don't read history and attend to it. The second barrier is we are still, alas, inattentive to the realities of how we keep school. And in my experience, all at the high school level, we are inattentive to the realities of the high school. How many high school kids can you teach at once and still know each child well enough to know how that child's mind works? If you don't know how his or her mind works, you cannot teach effectively. The answer is not 120 or 150 or 175, which are routine in American schools. Batch processing is the system of education in the schools. And you can have the most wonderful standards and the most wonderful assessments and the most wonderful textbooks and the most wonderfully articulated this and that, and you hand it to a teacher who has to see 130 kids, 40 percent of whom are truant on any given day, and it's a different 40 percent each day. And you won't have anything to show for it, and the assessments will prove once again that poor kids do poorly and rich kids do better. School for most Americans, for the overwhelming majority of secondary school kids, is divided up into things called periods: English, to physics, to French, to home ec, to study hall. Each of these 47 minutes or 52 minutes are effectively about 35 minutes. How many of us do serious intellectual and imaginative work in 35-minute snippets, with the subject changed every hour on the hour? And that is not many of us. That is the way school is, invariably, day after day after day, year after year. It is profoundly inefficient. No serious educating institution copies the way the high school works. No serious educating institution copies the 1890's model in which our forefathers, bless them, used the best understanding of human learning that was available in the 1890's. Now, further compounding it is the fact that these snippets, that physics class, to that math class, to that English class, to that French class, are planned in glorious isolation one from the other; that, God save us, physics teachers do not even talk to math teachers, much less to English teachers. And the standards and the substance and the expectations are completely fractionated. So if you shadow a kid—and I commend shadowing kids regularly in school—and become a kid again for a day, it'll hit you hard, the fragmented, fractionated quality, intellectual quality of the typical school. It's intellectual chaos. Does it make any sense? No, it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense at all. Furthermore, you will be reminded how much school is asked. Every problem that comes along, you add it. Pull out programs, special programs, something on AIDS, something on health, something on the 1980's, a special course on Vietnam. Add, add, add, add—with the result that the system becomes more and more trivial. And the current device of evolving standards in the traditional inside-the-beltway subject matter areas, which accepts the politics of the late 19th and early 20th century, which led to the configurations of organizations like the American Historical Association. I'm a historian. Bless it. But it's too much, and it's too confusing, and it does not talk to one another. And as a result, kids get this confused rule of education. We have to address that. It is not being addressed. Systemic reform is fine, but unless it gets into the innards of schools and fights those fundamental battles of there being too much and it being presented in a fractionated way and it not attending to what we know about how kids learn and about how knowledge can be most powerfully construed, the extent to which the whole thing will lead us is exactly where the 1960's reform led us, which is nowhere. MR. HOFFMAN: I decided to talk about a barrier, what I call the Great Barrier Reef. That means I've switched metaphors from airplanes to ships. Now, the title Great Barrier Reef has seven little numbers after it. Those are the footnotes. It says all that I say is to be interpreted as follows; anything I recommend doing is to be done wisely; and it will take into account all the things that the previous people here said. So I do not think what I'm saying now is all inclusive. The Great Barrier Reef is the following: The ship is sailing along, the ship of reform; what are the characteristics of the Great Barrier Reef? It's invisible. Right? Or at least not easily seen. It lies below the surface, a thing that can easily sink your whole ship, even though it seems to be beautifully built and cruising along wonderfully. The important word for the Great Barrier Reef of education is also a sea word; that is, this reef is made of several C's, not one C, Coral, but it's made of things like communication, cooperation, coordination, synthesis—that's one of my C words. And my favorite word which begins with two C's is called scale. The barrier consists of the fact that we do not have any sense of how to bring about change on a nationwide basis or to begin to address in any large-scale way the kinds of things Ted, for example, was talking about. I can describe what he's saying, which is don't try to fix schools in their present form; find out what works, and call that school. The point is you still have got to figure out how you're going to make change come about on a nationwide basis. I'm not going to say how to do it. I'm going to tell you what the barrier is, again. The barrier is us, the mental models that are inside our heads, the ways we think, the value structures we have. These things are major obstacles to figuring out what to do. We think hierarchically. We do not think cooperatively. We do not know about coordination as distinguished from direction. We don't know how to run our own organizations, much less how to tackle the more difficult problem of how to make webs of organizations working together. I conjecture that in the next decade one of the most important nouns is going to become "web"—not network, web—because, as Peter Drucker points out in his latest book, which was far and away his best, we are becoming rapidly a society of organizations. And the problems he described of the transition to this society are squared in education and in health care and so on because we not only have to figure out how to run organizations, we have to figure out how to get organizations to run together, to cooperate together in web-like ways. Now, if that sounds like mysticism to you, it's because of the models that are inside your head. You see? We all think in terms of hierarchical ways to run everything. And meaning no criticism, you see we think of master plans, instead of scripts for the drama, wherein various people identify what their own role is. There comes to be a common agreement on the script for reform. We have to talk in new metaphors. We have bad models of change. What do we value that gets in our way? We do not value the skills that are required to do the things that need to be done. Most of the people in education reform are educators in one way or another. What do they value? Well, you know what they value. They do not value the marketing political communication skills that are absolutely essential to making reform happen on a nationwide basis. How many school children are there in the United States? Look around this room. Can you imagine 100,000 rooms like this? That's how many school children there are in the United States. Those are the people you have to reach. That's where scaling comes in. We have to think big, think how to weave together the organizations across the country that are going to cooperate. Why? Because we need to build the support structures in the Nation that are going to sustain and cause to happen and sustain change at the local level, which is where everything important happens. I suggest to you that we can get the most wonderful ideas about standards, about what needs to happen at the local level and so on, and our ship can still crack up on this reef, that we haven't even begun to tackle the problems in this water beneath the surface, you see, where we have to learn to deal with large-scale organizational matters that we know not how to do. MS. BARRETT: All right. We've depressed you with thoughts of the big challenges that are ahead. We have talked about the barriers to educational reform, and it's depressing to see how many obstacles there are out there. We have a very strong panel, and they really understand the issues. So we are not going to leave you here because they know how to begin the next steps. Our panel will now tell us what kind of things they have seen happen, that they know are happening, that they are causing to happen that will help us get beyond the barriers they have described. MS. BITHER: In response to the need for the public to be with us—and I really think it is an outstanding need, because no matter how much we can think through some of the issues that everyone here has outlined, how much we think we realize what needs to happen, unless the public supports us, as Governor Romer pointed out yesterday, we really will not be able to make the necessary changes or raise the necessary funds that will be needed to help us to do that. So what we really need is an extended public conversation, the kind of conversation that Ted and Dorothy and Ken talk about, in order to move the reform effort that now is on a small scale to the large scale that's really necessary. The Education Commission of the States two years ago did a survey to find out how many schools in the country considered themselves to be restructuring, and found that it was between 5 and 10 percent of all the schools in the country at that time. And that was by self-assessment, which might have been a little bit too positive, almost. Some states are as high as 25 percent, and those are the states that are really on the leading edge of thinking about systemic reform. So even while we want to congratulate them, how do you get from 25 percent to 100 percent? And I would want to propose to you that the only way we do that is by making our case to the public on a school-by-school, community-by-community basis, to have people alerted and on the bandwagon and supporting those changes. I think that goes for rural communities as much as it goes for urban areas, and we need to provide opportunities, for instance, for people to see and tap into and imitate and learn from the Sizer networks, all the Sizer schools, the Comer schools, the accelerated schools that Hank Levin has, the models of group learning that Slavin talks about. I think all of those efforts need to have more public exposure, more public input, and it depends on all of us to bring that about. MS. BARRETT: Dorothy? MS. STRONG: I'm going to address the things that I identified as barriers. To begin with, I identified a master plan, and I do really seriously feel that that master plan needs to come from or at least be initiated at the level of the school district, with that school district then going out looking for the support that they need to make that happen. Now, will that be the final plan? Absolutely not. But you've got to have something for people to tear up. You can't come in and say to people, "dream," and they don't know what they're dreaming about. So we must begin, which says to them we've given it our best shot, now help us to make it better. So I think that there needs to be that plan. In that area, we've come up with—we have and use the standards to at least revise our systemwide objectives and standards. Now, we still are loaded with that long list that is still too long, but we have matched those standards so that at least when we talk to people, they know what the standards are saying children ought to know and be able to do; and they know what we're saying, and they know what the state is saying, because we use that. And we always identified the source that they came from. I'm a name-dropper, and I'm glad to tell people where things came from, because you have to take the blame or the credit when it comes about. In relationship to that, we've also developed a matrix that talks about what is it we want to happen and how do we expect it to happen. And we then evaluate help in light of how much you can help us to complete what we want to do with this matrix. We also have talked a lot about instruction being culturally relevant. When I say culturally relevant, I'm talking about mathematics right now because we are now moving toward the integration. But in mathematics, we talk about the subject matter for the mathematics coming out of the world of the children, which moves it beyond just being culturally relevant for the African American to being culturally relevant for all students. We've got to also begin to tell the truth. We've got to make things historically, culturally accurate. And we've got to realize that lots of mathematics came from lots of people that we're not admitting, and that we can help people to buy into the equation by letting them know that they had a part in the development of it. The other thing that we talked about was expectations. Until everyone is able to wake up and say that all children can learn mathematics, all children will learn math and science, all teachers can teach it, and all teachers will, then we're not ready to do it. I still say the only teachers that we can't help are those that hate children. Beyond that, we can deal with them, because what they're doing is our fault. And it is our responsibility to change them. I talked about the need for cooperation. We have two models of cooperation that I'm going to share with you, one being the Bob Moses Algebra Project that began with a person who was impatient with us and decided to go out and begin to do it himself. Out of that came the Bob Moses Algebra Project. That project is moving very fast in Chicago because there is a cooperative group that is run by community people. I am on the board, and I work with them. But equally as important in helping them is Paul Salley and other people, and we've now formed a national network, and by forming networks, Paul is now agreeing to become a part of forming collaborations between schools like the University of Chicago and the historically black institutions so that these schools can all support the development of the Algebra Project and the retraining of teachers that needs to happen. And it isn't that the University of Chicago is going to do it over here and the universities in the Delta are going to do it over there. They're going to all work together, and we all are going to benefit by what is going to happen. When we got ready to come to NSF to talk about a proposal, there was not a Bob Moses and two or three people. It was an entourage of about 50 people that included superintendents of schools, people from the Delta, everybody imaginable. Because we wanted to say with our bodies that we really do mean collaboration. The same thing that we have in Chicago is our CRCM model that we called Access 2000. We were just recognized by the Business Higher Education Forum and given the Anderson Medal because of collaboration. We are the only one in the country that has a co-principal investigator who is also with the school system. Eric Hamilton is the principal investigator and I am the co-principal investigator. What is the advantage? When we need data, we're not giving data to somebody else. We're giving data to ourselves. And this is the kind of thing that happens when you bring people into the equation. As we talk about awareness, I love the standards. Got a few problems, but that's all right. I love the standards because they gave me something to begin to say to people that we could raise the standards for all students. Underline all. But as long as they're just on my desk and your desk, they're not standards. They are an academic document. And we've got to move them to standards. So my challenge to NCTM and to NSF is get together and make those available to everybody. MR. SIZER: Let me give some examples of how my friends in a variety of schools around the country are addressing some of the specific barriers which I mentioned; for example, the problem of the snippets of time. There are now schools that have deliberately reduced the daily schedule to two or three blocks of time with teams of teachers—in one school, they call them a science faculty or a humanities faculty—responsible for how that time is deployed in the best interest of the kids, with the breaks taken when everybody gets a little tired. And if you need two hours to work on something, you work on it for two hours. If you need 20 minutes, you work on it for 20 minutes, which is the form follows the function. There is a sharp diminution of the separate subject matters and a deliberate attempt to cast subject matters in terms that make sense, not only epistemologically but, even more importantly, makes sense to children's worlds. And it's here where the mathematics and science community is way ahead of everybody else. The 2061 project is a major step forward for a lot of folks in the schools, because the arguments for the seamless cloth of science, mathematics, and technology are carefully worked out there. And it's that kind of work that allows teachers to move beyond that and to see how one can cast these important ideas and important skills in ways that have the coherence that young minds need. The contrast, for example, between the world of the arts, English, visual art, music, and where science and math are going is dramatic. Great chunks of the curriculum are totally untouched with the kind of imaginative thinking which has been seen and brought to bear in science and math. Second, the schools in our coalition take a solemn oath: no teacher will ever have more than 80 kids. That's the absolute outside. Most of my friends in schools working with low-income kids say I'm crazy, it's 50, no more than 50. All the schools take the further oath they're going to do that without changing the budget. Not that it wouldn't be nice to triple the faculty, but it's not going to happen. And so what they're doing is rethinking their schools, with step number one making it possible for teachers to know their children, and the compromises follow after that, rather than figuring out something else and then dumping 175 kids on the back of each teacher. Well, I know full well just because you have a smaller number of kids doesn't mean that you teach anything. But it's a necessary, if not sufficient, first step, and again, we're seeing around the country, most dramatically in inner city and rural areas, the almost instant positive effect of kids being known by two, three, four adults in a way they've never been known before during their secondary education. And on the question of too many things, that's where the most difficult politics of subtraction is taking place, because some things are more essential than other things. And these gutsy faculties are saying of the 25 things that this school does, there are 14 that count more than the others. And that means that teachers have to shift what they're teaching. There has to be focus. There cannot be serious rigor without the time for serious practice. The current overloaded curriculum makes no time for serious practice. So they're tough decisions, really tough decisions, because they're decisions that mean jobs and the way one teaches and the expectations for kids who like sort of going through the school day listening rather than doing some serious work. And this happened. It's possible to do. Not easy, but it's possible to do. It's being done. To go to my first point, this piecemeal business, there still is very little attention to the very difficult work I'm describing in the inside of the school. There has, in the last two or three years, been a lot of interest in system reform. The first trigger was choice. Chris Whittle added a little bit of sugar to it. But now we're talking about redesigning the whole system, but in most of the discussion, there is an assumption that the school building—that is, where kid, idea, and teacher confront—that's no part of it. There is in very few state plans investment of political protection, money, and time in what it takes to turn a school around, and a lot of attention about how you and I work, not about how folks who aren't here, the line teachers and the kids, are supposed to work. We somehow have to get this together, so that the very serious work that goes on on the third floor of a high school and the very serious work that goes on in the governor's office, state department of education, and the teacher preparation institutions and the arts and sciences faculties, that these things are in synergistic connection—which brings me to my final point. I'm delighted that Ken made the distinction between hierarchical thinking and these webs and networks. With all due respect, I read this morning the statement from NSF and the U.S. Department of Education about its system reform, and it is hierarchical: a small group of wonderfully devoted people who set the standards, and then another set do the assessments, and then there would be a syllabus, and then this would come down, and finally, teachers would be given this, and teacher education institutions would react. I think that way. But I know that Ken is right. I know he's right. I am scared by the notion that higher standards will be necessarily national standards. I'm scared from my experience as historian. We didn't get it right in the 1960's, and we had the smartest people brought to bear in science and math, for example. We didn't get it right. Who's to say we're going to get it right this time? And if we get this hierarchy locked in and articulated the way we're talking, we'll get it wrong up here. Well-intentioned, nice folks like me and you, we'll get it wrong. And the whole thing will drive the system. What we need is something that's more organic—another one of Ken's excellent words—where, in fact, there's this constant tension and movement, which is, of course, not only sensible as a matter of police, it's also the absolutely flesh and blood of a democracy. MR. HOFFMAN: Another good word for change is viral. I say that to biologists, and they get very nervous. Viral is very good in the change process. I wanted to tell you just about two or three things that are going on in the realm of this, what I called the Great Barrier Reef, which isn't that at all. First, a slight story. I learned some years ago, as I moved sort of out of the world of mathematics, that most of the world wasn't like mathematics. One of the features of mathematics as a scientific field is that, unlike most sciences, the people who discover really truly important things in the field do not stay up all night writing up the results, because they know with absolute confidence that no one else in the world is doing that at that precise moment. The field is just infinitely more intellectually diverse than most areas. I hope scientists don't get mad at me for saying that, but it's true. But you don't have to worry about that. You see, when I moved out of mathematics, I learned that the rest of the world is quite the opposite. If you come up any idea that you regard as important about this society or change or anything going on, you can be absolutely confident that thousands of other people are having the same idea at the same time. I remember from Pachelbel's Canon. Pachelbel's Canon has been around for a long time. Nobody ever paid any attention to it. It came upon the cultural side of society like a wave not too many years ago. Did you ever think about that? Actually, Disney had something to do with it, but never mind that. I was always startled by the way that hit. Anyway, ideas surface. So if I bring up the Great Barrier Reef, it's only because I think we're beginning to start to figure out how to get past it or how to avoid cracking up on the Great Barrier Reef. I noted, Ted, that while we're working on the science standards, the thinking is creeping in much more strongly about how does it interact with the standards for other disciplines; how does it fit into schools overall and to integrate with language arts and the math standards and so on; and how do you implement it. These things are coming in much more strongly than was true in the late 1980's, when NCTM was finishing their standards and having to invent the idea. So that's a very encouraging thing. A second thing is that through the vision of Luther Williams, about a year ago the National Science Foundation asked the National Academy of Sciences to explore the quest for the feasibility of setting up a group that would try to start to bring the thinking about a nationwide, systemic, cooperative, collaborative, flat approach to the infrastructure of educational change. And on income tax day, we're going to submit to the Foundation the first report on whether we believe it's feasible for a group to do this. To do what? To devise what the nationwide system needs to look like in the United States in order to support and sustain local change, even if everybody had all the standards. But I think that this fact that Luther asked the Academy to put together a group of distinguished people to look at that is a very interesting sign. The idea is to catalyze the coming together that we've all talked about. In order to do it the right way, though, you have to use very different language than people are accustomed to. You have to say silly things like I was saying about webs of organizations and other ideas. Because if you start looking at it hierarchically, the whole idea collapses very early on. It's filled with all the death traps. But I'm very encouraged, and I cite that to you as one piece of evidence that minds of people are beginning to come to grip with these things. I've also been astonished in the last year—and I'll end on this note—with the strength of the leadership that now continues to emerge out of various fields concerned about education. If I may brag, I might point out the fact that it was just announced a week ago that Hyman Bass, the great mathematician from Columbia, will be the next chairman of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board, something that would have been inconceivable five years ago. Inconceivable. If we had about a thousand more Hyman Basses, I can tell you, who has the capacity for synthesis and understanding all these things we're talking about, we would be a lot farther down the road. MS. BARRETT: I've sat here with a list of questions I had to try to get the panel to talk about important topics, and I haven't looked at one of them. I do want to interject one of them, though, because I think it is an issue that we must address; the turf issue. What I'd like the panel to give us is some practical answers, not about particular divisions or individuals claiming their material, but some practical strategies for dealing with turf issues. MS. STRONG: I wish I knew the person—we need to clone the person who created the Governor Romer who would come in this room and talk about mathematics and science as he did. Because somewhere along the line, someone—there was work done. We can't just assume that he was just created and God said, "Thou shalt"—you know, and it happened. Somewhere along the line, some people have done a lot of talking to him. We need to learn how to do it. As educators, as we talk about forming our collaborations, we need to find out ways to include on our team those people. And we've just got to have lots of them at the very top and willing to sit down and talk with and to come up with solutions and challenge us to do the things that we have to do. MR. HOFFMAN: I wanted to mention one of the things I've found very helpful, the stuff I was talking about was how-to stuff. Rather than what to do, it's really how to get things done. And one of the things I find helpful is to remember one of the little-known quotes of Yogi Berra, which is: "Life is a formative process." MS. BARRETT: Life is what? Say it again? MR. HOFFMAN: Life is a formative process. Report on Thursday Discussion Groups Introduction The National Science Foundation, at its invitational conference Beyond National Standards and Goals: Excellence in Mathematics and Science Education K–16, asked the participants to reflect on their role in educational reform and to offer advice on where future educational reform should go from here. In particular, individuals were asked to reflect on their own role, how it fits into a broader vision, how to develop a vision at the state level, and how to involve others in systemic change. Those in attendance supported the Standards as the foundation for reform activity, acknowledged the necessity of systemic change, and showed a common goal of building—in a systemic way—on the Standards. The difficulty of the task ahead was acknowledged, and the discussions focused on how to make standards-based change. Working in discussion groups with NSF division directors and program officers, the participants reflected on a series of questions. Across the 14 groups, there were a set of themes essentially present throughout all the discussions. What follows are the six themes: 1) The importance of the individual role; 2) The essentialness of linking and webbing; 3) The key role of teachers; 4) The need to evaluate; 5) The need to identify successes and to disseminate these successes; and 6) The need for public understanding and involvement in educational reform. The six themes were addressed in a variety of contexts and from a variety of viewpoints. The sum total of the discussion clearly identified these six areas as crucial to the continuation of educational reform. What follows is a summation of the remarks of the 14 discussion groups (in their language). The Individual Role Participants were aware they had been invited as leaders, both in their own professional activities and in their communities. The advice they offered themselves and others reflects the status they hold. Advice included: •Get personally involved; •Don't be bashful about your own work as a reformer; •Recognize and respect other individuals in the reform effort; •Take time in your own work to link to others; •Provide thoughtful, constructive, candid, informed, and purposeful feedback; •Be willing to make suggestions for change, give reasons that will convince people, and enter into dialogue; •Prepare to change yourself and to learn from others; •Realize that excitement and enthusiasm are contagious; •Utilize your own role to influence the organizations of which you are a member; •Take part in civic activities—run for your local school board; and •Decide when to speak out forcefully and when to be quiet. There was a recognition among the educational leaders in attendance that they have a responsibility for continuing to provide leadership and for making things happen. The importance of other conferences and linking structures was acknowledged by all, and the fact that these kind of links create an energy that propels individual activity is acknowledged. Linking: Networks, Coalitions, and Webs Beyond the individual role, a recurrent theme in all the presentations of the conference, as well as in the break-out session discussions, was the essential nature of the systemic reform that is needed. There was a clear acknowledgement that standards in mathematics and emerging standards in science are providing a foundation for activity. The necessity for change to take place in all aspects of the educational system, and for the activity throughout the system to be coordinated, linked, and webbed, was everywhere acknowledged. Advice was given to: •Link teachers with each other; •Be sure there are links within a school and within a system; •Link arts, science, engineering, and technology faculty with education faculty; •Link the science disciplines (include informal science); and •Create coalitions of teachers, parents, administrators, higher education, state departments of education, business and industry, and informal education. The networks, coalitions, linkages, and webs that are envisioned are seen as a new structure—not bureaucracies. The connections are seen taking place in meetings, in day-to-day activities, and by e-mail and other forms of telecommunications—as ongoing activities, not one-shot deals. Coalitions must be credible, they must be broad and sustainable, and they must involve networks not only of individuals, but also of organizations. State level organizations must communicate with the local level; professional organizations must be tied-in. The type of organization is seen to be one that is flat—not top-down or bottom-up, but an evolving organization that continues to create linkages among disparate parts. In the Thursday morning panel, Ken Hoffman had used the term "web." This descriptor was picked up in the further discussions and is seen as appropriate to describe the type of structure that must be formed. The importance of establishing effective mechanisms for regular communication within that structure was noted, as well as the importance of getting participants together again and again. In order for networks to be successful, the key players must be identified, leadership must be built among key players, and there must be those who see themselves as enthusiastic change agents. Critical collaborations must be identified, encouraged, and facilitated within a large web. Meetings of these critical collaborations must take place independent from the larger structure. Critical collaborations noted were: •Students, teachers, and parents; •Elementary, middle school, and secondary teachers; •Schools with business and industrial leaders; •School and university faculty with working scientists; and •Informal community with the schools. In developing the webs, or the networks, use must be made of existing structures. It was noted there were mathematics and science collaboratives in most states, and NSF-funded Statewide Systemic Initiatives (SSI) in 21 states, with funding for four or five more to be added. Some recurring themes were: •Identify all players; •Find out what is already present; •Establish regular means for communications; •Identify leaders and key components; •Work with existing organizations, create contacts, and involve all the key players; •Promote an environment that encourages interaction; and •Talk to your colleagues in those states where change is occurring to understand why their activities work. In some states the SSI's have helped to eliminate turf problems by bringing people together. In the absence of an SSI, determine how to provide that catalyst: •To help in avoiding turf problems or to resolve turf problems; •To help achieve the willingness of individuals to change their own particular activity so that it will fit into the overall picture; and •To help individuals understand that good activities can be made better, and that good activities that are isolated do not contribute effectively to the overall picture and can, in some cases, harm it. It is important to find a catalyst to bring the individual pieces together and establish a link with those having political clout. But above all, throughout all the linking activities, maximize the involvement of the classroom teachers, for without their understanding of the children in the classroom and of the teaching/learning process, reform cannot take place. It is important to find a mechanism to remove turf problems and to institutionalize changes that are taking place: •Avoid one-shot activities that solve a small, particular problem and do not lead to sustainable change; •Establish realistic expectations—change happens a little bit at a time; •Find creative ways to get around restrictions, regulations, and policies that are hampering activities; and •Once new activities are in place, take the time and trouble to create new, more appropriate policies. It is critical that the structure that forms the linkages—the collaboratives, the web—is a structure that can be maintained, that makes it easier to establish collaborations in the future, and that emphasizes broad concepts and keeps the overall vision in view. These themes appeared again and again in the reports. There was considerable discussion of what was happening in individual states. It was noted that in some states the activity had been top-down with a plan created by leadership at the state level, but made effective, for instance, in the case of the Louisiana SSI, by constant communication with all concerned. In other cases, the reform was seen as working at both the state and local level, with leadership at both levels and the leadership linked. Looking at the many examples, it is clear that the particular form of linkage is dependent on what is already present, what the source of funding is, and what the structure of the state educational system is. There is no general recipe. The Role of Teachers Reform will not happen unless it comes from the teacher. Education takes place in the classroom, and the teacher is the key agent. It is absolutely essential that classroom teachers buy into the changes that are taking place. For that reason, the classroom teachers and individual schools need to "adopt the standards" at the school level. Without the adoption, and in more than a formal way, the standards-based education does not become a reality. Recommendations included: •Set up school-level groups to adopt a structure, an environment, and an attitude that makes change, where needed, happen; •Involve the principals, administrators, and central office; •Treat teachers as professionals; •Reorganize the professional life of the teacher to include comprehensive development, sufficient materials, and opportunities for planning and reflective thought during the day; •Consider the student load of the teacher and provide a load that is in line with the support available to the teacher and the other duties of the teacher; •Allow teachers to use their know-how and share their knowledge; •Include comprehensive, on-going faculty/teacher development; •Realize that change will continue and provide for opportunities on a regular basis for teachers to continue to learn, to link with scientists and mathematicians, and to see themselves as part of a mathematical or scientific professional group; and •Provide copies of the mathematics and science standards, and the needed and related material, to the teacher without cost to them. Particular attention was paid broadly to the role of the elementary teachers. It is important that the elementary teacher's role and language is understood. It was noted that the terminology used in elementary classrooms by elementary teachers differs from the language used in discussing middle and secondary activities. Recommendations included: •Link the elementary teachers with other teachers, but be careful that opportunity is given for real understanding; •Arrange classes and curricula to let the students do science and mathematics; •Link students into science and mathematics beyond the classroom, not only through informal science and museums, but in their day-to-day lives; •Hold classes for parents so they can understand the science being done and so they understand and reinforce what the teacher is doing; and •Create the link between the parent and teacher. Evaluation A theme that occurred in a significant way in several groups, and in a peripheral way in others, is a theme which is of growing importance in the Foundation itself and throughout the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (FCCSET) agencies and in the broader community; namely, the importance of evaluating not only activity that is already present, but also new projects and activities as they take place. Advice given on evaluation included: •Look hard at what is already present to see what can be built on and what can be discarded; •Build a broad base for future activities; •Evaluate to show that the status quo is not an option and to establish the importance of change; •Evaluate what is taking place, or critique it, in order to identify the common elements of a shared vision; •Identify what is changing and what the individual strengths of projects are; •Make an effort to understand all components; •Evaluate to achieve an understanding of why a particular activity is important; •Realize that one size does not fit all, and that one individual or organization cannot do everything; and •Perform a candid appraisal of activities and an identification of opportunities to assess what is taking place, and through the utilization of evaluation of continuing change, the reform effort can be continued with freshness. Programs, Implementation, and Dissemination In the evaluation of the conference, one attender noted that the most important part of the conference for her was that it carried the message "Help is coming." At the conference, 40 exemplary projects were exhibited. In most cases, the Principal Investigator and a teacher were present who had been involved in the project. Help was seen as needed in: •Learning how to utilize exemplary projects in other locations; •Finding successful programs so that one does not have to reinvent the wheel. Reinvention should not take place if it is not necessary; •Going beyond demonstrating specific examples of success; •Adapting and utilizing key ideas; •Acknowledging that change is not uniform, situations are not the same, and successful techniques cannot simply be adopted; •Providing a mechanism to evaluate what makes success, in order to provide the basic information to others; and •Achieving the time to be able to adopt, or adapt, as needed; A suggestion was made that model classrooms need to be either developed, or identified, and publicized broadly. Throughout the small group discussions, there was a plea for electronic innovation in dissemination: bulletin boards on INTERNET, information in data banks that could be down-loaded, information on regional resources, and more information on what the Department of Education has available. There was a call for a base of information so that teachers know immediately where to go and how to find what they need. As part of the break-out groups, and even more clearly in the evaluation of the conference, there was a call for more—a repeat of the national conference with its exhibits, workshops, demonstrations, and opportunities to talk with teachers and Principal Investigators. There was also a call for these conferences on a regional basis where it would be possible for more classroom teachers, and hopefully more superintendents, principals, and school-based people, to attend. New methods, new materials, new ways of doing things, and the presence of new standards in mathematics and science—all these factors make demands on the individual teacher. An opportunity to learn the new things and to experiment with them must be provided. There must be an acknowledgement of the heavy demands on teachers and the need for professional treatment of teachers so that change becomes life-long learning and a life-long expectation. The teacher must be provided with a setting where change is possible, in a measured way, in the classroom. The thoughtful planning and carrying out of opportunities and support for teachers was seen as a vital part of the dissemination process. Public Understanding The fact that what is happening today in classrooms where educational reform is taking place differs from what happens today in more traditional classrooms makes it increasingly important that there be public understanding of the changes that are taking place. Parents need to understand that noisy classrooms, group activity, calculators in the classroom, hands-on science, and the absence of long lists of scientific terms to memorize does not mean that teaching and learning is ineffective. Parents need to understand that future economic health for the Nation and for the individual is tied to a strong background in mathematics, science, and technology. The content of Ray Marshall's keynote speech (the speech is found elsewhere in the proceedings of the conference) related to the change in education called for by the changes in our economy and sharpened the understanding of the need for a change in our educational system. Individuals without children in school, business leaders, and others need to understand the importance of educational reform and that the skills required for today's workforce are different than those of the past. Public information about education reform should: •Use good marketing techniques; •Make materials widely available in a form that can be understood by those outside the educational establishment; •Make information available as early as possible; •Bring information to community interest groups for a part of a day, or for a part of a conference, and bring them to activities that involve education; •Utilize professional associations of non-mathematicians and scientists, individuals in other fields, and community-based groups such as Kiwanis and Rotary in dissemination of information so that leaders in the business community will be informed and share this information; •Utilize shopping malls and other community centers and gathering places for displays, information, and demonstrations; •Use technology as a way to communicate with electronic conferencing, where appropriate; •Involve the media in activities in ways that reflect their limitations and interests, and those of their clients; •Include cable television stations; •Do everything possible to get model classrooms, new teaching techniques, and new approaches to education into television series and other mass media activity: •Include investment of time and effort of the educational establishment to make the state's vision, educational reform efforts, and successful projects known in a variety of settings; •Provide professional support to public relations and public information personnel; •Make certain that key leaders, individuals involved with the state budget process, and school board members are included in public relations activities; •Have key leaders involved both as recipients of information and as conveyors of information; and •Communicate that change is taking place, needs to take place, and will need to continue to take place. Conclusion The six themes that were present throughout the discussions in the small groups re-emphasize themes that appeared elsewhere in the conference. The thesis of the conference, that we are moving beyond educational goals and standards and are ready to move ahead with the necessary steps to implement effective educational reform, was affirmed by the outcome of the small discussion groups. The fact that the six themes (the importance of the individual role, linking and webbing, teachers as key, evaluation, dissemination and implementation of successful projects, and the need for public understanding) were matters that were brought up, emphasized, explicated, expanded, and addressed in a variety of ways—and in almost all of the 14 discussion groups—showed that there is a common understanding of next steps, a common agenda. Reinforcing activity is taking place so that key ingredients are understood and next steps are supported. Most attendees at the conference expressed their willingness to return to their home states and continue their work with increased enthusiasm. The reform activity will be ongoing. A new educational system will not come into place overnight, and once it is defined it will not be static, but an everchanging system. It is important to acknowledge up front that educational reform will be costly and it will not necessarily bring about long-term savings. It will, however, bring about long-term gains in the quality of education and in the economic and personal status of the student. It is important to find ways to translate the vision into adequate and available resources; to find help for resources in building coalitions; and to make small changes as they become possible and not wait for large infusions of money. The next steps will no doubt involve many of the common-sense, thoughtful, reality-based comments made at the conference that clearly reflected the nature of the attendees: leaders who are hard at work on educational reform and realize the tough problem that is being addressed. However, there is real hope, real progress, and tremendous willingness to continue the activity and to further the movement toward spreading educational reform that will provide educational excellence for all students. Advice to NSF In the invitation to the conference, Luther Williams asked that individuals come prepared to advise the Foundation on its role in educational reform. An opportunity was given for all attendees to offer advice to the Foundation on Thursday in the discussion groups, as well as in other sessions throughout the conference. This information has been gathered in an effort to learn what the leaders in the field see as appropriate roles for NSF and what they recommend as appropriate next steps to be taken. Recommendations Concerning the Conference: Participants see the conference as a success in providing an opportunity to continue to build partnerships among local/state/national groups for effective systemic reform and in presentation of successful NSF-supported projects in mathematics and science that are proving useful in systemic reform. The opportunity provided at the conference to develop together effective strategies for accomplishing systemic reform for mathematics and science was seen by many as a good beginning but not sufficient to address this issue. What is now incumbent on NSF is to build on that beginning. At the events of the conference—and especially in the Thursday morning group sessions—specific advice was offered. A widely expressed recommendation is to have more meetings like the conference. There was strong support for regional meetings. The meeting is seen as having provided an opportunity for leaders to get together, share ideas, reinforce each others' ventures, build new networks and linkages, and listen to each other. Hope was expressed that NSF would provide more time to listen to the participants at the next conference. A strong hope was expressed that more teachers—in particular, elementary teachers—could be included so that the participants could learn from them and they could have the opportunities to learn from the conference. Additional NSF Support for Networking Networking is seen as an important aspect of the conference. Support of networking activities by NSF was called for, along with the enhancement of current NSF activities and the creation of new activities. Attention to networks inside schools, and between elementary and other teachers, was mentioned. The effectiveness of the Statewide Systemic Initiatives as an outside catalyst that brought groups beyond turf problems was mentioned, applauded, and asked to have continued. Further guidance in the translation of a vision into a reality through the funding of creative organizational structures was called for. It was noted that the reorganization within NSF, the large teacher coalitions, and the Statewide Systemic Initiatives were the kinds of broad networking building seen as an appropriate, even essential, next step. Materials and Dissemination Considerable attention was paid to the question of good materials and dissemination of standards-based instructional materials. Recommendations related to materials included: assistance in the development of local materials by adaption or adoption of materials developed elsewhere; a chance to visit successful NSF projects; funding for the dissemination of exemplary projects (perhaps some not originally funded by NSF); more on-line information in hyper-text format; and a way to evaluate projects early-on and to leverage their utilization as examples. In terms of material dissemination and even more broadly in terms of all its activities, NSF was encouraged to coordinate its activities with other agencies (especially the Department of Education) and to reinforce the FCCSET process. Public Understanding, Public Relations NSF was called on to build parent and community support into its individual projects; to require projects to inform and involve the public, the school board, and the community; to work hard at utilizing language that could be easily understood outside the educational community; and to avoid jargon and "education-ese." As elsewhere in the conference, a persistent theme was to be sure to involve teachers—to pay attention to them and provide a motivational structure for them. A further recommendation was that all university-based grants that deal with school education have direct involvement of teachers, as change does not come in three to five years but is a slow process, and once it is begun it must be allowed to continue. Operational Comments There were some comments about the operation of NSF. These showed there was minimal understanding of the salary and expenses crunch. The fact that program monies have increased from $220.6 million in FY 1990 to $487.5 in FY 1993 without a significant increase in staff shows that we need to make better understood the "bind" on the Foundation, and we need to move quickly to operating in a more effective fashion—answering telephones, returning messages, and processing grants. The frustration even among knowledgeable leaders with these activities was clear. It was noted that rotators yield new ideas and help to bring the understanding of change into the Foundation, but they yield unevenness, change of emphasis, and some confusion to the field. What appears to be necessary is an articulation of an overall understanding that identifies new directions for EHR which provide a context for change in programs. This was implicit in some of the discussions and provided a hopeful note for the future. There was essentially no quarrel with the statement made in the title of the conference; namely, that we are moving beyond standards and goals to implementation. There was general agreement that systemic change is difficult to understand; that the understanding of systemic change, how to bring it about, and how to move ahead, is difficult—even for the leaders. The necessity for systemic change is not well understood by the public or by many professionals. There remain some who wish that good, small projects were funded rather than large projects that have broad impact. But the majority of the leadership attending the conference seemed to find major systemic projects, and the efforts on the part of the Foundation to leverage wide-scale reform, as appropriate activities. There was strong support for the Statement of Principles for School Reform by the U.S. Department of Education and NSF. Since the conference, there have been requests for multiple copies to be used at regional meetings. One section of the Principles that has been most clearly cited, and seen as important to help to bring about changes within the states, is the section on Teacher Education and Certification. There were concerns expressed as to the style of the statement more than the content. It was seen as wordy, somewhat "jargony," and by some as preachy. There was no disagreement in the basic content, and there was much applause for the fact that the two agencies were working together in a common agenda. The specific advice to NSF concerning its agenda reinforced and restated the themes of the conference. The positive aspect of the discussion and advice is the sense that widespread, systemic, and sustainable change is asked for. A concern is the widespread understanding of the difficulty of the task. National Standards for Mathematics and Science Education: Opening the Door to the Future Kenneth M. Hoffman Associate Executive Officer for Education National Research Council One of my long time friends and colleagues is the great Swedish mathematician, Lennart Carleson, who twenty-five years ago provided me with a metaphor that I have found valuable in my lives both inside and outside mathematics. It was shortly after he had rocketed to fame in his profession by proving a famous, century-old conjecture in mathematics. A brilliant young graduate student at the University of Chicago had found an apparently serious gap in Lennart's complex argument. When asked what he planned to do about this potentially embarrassing situation, Lennart shrugged his shoulders and said casually, "Oh, let him fix it. Once the proof is right, you can't make it wrong." Outside the mathematician's realm of theorems and proofs, I like to paraphrase Carleson by saying, "Once an idea is right, you can't make it wrong." What I mean, of course, is just what Carleson was trying to convey, that occasionally in the process of thinking about a deep and difficult problem there comes a point at which you know with certainty that you have had the important insight, the key idea on which the rest of the solution can be based, even if "the rest" requires further ingenuity and an enormous amount of work. In the last few years, I believe that those of us concerned with nationwide reform of education in the United States have come to understand that the idea of national standards is "right." Or, as Senator Mark Hatfield said recently, "At least in math and science, standards will provide the foundation for reform." This important insight has taken hold in the minds of education, policy, and business leaders in a series of steps, compressed into a remarkably short time span. National Standards: Their Recent Origins The National Science Foundation's February 1993 conference, Beyond National Goals and Standards: Excellence in Mathematics and Science Education K–16, is being held exactly four years after the national education standards idea in its present form came upon the scene. The critical event was the March 1989 publication by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) of its pioneering document, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics. In a timed release exactly 60 days earlier, the stage had been set by the National Research Council's (NRC's) Everybody Counts: A Report to the Nation on the Future of Mathematics Education. This document, developed primarily by the Mathematical Sciences Education Board (MSEB), assessed the state of mathematics education in the United States, charted a course for the future, and described a now broadly supported national strategy for education reform, based on (1) national education goals; (2) national standards in major disciplinary areas; (3) organized and coordinated involvement of all key constituencies; and (4) development of a nationwide support structure to sustain on-going revitalization guided by the standards. NSF's February conference also comes just three years after the announcement by the President and the National Governors' Association of their unprecedented agreement on national education goals; a little more than two years after the acceptance of the national standards concept by these leaders and the National Education Goals Panel, giving rise to its offspring, the National Council on Education Standards and Testing; and about one year after a full battery of curriculum standards efforts in various disciplines was launched with the support of the U.S. Department of Education. National Standards: What Are They? Given the fact that we talk so freely about such ideas today, it seems hard to believe, but as the finishing touches were being put on the NCTM Standards and Everybody Counts in late 1988, there was great apprehension about whether open talk of national goals and standards might set off a sort of educational–political fire storm, raising the specter of national interference with the authority and prerogatives of the states and localities. To appreciate why this didn't happen, and to see why the idea of national standards is now held to be "right," it is important to understand what is meant and what is not meant by "standards" in this context. The mathematics leadership, both nationally and in places like California, which had pioneered with its state mathematics framework, realized several important things: • National standards for curricula should be goals for young people in different age brackets to strive for—demanding but attainable learning goals providing a vision of what we want all of our young people to know and be able to do. • They must not be reducible to a set of minimum competency thresholds. • The standards should help guide states, localities, teachers, and others who select or develop curricula or frameworks, allowing for local variation and adaptation, but providing sufficient consistency from school to school, town to town, and state to state that a change of school or household move does not create educational chaos for the student. • They must not be federal standards; their use by teachers, schools, districts, or states should be voluntary. • The standards should be openly accessible and presented in narrative form with illustrative examples, so as to be readable by those whom they affect and those who will effect their use: students, teachers, administrators, parents, school board members, legislators, etc. • They must not be pronouncements from on high, but should emanate from the teaching profession in the disciplinary area, with strong involvement of disciplinary experts and key constituencies, ultimately seeking nationwide consensus support. The mathematics leadership also knew that it should not stop with just curriculum standards and went on to develop Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics (NCTM, 1991) and assessment standards, now being worked on jointly by NCTM and the MSEB, which had been established by the National Research Council (NRC) in 1985 to serve as a national steering committee for mathematics education reform. Their goal is to have a coherent set of three interrelated standards documents, covering curriculum, teaching, and assessment. The Need for Science Standards Science was also on the move in the last decade. In the early 1980's, the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering (1982), the National Science Board (1983), and other groups called to the country's attention the urgency of strengthening the science and mathematics educations of the Nation's young people, emphasizing that science was something needed by the many, not the few. By the middle of the decade, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) also had underway its ambitious multiyear undertaking called Project 2061, which in 1989 published Science for All Americans, describing school learning outcomes in science appropriate for all students. In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Smithsonian Institution established the National Science Resources Center (NSRC) to develop and promulgate materials and resources for hands-on science in the elementary schools, including its own modules called, Science and Technology for Children. In the late 1980's, the National Science Teachers Association started its Scope, Sequence & Coordination Project in secondary school science, which has recently published its Content Core to guide curriculum developers. By the end of the last decade, numbers of other projects of significance were underway around the country, including state efforts to develop science frameworks, some of them highly successful. As the 1990's began, many science education leaders were asking how to bring all of this together. The pressure to find a way was increased by events referred to earlier: the strong entry of the governors and the President into education and the launching of the National Education Goals Panel and National Council on Education Standards and Testing. National Standards: A Corporate Insight Political leaders were not the only ones to join the education community in communicating that national standards were needed. In late 1988, I was lucky enough to be present at a luncheon meeting that involved Mr. Richard Heckert, former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of DuPont. Dr. Robert White, President of the National Academy of Engineering, opened the discussion by asking Heckert what he thought he had learned from all his years of supporting school education activities at DuPont. I was so startled by the brilliance of his extemporaneous response that I wrote down what he said: "If we expect to mount a successful effort to reform mathematics and science education in this country, we must have consensus agreement on three things: • what kids ought to know about math and science; • how it should be presented to them; and • how we're going to measure the results." In the language used in the education world today, Heckert was saying that we must have national standards for curriculum, teaching, and assessment, all backed by nationwide consensus support. National Science Standards: A Concerted Effort Begins In the spring of 1991, the President of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), acting on the basis of a unanimous vote of the NSTA Board, wrote to Dr. Frank Press, Chairman of the National Research Council (NRC), asking the NRC to convene and coordinate a process that would lead to national science education standards, K–12. This request was seconded by the presidents of several leading science and science education associations, as well as the U.S. Secretary of Education, the Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources at NSF, and the Co-Chairs of the National Education Goals Panel. The NRC leadership was anxious to help, but still exercised caution, because they would be entering the rightful domain of the teaching profession, and they were well aware of the complexity of the undertaking needed. This complexity derives from the fact that science in U.S. schools is a considerably more heterogeneous field than is mathematics, in part because several strong subdisciplines are involved and in part because an organized K–12 curriculum is wanting. Traditionally, science has had a weak presence in elementary school, a stronger presence in higher grades, but with rather sharp separations by the subdisciplines of biology, chemistry, and physics, typically taught in one-year courses taken by 100%, 50%, and 20% of high school students, respectively. In recent decades, the earth and atmospheric sciences have grown to be a stronger part of this mix. Bringing the subdisciplinary faculties together and linking them to the elementary teachers, who are the gatekeepers of what all young people must study, has always seemed a daunting task. Yet in 1991 there was a recognized urgency to doing this, in order to move the science reform effort ahead in parallel with the mathematics effort and to help science gain the full curricular presence that is called for today, if our young people are to be prepared for life and work in an increasingly knowledge-based, technology-intensive society. After extensive discussions with leaders in science education and science teaching organizations, the NRC took up the challenge. The Science Standards Effort: Getting Organized On September 16, 1991, just ten weeks after the NSTA letter had reached Dr. Frank Press, Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander announced the award to the NRC of a grant to support start-up activities. Over the fall, the NRC developed a general design and time plan for the project, and Dr. James Ebert, Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences, was designated as Chair of a National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment (NCSESA), to oversee both development of science education standards and a nationwide critique and consensus process. Its goal was to see publication of curriculum, teaching, and assessment standards before the end of 1994. As 1992 began, a Chair's Advisory Committee was formed, consisting of representatives of the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Association of Physics Teachers, American Chemical Society, Council of State Science Supervisors, Earth Science Education Coalition, and the National Association of Biology Teachers, to assist in planning the project and to help steer it throughout its lifetime. This group participated directly in a process lasting through the spring to identify and recruit Co-Directors of the staff and 89 volunteers to serve on the 36-member oversight committee (NCSESA) and its three working groups, dealing with curriculum standards, teaching standards, and assessment standards. Starting to Work In truth, work on the intellectual substance of the standards had begun early because of the determination to build on the work of major reform initiatives, such as NSTA Scope Sequence and Coordination, AAAS Project 2061, and NSRC Science and Technology for Children. Staff of NRC's Coordinating Council for Education (CCE) were assigned to produce Science Framework Summaries, based on the work of these projects, as well as state science frameworks, and science standards from other countries. The resulting compendium was made available to the working groups and the national committee when they started. The National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment (NCSESA) first met in May 1992, and—following organizational meetings that same month—the three working groups each had intense working sessions in the summer of 1992. Out of the spring and summer efforts came the plan and structure for the National Science Education Standards Project. One of the early decisions was to go for an integrated volume containing curriculum, teaching, and assessment standards displayed in mutually reinforcing ways. The decision was also made to take the critique & consensus process very seriously, not only putting out regular updates on the project but also frequently issuing drafts suitable for intense critique by subject matter experts, teachers, and others. Using feedback from drafts released in October and December 1992 and February 1993, plus further intense work on the curriculum standards, it is planned to have available by June of 1993 a fairly complete draft of the curriculum standards, to be critiqued by tens of thousands of scientists, science educators, engineers, and others over the summer of 1993. The next page describes the task that the working groups, the national committee, and the critique & consensus team have set for themselves to complete before the end of 1994. National Science Education Standards: A Project of the National Research Council National Science Education Standards, developed through a nationwide development, critique, and consensus-building initiative involving teachers, scientists, and other educators—together with parents, policy makers, and a broad base of interested citizens—will provide the qualitative criteria and framework for judging science curricula, teaching, and assessment. They will: •define the understanding of science that all students, without regard to background, future aspirations, or prior interest in science, should develop; •present criteria for judging science education programs and content including learning goals, design features, assessment characteristics, and support for teachers, including resources needed to meet the learning goals; •include all natural sciences and their relationships to technology, society, and other school subjects, acknowledging the interdependence of the science disciplines and the natural science connections with mathematics, technology, social science, and history; •include standards for K–4, 5–8, and 9–12 spans of learning as well as the preparation and continuing professional development of teachers; •propose a long-term vision for science education—some elements of which can be incorporated immediately in places, others of which will require substantial changes in the structure, roles, organization, and context of school learning; •provide criteria for judging models, benchmarks, curricula, and learning experiences developed under SS&C or 2061 guidelines, or under state frameworks, or local district, school, or teacher designed initiative; and •provide criteria for judging teaching, the provision of opportunities to learn valued science (including such resources as instructional materials and assessment methods) and science education programs at all levels. Financial Support Start-up activities and development of science curriculum standards are being supported by the U.S. Department of Education. Funds for development of science teaching and assessment standards are being provided by the National Science Foundation. The critique & consensus process is being supported by a coalition of federal agencies, led by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Beyond National Standards We are at a watershed in U.S. mathematics and science education. The 1980's were characterized by (1) greatly increased grassroots activity and a growing desire on the part of mathematicians, scientists, engineers, business leaders, and others to become involved; and (2) the simultaneous beginnings of large scale policy and planning efforts aimed at bringing some order to all of the involvement, most especially the strong entry of the Nation's governors into education, and the unprecedented development of national goals, standards, and strategies. The work on standard-setting is far from complete, but national education standards in mathematics are moving to their third and last stage, and the very real prospect exists of having such standards in science before the end of 1994. It is therefore a good time to try to look ahead and ask what the 1990's may bring, or, as the title of this NSF conference suggests, to anticipate what may lie beyond national standards. Navigation The first thing to be clear about is that national standards are not the end of reform, they are the beginning of a new phenomenon in U.S. education: coordinated, nationwide reform. They provide the shared vision of where we are going educationally; that is, the consensus agreement on what we want to see our students, teachers, and schools achieve. They provide criteria for the development of curricula and assessments and for development and selection of the varieties of associated materials. They point up purposeful directions for education research. They help countless organizations set priorities in choosing education activities to undertake. They are the constant reminders of what we as a nation are aspiring to—accessible to and readable by all who are willing to invest a little time, energy, and effort. In short, they are the navigational or guidance system of reform. Motivation All six national education goals set by the President and the Nation's governors bear on the future of mathematics and science education, most especially Goal Number 4, which calls for making the mathematics and science achievement of U.S. students the best in the world by the year 2000. In using the goal to help drive reform, it is important not to take too literally the somewhat ambitious target year 2000 or quantitative results from international comparisons that use assessment instruments hammered out through a series of compromises among culturally and educationally diverse countries. I like to think that what the President and governors expected us to latch onto is the spirit of this goal: to make U.S. mathematics and science education the best in the world, and do it as rapidly as possible. I also believe that we must not focus too much on the competitive aspect of the goal. It was useful in 1989 as a "grabber," because people's minds could relate it so easily to economic competitiveness. But, now that we are moving into the real business of education reform, I believe we would be better guided by something more inner-directed that I call national education Goal Number 4A: By the year 2005, have mathematics and science education programs aligned with national standards in every school in the nation, and put in place a nationwide infrastructure to sustain on-going revitalization. I offer this amended Goal Number 4 in the spirit of TQM—total quality management—which teaches us that effective businesses or organizations are ones that focus less directly on competitors and more directly on setting their own internal goals and mobilizing their organizations fully in pursuit of these goals. It seems to me that this principle applies equally well to effective reform movements. In mathematics and science education the clearly defined internal goals are the emerging national standards. In the 1990's, we need to concentrate less on comparing ourselves with others and more on comparing ourselves with our own standards. In this way, the standards will become the first component of an operational national strategy for reforming mathematics and science education. Monitoring A second high priority for the 1990's is also suggested by TQM: development of effective means of monitoring nationwide progress toward the goals, i.e., toward alignment with the standards. This will be a complex and sizable undertaking, leading to a system quite different in character than the means we use today to monitor educational progress. A large number of indicators will need to be tracked, in addition to student achievement scores that we rely on so heavily on today. Efforts to design such a system are just getting under way. Unification The National Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and other organizations are working to draw mathematics and science closer to one another and eventually to other disciplines—utilizing common networks and structures to support reform and hoping eventually to see partial interweaving of curricula in the schools. Another kind of unification that is needed, and needed soon, is the bringing together of the discipline-based reform efforts I have been discussing here with what is generally referred to as the restructuring movement. Led by national organizations such as the National Governors' Association, the Education Commission of the States, the Business Roundtable, and the National Alliance of Business, and by national projects such as the Coalition for Essential Schools, Re Learning, and the Alliance for Restructuring Schools, this movement is concerned with the general systemic reform of schools and schooling. The mathematics and science education reform effort needs the restructuring movement, as the means to effect change in such areas as governance, the structure of the school day, accountability, etc. Conversely, the restructuring groups need the mathematics and science standards in order to put the focus for general reform on the one area that all of the major parties would agree is key: student outcomes. Actions need to be accelerated to strongly bond the two reform efforts, to form some of us call the standards-based systemic reform movement. Mobilization That leaves the crucial question for the 1990's: How is the needed mobilization to occur? Some people would say that it is already happening, looking at all the grassroots activity started in the last decade and continuing in the 1990's. They might also point to effective impressive work done at the state level. At the national level, through the efforts of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board (MSEB) working with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and other organizations, the mathematics reform movement has had the character of a mobilization, linking the actions of major constituencies to standards-based reform. The current science standards effort is being conducted in such a way as to link major constituencies to standards critique and consensus, and then to use the structures and patterns of cooperation established for subsequent implementation efforts. The Committee on Education and Human Resources (CEHR) of the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology (FCCSET) has made remarkable progress at drawing federal agencies together around a common strategy—a strategy based primarily on national standards, by the way. It has also given rise to a memorandum of understanding between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education that is unprecedented and bodes well for future effective action in mathematics and science education. But these are only the beginnings of the mobilization that will be needed. The scales of involvement and impact of current reform activities can be measured in hundreds of thousands of people. But there are millions of teachers and tens of millions of students. Thus the whole reform effort must be scaled up by one to two orders of magnitude—a factor of 10 to 100. The critical question is: How is this to happen? A powerful device for mobilizing the varied players in pursuit of the vision represented by the standards is just coming on the scene. It grows out of the following question, which is enough to buckle the knees of the boldest and most energetic of education reformers: Suppose that the mathematics and science standards are completed and gotten into the hands of all of the Nation's teachers, and suppose that they are read and understood. How on earth are the teachers supposed to make all of the changes the standards call for—dramatic changes in curriculum, teaching methods, and assessment? The question is premised on the opinion of experienced hands in the education business, that the current infrastructure for supporting local change cannot come close to providing the amount of help and support that teachers are going to need to fully align programs with the standards. About a year ago, Dr. Luther S. Williams, Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation, asked the National Research Council (NRC) to take the first step in attempting to answer the fundamental question just posed. The task: to determine the merit and feasibility of a multi-year effort to do two things: • Identify the critical forms of help that teachers, schools, students, and others will need if they are to modify mathematics and science programs so as to align them with national standards; and • Design the nationwide system of support structures needed to provide these varied forms of help and sustain on-going revitalization. Through a committee known as NESSTS—National Education Support System for Teachers and Schools—the NRC is working on the merit and feasibility questions and will report to NSF in April 1993. Dr. Williams has stated that, after reviewing the report, the Foundation will decide whether the "design" task should be undertaken and, if so, by whom. Prognostication Speaking purely as an individual, I would like to end with a summary prediction regarding what lies ahead. It is an upbeat forecast, intended to stimulate discussion: The 1990's will be characterized by (1) widespread acceptance of the idea that in mathematics and science education national standards are the guidance system of education reform and can form the foundation for a national strategy (1990–93); (2) coalescence around this strategy by the major national and state players, who are already moving in that direction and showing a remarkable willingness to let down the turf barriers and cooperate with one another (1992–94); (3) agreement among these major players on a design and funding mechanism for development of a nationwide infrastructure to support the strategy (1993–95); and finally (4) launching the fully mobilized reform effort that will involve the really important players, those at the local level, and successfully impact schools and school districts all over the country (1995–96). Our goal should be to make these things happen, and on the timetable indicated. If we do, the final five years of the century will be the most exciting in the history of U.S. education. Choosing The Path: Needed Steps on the Road to Reform in Mathematics Education Mary Montgomery Lindquist, President National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [This paper does not necessarily represent the views of the Council.] The Road to Reform in Mathematics Education: How Far Have We Traveled? (NCTM 1992) indicates that teachers are aware of the existence of the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM 1989). The Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics (NCTM 1991) do not enjoy the level of awareness that its companion document does. This may be due to the time that each has been available, the greater effort to make people aware of the first document, or the difference in the nature of the two documents. It is also evident that policy makers are generally aware of the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards. One only has to read any recent research on students' learning of mathematics, educationally related policies, or funding agencies calls for proposals. It is less clear the status of awareness of the Professional Standards. Although the NCTM Standards (both documents) have lead the movement to develop national standards in other fields, the implementation of these standards requires a deep understanding of the implications of fulfilling the vision. In this regard, we are just beginning. There was no intention in this paper of specifying a comprehensive plan for moving beyond the creation of goals and standards. For example, there is no mention of research other than that done in the monitoring projects that must continue. Likewise, there is little emphasis on curriculum development. Both of these areas are of utmost importance and must be continued and enhanced. Instead, this paper focuses on only five areas (MAPPS): Monitoring, Assessment, Professional development, Public awareness, and School reform. Immediate and new actions are needed in each of these areas to take the NCTM Standards from the slogan stage to the position of providing the recommended mathematical experiences for every student in the United States. Some of the current efforts of NCTM are briefly summarized while others are listed on the attached handout, and suggestions of some needed steps are mentioned. Monitoring The greatest detriment to present and future reform efforts could be failing to monitor the present reform in mathematics education. If we do not know what is working and, more importantly, the conditions under which change is being made successfully, then we have no models to share with those that are making change nor any history to guide future ventures. From the conception of the Standards, the Research Advisory Committee (RAC) of NCTM has recommended the need for monitoring. "Recognizing and Recording Reform in Mathematics" (R3M), a project funded by the Exxon Educational Foundation and headed by Joan Ferrini-Mundy, is the first of NCTM's efforts. An initial planning grant from Exxon allowed for the collection of data that is reported in the Road to Reform document. Similar information is to be gathered this year as part of a study conducted by the Horizon Research, Inc. The main part of the R3M project, however, is to develop useful and deep descriptions of schools where significant change in mathematics teaching and learning is occurring. Schools have been selected for initial visits and the process of gathering data has begun. The study designed to continue for five years has presently only received funding for the first two years. Another proposal initiated by the RAC, "Monitoring the Effects of the Standards: Research on Reform in School Mathematics," has now been submitted for funding. The project, directed by Douglas McLeod and Judith Sowder, is designed to coordinate, analyze, synthesize, and disseminate research. The Center for Research in Mathematics and Science Education (CRMSE) at San Diego State University will work with other monitoring projects such as R3M and Secada and Byrd's project on reform of mathematics teaching at the school level, supported by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement and the National Center for Research in Mathematical Sciences Education. Although this proposal was originated by NCTM, it is acknowledged that an independent but cooperative group as CRMSE would provide the neutral role needed for monitoring. The following are some of the next steps that need to be taken: •Secure funding for each of the monitoring projects described above. •Design a system that would assist in the automatic flow of any future monitoring efforts (NAEP results, studies such as the NSF project that studied the effects of testing, etc.) to a central source. The McLeod and Sowder proposal, if funded, is designed to synthesize and disseminate all efforts. •Reconceptualize present dissemination efforts on the status of education. For example, the results of the monitoring efforts could inform such documents as the annual report card. •Build on the knowledge gained from monitoring such as from the R3M project to institute model schools and classrooms. •Use information from the monitoring projects to revise the NCTM Standards. Assessment The Board of NCTM has approved the revision and extension of the evaluation portion of the Standards to create Assessment Standards. This effort will be one of the major projects of the Council during the next two years incorporating what has been learned since the writing of these standards almost five years ago. For example, the Mathematical Sciences Education Board has had a study committee working for two years on defining issues related to assessment. NCTM will work with MSEB using their past efforts on the assessment front and their expertise in building consensus as they did for the previous standards documents. This is the main effort that NCTM will take in the assessment area. There is much other work needed in this area, but some small steps will smooth the path to change: •Assist textbook publishers with in-class assessment; they have requested a working seminar on alternative forms of assessment. •Encourage standardized test publishers in their efforts to align their tests with the Standards in a more timely manner. •Educate the public on alternate ways of assessing and the reporting of results. The recent publication, Measuring Up (NCR), is a sample of possibilities, but there needs to be a major awareness of the positive changes that appropriate assessments can encourage. Professional Development Changing curriculum is an easier task than changing teacher practice. There have been reforms based on the premise that changing curriculum would change teacher practice; this is not the case in this reform movement. We have come to realize that all facets deserve attention and we must move on all fronts. Teachers are the key to change and thus our main attention must be on professional development. NCTM has several task forces, as well as standing committees, addressing this area. In particular, the Advisory Committee for Professional Development and Status is revising the guidelines for folio review for NCATE to reflect the NCTM Standards. A task force is planning a major project to increase the awareness of the Teaching Standards in a comparable way to what Leading Mathematics into the Twenty-First Century did for the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards. The project will move beyond awareness to include ways of helping teachers implement the Teaching Standards. Another task force is designing a plan to make the evaluation of teaching standards usable for a variety of audiences—supervisors of student teachers, principals, and teachers themselves. This is an area in which we must all join forces and change initial teacher preparation and continued professional development. The Standards call for cooperative efforts among schools of education, mathematics departments, and schools. Another task force is examining ways to bring together classroom teachers and mathematicians to examine teaching and learning research. Although there is much to be done in this area, I would like to suggest one step that must be taken. The mathematics teacher educators must have the opportunity to renew their knowledge and commitment. We have many educators teaching the mathematics methods' courses who have had no opportunity for professional development. We have neglected this group for too long. Many of them are leaders in research, curriculum development, and professional organizations, but too few have a forum to discuss their own role at the collegiate level. We have not provided resources or leadership in coalescing this group into the powerful force it could be. Public Awareness Until assuming the presidency of NCTM and talking with many reporters, I did not realize the seriousness of negative perception about mathematics and mathematics teachers. We will not make any changes until we change the belief structures of the public about mathematics. This will take a two-front assault—one from the outside and one from the inside. As part of the outside assault, NCTM will mount a massive public awareness program as part of the celebration of our 75th year in 1994–95. One of MSEB's greatest strengths has been in the public arena, and we would continue to work with them on their many efforts. We are presently working with the Public Broadcast Service on several projects that could assist in this effort as it will in the professional development area. Other mathematics professional organizations also have public awareness on their agenda, but it is an area that would be helpful to have more dialogue and a common assault. We must also approach the problem from within. We cannot make believers of the changing role of mathematics and the need for every one to be mathematically literate unless we change the experiences that students have from pre-school through graduate school. This, of course, ties to the steps needed in professional development. Some initial steps that we could take on the outside front: •Sponsor a conference for reporters on the "joys and importance" of mathematics today. Have accessible experiences of what it means to know mathematics, examples of how technology has changed mathematics, and students' thinking. • Showcase our teachers who do believe and make a diverse population of students believe that every student can and must learn mathematics. In many ways the Presidential Awards program has begun to do this, but mainly the showcasing has been done within the professions and not to the public in general. School Reform The Teaching Standards call for a professional teacher who is supported to make the necessary changes and provided an environment that is conducive to these changes. There are many that say we should begin with the larger picture of school reform; my sense is that we cannot wait and that there are steps to be taken now that can help move the overall school reform. There is ample research to make a strong case for the need to provide time for teachers. This includes time to plan; to reflect; to interact with other professionals; to work with students in new and different ways; to learn new mathematics, methods, and materials; to take part in professional activities; and to be a person! If we could find a way to lever more time for teachers coupled with the support—financial, educational, and psychological—that they need, then the rest of the recommendations in this paper, I feel, would fall into place. In summary, this paper has provided a quick glimpse into some of the next steps that the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics is taking and some that should be taken. It did not cover all steps or describe in detail those steps mentioned. Hopefully, this conference will shape, refocus, and assist in making the needed steps clear and possible. Science Frameworks and the National Standards Building on the Past—A View to the Future Maureen Shiflett Director, Education West National Research Council As the development of National Standards for Science Education and Assessment proceeds, questions about their impact on the states have arisen. About 40 states have existing documents that are variously curriculum frameworks, desired student outcomes in science, or required or recommended science curricula. Obviously, the science educators in the states that have existing documents are concerned that the National Standards for science will render their documents obsolete. Moreover, about 25 states are in various stages of development and writing science frameworks or desired outcomes for students. Several of the states that have received National Science Foundation State Systemic Initiative grants are, as part of their project, developing or revising state science frameworks. These states, too, are concerned that their process be in line with the National Standards effort. This paper will explore some of those concerns by discussing the purposes of a science framework and by reviewing how the existing state science frameworks have been used in the development of the National Standards. What is a science framework? A science framework outlines the essential elements of science education. It provides the philosophical backdrop as well as the vital information necessary for designing curricula, choosing instructional materials, and constructing assessment vehicles. The framework gives the architectural plan to a curriculum, while the local curriculum developers add the mortar and bricks detail. The framework should be broad enough to allow for many curricular models, but at the same time, specific enough to encourage a consistency of science education. A science framework empowers educators. It makes a statement that science is an important, valued, and essential element of the curriculum of K–12 education. Teachers can use a framework as a guide to their own training as well as to their classroom practices. Administrators can use it as a lever for financial and other support. Instructional materials developers can use it as a guide to the expectations of a state or nation. College and university faculty can design teacher preparation and in-service programs that will meet the criteria of the framework. It is a rallying point that will allow for some consistency of science education, but still give local flexibility in how the guidelines will be utilized. The Science Framework Landscape The National Standards for Science Education and Assessment are not being written in a vacuum. The extant state science frameworks, national projects, and international curricula have been serving and will continue to serve as resource material. Some of the salient points contained in these documents are discussed below. This is not to say that all of these items will be incorporated into the National Standards for Science Education and Assessment, but rather, these are examples of the commonalities that will influence the development of the National Standards. Five examples have been chosen: Science for all, "Less is More," "Themes," Attitudes, and Process Skills. These and other topics from the available frameworks have already been the stimulus for discussions within the Working Groups of the National Standards for Science Education and Assessment project and will undoubtedly continue to be part of the basis upon which the writing will proceed. One national effort, Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), has been influential in the development of other national documents such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Science Framework for 1994 Assessment and the National Science Teachers Association's Scope, Sequence and Coordination (SS&C) Content Core (1). Moreover, most state science frameworks written since 1989 have also relied on the tenets of the Project 2061 document Science for All Americans (2). Slogans such as "science for all" and "less is more" have become rallying points that grew out of Science for All Americans. "Science for all" encompasses many ideals. Scientific literacy has become a major goal expressed in most recently-written science frameworks. According to Science for All Americans, "What the future holds in store for individual human beings, the nation, and the world depends largely on the wisdom with which humans use science and technology. But that, in turn, depends on the character, distribution, and effectiveness of the education that people receive." (2, p. 12) The need for a scientifically literate populace is seen as the impetus for reform of science education. Part and parcel of this aspect is equal access for all students to excellent science education. The state science frameworks have begun to specifically address the equity issue. Some, e.g., California (3), actually give detailed guidelines on how to provide for the historically underrepresented and the limited-English-proficient students. "Less is more" (or "depth vs. breadth" or "fewer things taught better") is based on less emphasis on isolated facts and vocabulary with a concomitant increased emphasis on learning science by doing science and increased emphasis on the fundamental principles of science. Development of higher order thinking skills and the use of concepts provides students, and the adults into which they develop, with the skills and the framework needed for lifelong learning. In other words, teaching and learning science in the same way that science is practiced leads to a greater understanding of the connections that make the facts and theories of science manageable and useful. One way of making those connections is by the pedagogical tool of "themes," which are recurring ideas that provide a conceptual context for facts and phenomena. According to the California Science Framework, "Themes are necessary in the teaching of science because they are necessary in the doing of science. A scholar does not merely collect facts and categorize them. Facts are useful only when tied to the larger theoretical questions of the natural world—how it works and how its parts fit together." (3, p 27). Many variations occur within the available documents on how to use themes or organizing concepts and which themes or organizing concepts to use. Table 1 gives examples gleaned from the various sources. The message which pervades is that making connections within disciplines and between disciplines will be the key for enabling all students to learn science. Most of the state science frameworks and national projects concur that there are certain attitudes or "habits of mind" that should be fostered by science education. While the wording varies, there is a general consensus about the important attitudes that are fostered by a creative science education program. A scientifically literate citizen should exhibit curiosity and be inquisitive about nature; should long to know and understand the natural world. Open-mindedness and a willingness to accept ambiguity are other attributes of scientific literacy; there is an understanding that there is no one "scientific method," but a recognition of the importance of verifiable data, testable hypotheses, and the predictability of science. A scientifically literate citizen is an informed skeptic and understands that science is an important way of thinking about experience, but not the only way. There is a recognition of the interaction of science, technology, and society. Ideally the informed citizen has a positive attitude about science and science's relevance to the individual, society, and the environment. He or she feels at home with the ideas of science and technology and values science in daily life. There is a respect for the ethics of science and recognition of the ethical implications of applying scientific knowledge. Table 1 THEMES/ORGANIZING CONCEPTS Project 2061 Other Documents Systems Models Constancy Patterns of Change Evolution Scale Systems and Interaction Fundamental Units Models and Theories Stability Equilibrium and Homeostasis Variations Cause and Effect Diversity Change and Conservation Evolution and Equilibrium Cycles Time and Scale Organization (Orderliness) Structure and Function Energy and Matter Probability and Prediction Patterns and Symmetry The last example of common elements in the science frameworks is stress on the importance of the development of the process skills of science in science education. There is some variation in the types, numbers, and description of those skills, but they generally fall into the following categories: •Observing: taking readings, gathering information •Exploring, investigating, and experimenting: planning and carrying out experiments, using materials and instruments, setting up controls •Hypothesizing, predicting, inferring: reasoning, rationally and creatively thinking, forming questions •Measuring: using the tools of science, using metric units, converting units, using numbers to describe measurement, properties and relationships •Classifying and sorting •Recording: keeping a notebook, storing and retrieving computer information •Reporting: Communicating, constructing and using tables, graphs, and charts, interpreting results • Decision making and valuing: using experiences with science and technology in personal decision making. The tables in Attachment 1 give the reader an example of the comparisons of the various frameworks that have been made available to the groups responsible for developing the National Standards. The comparison tables include, not only the topics mentioned above, but treatment of the science subject matter, technology and related disciplines. Summaries of an international curriculum [Great Britain (4)], a national project [Science for All Americans (2)], and two state science frameworks [Arizona (5) and California (3)] are given. Just as the National Standards are building on the past, states will be able to use the National Standards to guide the development and revision of their own state science frameworks. The standards have the potential to empower the science education community to achieve the goal of science for every citizen. Useful, high-reaching science frameworks exist in several states; development of National Standards for Science Education and Assessment may encourage more states to follow suit. REFERENCES 1. Scope, Sequence and Coordination of Secondary School Science. Volume I. The Content Core. National Science Teachers Association. Washington, D.C., 1992. 2. Science for All Americans. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Washington, D.C., 1989. 3. Science Framework for California Public Schools. California Department of Education. Sacramento, CA, 1990. 4. Science in the National Curriculum. Department of Education and Science and the Welsh Office, Great Britain, 1989. 5. Arizona Science Essential Skills. Arizona Department of Education. Phoenix, AZ, 1990. ATTACHMENT 1 The Role of Faculty from the Scientific Disciplines in the Preparation of Mathematics and Science Teachers William Haver and Herbert Levitan Introduction Faculty from the scientific disciplines can play an extremely important role in the current efforts to improve K–12 mathematics and science education. Arguably, college faculty can make the most meaningful contribution through the opportunities we provide in our own undergraduate courses. This paper summarizes some of the most common activities college faculty are involved in that impact K–12 education; calls attention to the major additional needs and challenges that face college faculty in this respect; summarizes some of the activities that NSF supports that are directed toward improving the future corps of teachers; and describes the intent and scope of a recent NSF-supported workshop, which explored the role of faculty from the scientific disciplines in the preparation of mathematics and science teachers and ways to enhance the education of prospective teachers, while also serving to improve learning by all students. Current Faculty Activities In recent years mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from college and university academic departments have been paying increasing attention to K–12 education. This development parallels the general public concern regarding the need for improved student performance in mathematics and science. Signs of this interest are widespread and encouraging. Large numbers of scientists are working directly with talented secondary school students through the NSF-supported Young Scholars program. Many are spending time in regular classrooms bringing their talent and enthusiasm directly to students. Others are engaged in providing retraining and enhancement for elementary and secondary school teachers with support from various NSF programs and the Eisenhower programs from the Department of Education. University and college-based mathematicians from every state in the Nation are working hard to make the political changes necessary for improved mathematics education by providing leadership for the various statewide Mathematics Coalitions. Under the auspices of the National Research Council, and with NSF support, faculty are participating in developing new Standards for K–12 Science. These efforts are extremely important and for multiple reasons the number of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers engaged in these activities must be greatly increased. The Needs and Challenge However, an important area where we in the disciplinary departments in colleges and universities can make a very significant impact in K–12 education is through opportunities we provide in our own classrooms. The authors of this paper have been involved in activities to improve K–12 education and definitely do not underestimate their importance and necessity. However, in many ways those activities are both easier to accomplish and less central to our primary responsibilities. It is easier to tell people at a different institution and in a different segment of education what they should do. Changing the courses we teach, encouraging our colleagues to reconsider their teaching, and challenging the reward structures of our own institutions is much more difficult. Improving the quality and changing the nature of college-level instruction is a key ingredient to changing the nature and quality of instruction in K–12. Many of our Nation's leaders will have their final formal exposure to mathematics and science in colleges and universities. Many of the parents of future students will finalize their attitudes about science and mathematics during their time as undergraduates, and their views and feelings about mathematics and science will be passed on to their children. Most significantly, the knowledge and world view of science and mathematics of future teachers is formed at the college level. Future elementary school teachers need positive experiences with mathematics through which they themselves experience the relevance and power of mathematics. They need to gain an understanding of science by actively being engaged in the scientific enterprise instead of passively hearing about science as members of lecture classes. Individuals who are preparing to teach science, mathematics, or technology at the secondary level also need greatly improved undergraduate programs. The commonly stated adage remains true: How teachers will teach is greatly influenced by the way that they are taught. Therefore the greatest contributions that we as college and university faculty members can make to improve K–12 education is to improve the mathematics and science experiences of our undergraduates. Faculty in the Education schools have extremely important contributions to make in providing many portions of the appropriate preparation of future teachers. However, in the efforts which enable prospective teachers to gain an understanding of and an attitude toward the disciplines, the major responsibility rests with faculty from the sciences. NSF-Supported Activities Improving the future teacher corps of the Nation's schools is the principal thrust of the teacher preparation initiative in the Division of Undergraduate Education. The strategy for achieving broad impact is to optimize the use of both small and large scale projects that explicitly engage the Nation's college and university science and mathematics faculties in the production of the next generation of K–12 science and mathematics teachers. On a large scale, the "Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation" program supports coalitions of institutions in cooperative, long-term efforts to increase substantially the quality and number of science and mathematics teachers and supervisors, especially members of underrepresented groups. As described in the Division of Undergraduate Education's Program Announcement (NSF 92-135), collaboratives typically involve a consortium of participants from both within and outside the primary institution. Leadership of faculty members in science, mathematics, and engineering, working with education faculty, is essential. Participating institutions may include comprehensive and research universities, two- and four-year colleges, community organizations, and the private sector. It is expected that in the next few years several Collaboratives will be initiated with NSF support of $500,00 to $1,000,000 per year for up to five years. Most projects, however, are relatively small scale and are designed to support the development of innovative, cost-effective, high-quality efforts that incorporate key elements of the pre-service science and mathematics education of future teachers. These projects are incorporated into the Division of Undergraduate Education's programs for Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement, Undergraduate Course and Curriculum Development, and Undergraduate Faculty Enhancement. These programs have a major impact on science education at the undergraduate level. During the past six years more than 4,000 teams of faculty have undertaken curriculum development activities with the support of Instrumentation and Course and Curriculum Development awards. This past summer, more than 3,500 faculty participated in short courses and workshops to help them improve and update their undergraduate courses. This fall, it is estimated that more than 4,000 undergraduate students are enrolled in calculus courses that, with support from the Curriculum program, have been significantly revised to involve more group learning, more open-ended and extended problems, more applications from other disciplines, and the appropriate use of technology. Interesting and promising approaches have also been developed in the sciences. For example, an introductory physics course has been developed that replaces traditional lectures and laboratory exercises with physical phenomena enhanced by the use of microcomputers for data collection and problem solving. The work of these and other projects will be shared and discussed at the February NSF Conference. The Recent Workshop Another thrust of the Foundation's activities to engage faculty from the disciplines in the preparation of teachers was a Workshop held in November of 1992 to discuss the nature of the role of the disciplinary faculty in this enterprise. A full Proceedings of the Workshop will be available in the Spring of 1993. While the Workshop participants did not attempt to proscribe the exact experience that prospective teachers should have, they did agree on the general tenor of the desired experiences. The major point of agreement was that undergraduate courses taken by all students, and future teachers in particular, must be much more student oriented. The specific goals of the Workshop were to provide a forum for science, engineering, and mathematics faculty to share ideas and experiences concerning effective ways of improving the undergraduate education of science and mathematics teachers; to encourage faculty in science disciplines to share responsibility with Education School faculty in addressing the needs of students considering careers in teaching; and to promote wider discussion of the issues of why and how faculty from the science disciplines should be involved in the undergraduate education of future teachers. A major objective of the Workshop was to provide opportunities for faculty to share examples of the kinds of experiences that can be employed in disciplinary courses that would enhance student understanding and learning of the subject, but also would encourage undergraduates to consider careers in teaching and better prepare them for such responsibilities. While a growing number of college and university faculty are becoming interested and involved in K–12 education in various ways, a great many science, mathematics, and engineering faculty remain primarily interested in their discipline subject matter and committed to preparing undergraduates for research and professional careers in industry or academia, i.e., to enable their students to become just like them. An important perspective of the workshop was that by attending to the needs and requirements of the future teachers among their undergraduates students the faculty will enable all students to gain a broader and deeper appreciation and mastery of the subject matter—whatever the students' career aspirations. This perspective is justified by experiences that almost all faculty shared when they began their own academic careers. Most of us will acknowledge that we really began to master the subject matter of our discipline when we began to teach. Yet, in spite of the willingness to acknowledge the validity of this experience concerning the utility and empowerment of teaching, many faculty in the disciplines do not provide comparable experiences and opportunities for their undergraduate students. In considering topics that could be viewed as being of particular use to prospective teachers but would also serve to improve learning by all students, workshop participants focused on the following: assessment and evaluation, research on teaching and learning, the diversity among the students, and innovative instruction. Elaboration of Major Themes of Workshop Assessment: Assessment of student learning, which is often viewed as the sole prerogative and responsibility of the faculty, is also an important skill for future teachers to master. Yet, because the process of deciding what to assess and how to assess requires a broad and deep understanding of the subject matter, engaging all students in the process could serve everyone's objectives. Workshop participants were charged to consider: What different types of assessment devices and mechanisms are available? How can assessment be structured so that the assessment experience becomes a learning experience as well? How can assessments be structured to enhance learning, more accurately reflect a student's understanding, and lower students' anxiety? How can preparation of assessment devices by students be used to enhance the learning experience? Diversity: Students in any course have diverse backgrounds and experiences that profoundly influence the way they learn. By acknowledging this diversity and learning how to utilize it, faculty can empower students to pursue their career goals in ways that call upon the students' strengths. Workshop participants shared their perspectives on how faculty in the disciplines can enhance student learning by appreciating diversity as a resource rather than a diversion. Such a perspective can serve future teachers as models for use in classroom teaching at any level. Workshop participants were charged to consider: How can the different aspirations of students in a class, such as those intending to major in the discipline, those majoring in other science and mathematics disciplines, non-scientists, as well as those aspiring to careers in teaching, be turned into an opportunity for a positive learning experience? What is the impact of: different learning, studying, and communication styles; different types of personality in the process of identifying problems and suggesting creative solutions; varying racial, ethnic, cultural, and class backgrounds; and differences in experience, age, gender, and physical abilities? Can these differences be acknowledged and utilized in classes with very large numbers of students? Research on Learning: Although research exists on how students learn science and mathematics, faculty in the disciplines are for the most part unaware of this research and its relevance and potential to inform their own teaching of undergraduates. Moreover, faculty in the disciplines, in general, do not participate in such research, or engage their students in thinking about how people learn. The objectives of this panel were to share some key results of research on how students learn science and mathematics, consider its implications for teaching undergraduates, provide a basis for faculty in the disciplines to acknowledge such research as a legitimate scholarly activity, and consider ways that faculty can participate in such research. Faculty often describe current basic research hoping to interest students to consider careers in their discipline. Similarly, faculty who share with students an interest in exploring how students could learn better might give students an appreciation of the dynamic nature of teaching, encourage students to pursue teaching as a profession, and contribute to the development of new ways of facilitating learning by others. Workshop participants were charged to consider: How can undergraduate faculty in the disciplines be made aware of research on learning? How can faculty in the disciplines incorporate such research into their courses both to improve learning by all students with diverse career objectives, as well as to accommodate the interests of future teachers? How might prospective teachers be engaged in research on teaching and learning, in a way and for the same reasons, that research experiences for undergraduates in the disciplines is considered valuable and desirable experience both for enhancing learning of the subject and to inform career decisions? Instructional Innovation: The most common mode of undergraduate instruction is the lecture. Most disciplinary faculty are not involved in developing and experimenting with modes of instruction that acknowledge that students may learn in a variety of ways or that take advantage of newly developed technologies. Workshop participants experienced a variety of innovative approaches that are alternatives to teaching through lecture. They were charged with considering questions such as: How can faculty be encouraged to exhibit comfortably, and in the classroom as role models, their own dual mixture of scientific training, instinct, and ignorance? How can instructional curricula that purport to "tell it like it is" also encourage a sense of discovery, uncertainty, paradox, and mystery? That is, can disciplinary faculty be encouraged to take risks and explore innovative pedagogy that could enhance learning of subject matter, while demonstrating to prospective teachers the potential dynamic nature of teaching and pedagogy? How can we encourage instructors to discuss, with their students, their strategies for teaching various concepts or techniques? Examples include collaborative and cooperative learning, methods of engaging students in large classes, the uses of writing by students, peer teaching, the appropriate use of instructional technology, and other means of promoting active, experiential learning. Creating such learning experiences for the majority of our Nation's prospective teachers will be no easy task. Even more daunting is the task of providing the majority of undergraduate students with such experiences. However, we believe that the currently growing interest of college and university mathematicians and scientists in K–12 education can be exploited to help bring about these changes. As more and more faculty become interested in K–12 education and publicly state the importance of this activity, we believe that they are putting themselves in a position where they must support reformation of education in their own schools. In addition, the task at any individual school is not impossible. Teaching undergraduates is, after all, an extremely enjoyable experience; with the agreement in the scientific community concerning the importance of K–12 education, those who commit to doing the necessary work at the undergraduate level will have at least the tacit support of their peers. In addition, once the determination has been made to take seriously the future teachers in our midst, a wonderful apprenticeship opportunity becomes available. Upper-level students who are majoring in the disciplines and who are also prospective teachers make strong and committed colleagues for improving undergraduate education. As we prepare individuals to become our colleagues as mathematics and science teachers we also have eager partners in helping our lower-level courses be more student oriented. Reward Structure No discussion of the involvement of faculty from the disciplines in the preparation of teachers is complete without a discussion of the faculty award system. Indeed, major recommendations of each of the disciplinary groups at the NSF workshop focused on this issue. State higher education organizations, boards of visitors of universities, the national press, as well as large numbers of university Presidents are calling for such changes. We agree that formal award structures should be modified. However, there is no need to wait. Given the deep concern of so many scientists with K–12 education, faculty from the disciplines interested in changing the mathematical and scientific experiences of future teachers can begin immediately to invest time in this work. [Bill Haver is a Professor of Mathematics at Virginia Commonwealth of Virginia who is currently a part-time program officer in the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE). Herb Levitan, a neuroscientist, is section head for Undergraduate Course and Curriculum Development in DUE and is on leave from his position as Professor of Zoology at the University of Maryland, College Park. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors.] Overcoming Barriers to Systemic Change: Developing a Comprehensive Reform Plan Frank Newman, President Education Commission of the States There is widespread agreement among policy makers, researchers, and educators that our entire education system must be redesigned so that all students acquire a much higher level of literacy. Throughout the 1980's and into the 1990's, we have seen an unprecedented amount of reform legislation, strong reform leadership from numerous governors, an explosion of business–education partnerships, a booming business in new curriculum, assessment and instructional materials, and the appearance of dozens of school reform and restructuring networks. Talk about reform, restructuring, and fundamental change is at an all-time high. Yet, much of this reform activity has been piecemeal, frequently short term and without widespread impact on student learning and the system that supports learning. But, we know what is needed. In recent years, researchers have provided us with new ideas about effective teaching and learning. Our own experience with the Re:Learning effort1 and other initiatives at the Education Commission of the States has convinced us that state education systems must be redesigned from the statehouse down to the school to produce students who meet performance outcomes, such as those described in the NCTM Curriculum and Evaluation Standards and the upcoming NRC's Science Education Standards. We know much more about how students learn. Passive lectures must be replaced by active learning where students construct meaning. To drive the desired outcomes, assessments must require students to integrate knowledge and demonstrate mastery. Teachers must take on new roles such as mentoring and use new strategies to help students reach desired outcomes. Decisions must be moved closer to the classroom. And so on. We know what to do. If we know so much about effective teaching and learning, why haven't we designed state education systems to support it? We asked this question of state-level policy makers, ECS Commissioners, "restructurers," and educators in several states. What we heard was a surprisingly uniform set of barriers to changing the system. The identified barriers were: 1) There isn't a critical mass of people in states who understand what systemic change is and what it means for redesigning the education system. 2) There is no unified, turfless, or widely shared vision for education in a state. This can be seen in states as multiple visions (e.g., the legislature, state board, and governor's office may have separate visions), no clear understanding or concrete examples of what an effective system would look like, and lack of support for a performance- or outcomes-based system built on the best research on how students learn. 3) The policy-making process is fragmented and piecemeal and leads to incoherence rather than whole system change. Policy making, slowed by single-issue bargaining and partisan bickering, all too often has been incremental and reactive—more likely to support the status quo than to make fundamental change. Because there isn't a unifying vision, policies are not aligned. Rarely is there a mechanism to link policy-making bodies at the state level, and more rarely, the state and local level. 4) Systemic change is complex, enormous, and politically difficult to manage. The immensity of changing a system is daunting. People become intimidated, lose hope for creating change, and give up. Managing the complexity requires skills of facilitation, negotiation, cooperation, and collaboration—skills frequently not taught in schools. Politically, it requires leadership and non-partisanship. Adults don't always act in the best interests of children when issues such as turf, personal loss, protection of the status quo, and self-preservation are involved. Finally, the revolving-door phenomena associated with our political system supports quick fixes rather than long-term solutions. 5) The public doesn't support systemic change because they don't see the need for change. First, people think their local schools are doing a good job2. Second, they don't see the need for (or support) a curriculum different than the one they experienced in school. Policy makers need a communications strategy to convince the public that change is needed and that students need a much higher level of mathematical and scientific literacy in an increasingly technological world. Parents and community members, as voters and school board members, must support educational change for it to happen. Although these barriers to systemic change are real and exist in many states, they are not insurmountable. Working closely with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, National Governors' Association, the U.S. Department of Education, and Governor John McKernan, Jr., 1991–92 ECS Chairman, we have identified what reforms are needed, what types of policies will support them, and what strategies will bring them about. We believe every state should develop a comprehensive plan for systemic change. The development of the plan should involve key stakeholders—policy makers, educators, business leaders, community members, students, and parents—representatives of the whole system. There are three critical components of a comprehensive plan: (1) create a vision, (2) develop and link policies, and (3) lay out strategies for implementation.3 1) Create a Vision Systemic change begins with a clear sense of what students should know and be able to do when they leave school. It springs from compelling images of what better schools and education systems are like (e.g., different teaching styles, a variety of assessments, support for innovation) and from intense community discussions about how to get there and what the costs will be if we don't. It must encompass new, higher standards for everyone in the system. What should teachers do to help students succeed? What is the role of administrators and school boards? 2) Develop and Link Policies Systemic change requires integrating policies that support creative learning environments. Such policies should: •Create new standards for what students should know and be able to do. These standards should emphasize higher-order learning and be shared by everyone involved, from community members to state policy leaders. •Develop frameworks and guidelines to link curriculum to new standards. Expectations for what students should know and be able to do should cross subject areas and support active learning, not passive memorization, and critical thinking. •Develop assessments that are tied to the new standards and reinforce the curriculum. Assessment efforts should measure the knowledge and skills called for and include a variety of approaches, including exhibitions, portfolios, and other forms of performance assessment. •Create environments that allow and support reform. Regulations that inhibit or prevent reform should be waived until policies are reshaped. Incentives should encourage schools and districts to restructure and be innovative. Schools should have the latitude to make critical decisions about hiring, allocation of resources, modes of instruction, scheduling, and other such issues. •Hold schools and districts accountable for results. Success should be measured by student performance/outcomes rather than number of days spent in class or compliance with regulations. Assessment results should be public, and schools that consistently fail to improve student achievement should receive both sanctions and extensive assistance. •Transform professional development. Professional development efforts should include helping teachers and principals understand the demands of restructuring and improve their ability to teach in new ways to new standards. Teacher education should ensure that newly graduated teachers can be part of the change process. The teacher certification process, too, should reflect new, higher expectations and standards with alternative routes to certification considered. •Involve the public. Parents and business/public coalitions should be involved in every aspect of education system reform. Parents should be welcomed into schools as part of decision-making teams. •Engage higher education's participation. Undergraduate education, including admissions standards, should reflect higher expectations for students in grades K–12 and for prospective teachers. Colleges and universities should work as partners with schools to support restructuring. •Reshape education finance. Finance decisions should focus on the needs of students, not the maintenance of organizations, and should be made in light of the dual goals of equity and improved performance. Financial incentives should support innovation and collaboration among schools and colleges. •Provide incentives for health, social, and youth service agencies to work with schools and with one another. Social agencies can help parents with prenatal care and parenting skills to ensure that children arrive at school healthy and ready to learn. Quality preschool opportunities also benefit young children. •Restructure the state education agency. People working in the state department of education should be engaged in the work of redesigning their roles and responsibilities in a restructured system. 3) Lay out strategies for implementation and enlist groups to carry them out. •Build business/community coalitions to provide continuity through changes of leadership, maintain fidelity to the vision, and serve as a sounding board for integrating new ideas. •Create a communications strategy to explain the need for reform, stimulate broad public debate of the options, and keep the public part of the reform process. •Review existing policies to see which hurt and which help reform efforts and make appropriate policy adjustments. •Establish benchmarks for the progress of reform and then track your progress. Elements of a systemic approach to school change are emerging. The President, 50 governors, and numerous leaders in education have set national goals and called for higher standards. States such as California, Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont have begun the process of developing new visions of a better education system. States such as Kentucky, Oregon, and South Carolina have begun bold policy efforts to bring about comprehensive change in how they educate their students. Colorado, Maine, and Michigan are among states that have established broad public/private coalitions to coordinate reform efforts, showcase innovation, and lead the public debate about new, higher standards. But no state has yet put all the elements together. We have the tools and information we need to create a new, dynamic education system. Now it is time to take the best ideas and reforms educators have to offer and put them together in an education system that can deliver on the promise of reform. BIBLIOGRAPHY Education Commission of the States. 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Lyle Cook Louisiana State Univ. -Shreveport Lloyd Cooke LMVC Associates Alicia Coro U.S. Department of Education Sammie W. Cosper Louisiana Board of Regents John Coulson Eisenhower National Program Raymond M. Coveney, Jr. University of Missouri-Kansas City David P. Crandall Northeast Regional Laboratory Phillip D. Creighton Salisbury State University Linda Creque Government of the Virgin Islands Hilda Crespo ASPIRA Assoc. David L. Crippens KCET TV Dagmar R. Cronn University of Maine Doris M. Crudup U.S. Department of Education Eisenhower State Program Robert P. Cullen North Carolina Science & Mathematics Alliance Chris Cullis Case Western Reserve University Francena Cummings EL DOE, SERVE Trudy B. Cunningham Bucknell University Brian Curry ASCD Glen W. Cutlip National Education Association Louis Dale University of Alabama at Birmingham June M. Danaher Maryland State Department of Education Rosalie A. Dance D.C. Public Schools Jane Daniels Purdue University Phil Daro University of California Phillip Daro University of California Kerry Davidson Louisiana Systemic Initiatives Program (LaSIP) Leodis Davis Academic Affairs Lois A. Davis U.S. Department of Agriculture Phillip H. Davis University of Tennessee at Martin Rick Davis U.S. Department of Education Robert Davis Rutgers University Spencer Davis School District of Philadelphia Santos de los Maricopa County Community College Melanie C. Dean Univ. of California, San Diego Doris B. DeBoe Elizabeth H. DeBra Office of Educational Research and Improvement JoAnn E. DeMaria Fairfax County Public Schools Costel Denson University of Delaware Edward D. Dill Southwestern Oklahoma State University Gloria A. Dobbins District of Columbia Public Schools Stephen A. Doblin University of Southern Mississippi Clarence J. Dockweiler Texas A&M University Alice W. Dollar Knox County Schools Joan Donahue Mathematical Sciences Education Board James A. Donaldson Howard University Herman K. Doswald Virginia Tech Claudia B. Douglass Central Michigan University Floyd L. Downs Arizona Mathematics Coalition Mark Driscoll Educational Development Center Linda Dritsas Fresno Unified School District Marvin Druger Syracuse University Dorothy W. Drummond Indiana State University Paula Duckett D.C. Public Schools Joan E. Duea University of No. Iowa Mary S. Duru D.C. Public Schools Russell R. Dutcher Southern Illinois University at Carbondale J. Graeme M. Duthie University of Alabama in Huntsville Pat Dyer Eisenhower Curriculum Framework Project William Earl Utah State Office of Education Larry L. Earvin Clark Atlanta University F. Donald Eckelmann Ohio University Irene A. Eckstrand National Institutes of Health Sally C. Edgerton-Bell Baltimore City Schools John Egermeier Eisenhower National Program Steve G. Ehrmann Annenberg/CPB Projects Terry L. Eidell Appalachia Education Laboratory, Inc. Rey Elizondo The University of Texas at El Paso James D. Ellis Biological Sciences Curriculum Study Monica A. Ellis Indian Creek Elementary Roslyn R. Elms University of Northern Colorado Eileen Ericksen National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Allan C. Eustis WRC-TV Richard E. Ewing Texas A&M University Joseph Exline Virginia Department of Education Patsy J. Fagan Drake University Ava L. Fajen Coordinating Board for Higher Education Daniel Fallon Texas A&M University Florence D. Fasanelli Mathematical Association of America Edward M. Felegy Prince George's County Public Schools Elizabeth Fennema University of Wisconsin Sharyn E. Fenwick Evan R. Ferguson Sigma Xi The Scientific Research Society Celestino Fernandez University of Arizona Mary B. Finch New Mexico Systemic Initiative Math/Science Education James H. Finkelstein George Mason University Allan G. Fischer North Dakota State University Kathleen Fisher San Diego State University Robert M. Fitch SC Johnson Wax Patrick W. 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Pierotti Georgia Institute of Technology William A. Pirkle Univ. of South Carolina -Aiken Loren D. Pitt University of Virginia Rita Platti Gordon Plishker Sam Houston State University Bob Polkinghorn University of California Mattye Pollard-Cole Colorado Department of Education Steven K. Pontius Radford University James L. Powell The Franklin Institute Harold A. Pratt National Research Council Blanche L. Premo-Hopkins University of South Carolina-Aiken Fernand J. Prevost New Hampshire State Department of Education Leslie Prewitt Courtesy Associates Patricia P. Price New York State Education Department Dean B. Priest Harding University Jeffrey M. Priest Ruth Patrick Science Education Center David J. Prior Northern Arizona University Barbara Pryor Office of Senator John D. Rockefeller IV Thomas L. Purdy Rutgers University James L. Pyle Ball State University John C. Raich Colorado State University Ernesto Ramirez Maricopa County Community College District Robert R. Rath Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Pradosh K. Ray Tuskegee University Kenneth R. Rebman CSU Hayward Susanne M. Reeder Buffalo Public Schools Thomas M. Regan University of Maryland Diane Resek San Francisco State University James R. Retherford Louisiana State University John Richards Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Inc. Earl S. Richardson Morgan State University Chester R. Richmond Oak Ridge National Laboratory Mary Kay Rickles Britannica Marketing Companies Stephen Riter University of Texas at El Paso Scott P. Roberts The Annenberg/CPB Math & Science Project Steffen H. Rogers University of Rhode Island Roy Romer Governor of Colorado David P. Roselle University of Delaware Linda P. Rosen Mathematical Sciences Education Board Carla B. Rosenberg Oklahoma State University Joseph G. Rosenstein New Jersey Mathematics Coalition Judith W. Rosenthal Kean College of New Jersey Ronald C. Rosier CBMS Michael Ross OGRI/NCGS William G. Roughead Georgia Department of Education Wimberly C. Royster Kentucky Science and Technology Council Margaret A. Roytek General Motors Corporation Peter A. Rubba, Jr. Penn State Marlene Rushay Ohio Board of Regents George A. Russell University of Missouri Tom Ryerson Minnesota Department of Education Judith S. Sachwald Maryland Science Center Phil Sadler Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Roy H. Saigo Southeastern Louisiana University Tomas E. Salazar New Mexico Highlands University J. Robert Sampson Illinois State Board of Education David A. Sanchez Los Alamos National Laboratory Linda R. Sanders Christopher Newport University Lawrence Scadden National Science Foundation Alden Schacher Office of U.S. Rep. Dave McCurdy Sally Schuler National Science Resource Center Brian B. Schwartz The American Physical Society M. Mark Schwartz U.S. Department of Education Juanita S. Scott Benedict College Susan J. Seaman Bonner County School District Jack A. Seilheimer University of Southern Colorado Robin L. Sellen Mesa Elementary School Robert J. Semper The Exploratorium Ann Serratore Connecticut State Department of Education Candadai Seshachari Weber State University Charles M. Severin State University of New York at Buffalo Elaine Seymour University of Colorado Roy L. Shafer COSI, Ohio's Center of Science of Industry Robert H. Shapiro U.S. Naval Academy Karen Sharp American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges Terry J. Shaw Irving Middle School Maureen Shiflett National Academy of Sciences & Engineering Ray C. Shiflett Associated Western Universities Cal Poly Pomona Rick Short American Psychological Association Martha J. Siegel Maryland Mathematics Coalition Ronald J. Simanovich Pennsylvania Department of Education Rebecca Simmons American Chemical Society Charles W. Simms St. Louis Public School District Mary L. Sivertsen U.S. Department of Education Theodore Sizer Brown University Theodore Sizer Brown University Claibourne Smith Du Pont Company David Smith Duke University Ronald E. Smith Northeast Louisiana University Jesse O. Snowden Southeast Missouri State University David Sokoloff University of Oregon Jimmy L. Solomon Mississippi State University Andrew A. Sorensen University of Florida Jeanne S. Spawn Park Elementary School Mark Spencer Utah System of Higher Education Charles D. Spielberger University of South Florida Angelica Stacy University of California at Berkeley Julie C. Stafford Cray Academy Elizabeth Stage NRC/Coordinating Council for Education Charles B. Stalford Eisenhower National Program Virginia Lyn Stallings-Roberts The American University Kendall Starkweather International Technology Education Association John R. Staver Kansas State University James B. Stedman Congressional Research Service Lynn A. Steen Mathematical Sciences Education Board Sharon M. Stenglein Minnesota Department of Education Nicholas J. Sterling Binghamton University Joyce Stern Eisenhower National Program Andrew Sterrett Mathematical Association of America Donald M. Stewart College Board James H. Stith American Association of Physics Teachers Trish Stoddart University of Utah Connie Stout Texas Education Agency Harrison W. Straley Woodberry Forest School Arnold A. Strassenburg SUNY - Stony Brook Dorothy Strong Chicago Public Schools Dorothy Strong Chicago Public Schools Judith A. Strong Moorhead State University Malcolm Sturchio Fairleigh Dickinson University Marilyn J. Suiter American Geological Institute Keith A. Sverdrup American Geophysical Union Marcia P. Sward Mathematical Association of America Joyce Swartney Buffalo State College Kathleen Sweeney-Hammond Maret School Maurice R. Sykes D.C. Public Schools Ronda Talley American Psychological Association Judith Tamburlin State University of New York at Buffalo Anthony A. Teate Morgan State University Mary L. Tenopyr AT&T Barbara J. Tewksbury Hamilton College Paul Eric Thiess Joint Board of Science, Math & Engineering Education Juanita Thomas North Central Regional Educational Laboratory Melvin W. Thompson Howard University Ron Thornton Tufts University John A. Thorpe State University of New York at Buffalo Cornelia Tierney Technical Education Research Center Bob Tinker Technical Education Research Centers Robert O. Tinnin Portland State University George Z. Tokieda The Brearley School John S. Toll Universities Research Association, Inc. Warren C. Tomkiewicz Plymouth State College David L. Toppen Montana University System Linda Torp Inninois Mathematics and Science Academy Blanche M. Touhill University of Missouri-St. Louis James H. Townes Elizabeth City State University Carol B. Tremper Hampton Township School District John Tweed Old Dominion University Robert G. Underhill Virginia Tech Vaughn Vandegrift Montclair State College Eleanor M. Vander Haegen Keene State College Peggy G. Vatter Superintendent of Public Instruction Argelia Velez-Rodriguez U.S. Department of Education Joyce M. Verrett Grambling State University Kent Viehoever USED Terry Anne Vigil Bridgewater State College Richard N. Vineyard Weber State University Cathleen A. Wagner Columbiana Ex. Vill. Schools Kay F. Wagner SAIC Ellen Wahl Girls' Club of America Henry H. Walbesser Baylor University David L. Walker Tennessee Board of Regents M. Lucius Walker, Jr. Howard University Thomas P. Wallace Illinois State University Virginia M. Wallace Fairfax County Public Schools Sylvia A. Ware American Chemical Society Beth Warren Technical Education Research Center Reg Weaver N.E.A. Stacey S. Weinand Oklahoma State Department of Education Robert Weinbeck American Meteorological Society Druid R. Weir Washington Technology Education Association Joyce Lowry Weiskopf National Science Resources Center Ronald H. Wenger University of Delaware N. Richard Werthamer The American Physical Society Karen Wetterhahn Linda Barton White California Postsecondary Education Commission Rosanne T. White Technology Student Association Jerry L. Whitten North Carolina State University Beverly R. Whittington Educational Testing Service Gene Wilhoit National Association of State Boards of Education Jack D. Wilkinson University of Northern Iowa James A. Williams Dayton Public Schools Lauren A. Williams Triangle Coalition for Science and Technology Education Luther Williams National Science Foundation Wiley Williams University of Louisville James Wilson Committee on Science, Space and Technology Rebecca J. Wilt U.S. Department of Education/OERI Eisenhower National Program James L. Wolfe Emporia State University David S. Wood Sidwell Friends School Martha M. Wood Clayton State College James A. Woodland Nebraska Department of Education Karen Worth Education Development Center Emmett L. Wright National Association for Research in Science Teaching Janet L. Wright W.I.S.E. Project University Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Daniel L. Wulff State University of New York at Albany James J. Wynne IBM June J. Yamashita Hawaii Department of Education Catherine G. Yeotis AETS and Wichita State University Debbie Yoklic Pima Community College Gerald E. Young Eastern Oregon State College Marvin Zeman Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Walter Zimmermann University of the Pacific Sandy Zimmet Office of Rep. Constance Morella Paul W. Zitzewitz University of Michigan -Dearborn David A. Zwart Hope College Thomas T. Zwick Eastern Montana College 1993 Invitational Conference NSF Staff List Mary A. Bahns Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources William S. Bainbridge Program Director, Div. Social & Economic Science Directorate for Social/Behavioral/Economic Lida K. Barrett Senior Associate Directorate for Education & Human Resources Susan Bartlett Audio/Visual Production Specialist Office of Legislative & Public Affairs Amy Berger Office of Legislative/Public Affairs Peter G. Braunfeld Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Arturo Bronson Program Director, Div. Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources Costello Brown Program Director, Div. Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources Mary Bullock Head, Special Projects Office of Legislative & Public Affairs Stacy L. Bullock Public Affairs Specialist Office of Legislative & Public Affairs Barbara H. Butler Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Roosevelt Calbert Deputy Director, Div. Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources Lura Jo Chase AACC Fellow, Div. Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources Julia V. Clark Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources James Colby Directorate for Education & Human Resources Ray Collings Assoc. Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Directorate for Education & Human Resources Eugene Cota-Robles Special Assistant to the Director Office of the Director Margaret M. Cozzens Director, Div. Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Educ. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Joseph G. Danek Director, Division of Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources Janice M. Earle Program Director, Office of Systemic Reform Directorate for Education & Human Resources Karolyn K. Eisenstein Senior Staff Assoc., Div. Undergraduate Education Directorate for Education & Human Resources Donald P. Ely Program Director, Research/Evaluation/Disse mination Directorate for Education & Human Resources Marjorie A. Enneking Program Director, Div. Undergraduate Education Directorate for Education & Human Resources Larry G. Enochs Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Joyce B. Evans Assoc. Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Directorate for Education & Human Resources Hyman Field Unit Head, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Carolyn Girardeau AACC Fellow, Research/Evaluation/ Dissemination Directorate for Education & Human Resources Mary J. Golladay Program Director, Div. Science Resources Studies Directorate for Social/Behavioral/Economic Michelle M. Hainbach External Affairs Liaison Specialist Office of Legislative & Public Affairs Joyce M. Hamaty Head, External Affairs Office of Legislative & Public Affairs Peirce A. Hammond Program Director, Office of Systemic Reform Directorate for Education & Human Resources Michael R. Haney Assoc. Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Directorate for Education & Human Resources Raymond Hannapel Visiting Program Director, Research/Evaluation/ Dissemination Directorate for Education & Human Resources Mary E. Hanson Public Affairs Specialist Office of Legislative & Public Affairs W. Franklin Harris Deputy Assistant Director Directorate for Biological Sciences Joanne G. Hazlett Program Manager, Cross-Directorate Activities Directorate for Biological Sciences Susan T. Hill Science Resources Analyst Directorate for Social/Behavioral/Economic Catherine Hines Staff Associate Directorate for Social/Behavioral/Economic Deh-I Hsiung Head, Budget and Operations Directorate for Education & Human Resources Beverly C. Hunter Program Director, Research/Evaluation/ Dissemination Directorate for Education & Human Resources Theodosia L. Jacobs Division of Science Resource Studies Directorate for Social/Behavioral/Economic Elmima Johnson Staff Associate Directorate for Education/Human Resources Donald E. Jones Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Conrad Katzenmeyer Program Director, Research/Evaluation/ Dissemination Directorate for Education & Human Resources Marvin E. Kauffman Program Director, Div. of Earth Sciences Directorate for Geosciences Mary Kohlerman Program Director, Div. Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources Toni Kring Visiting Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Directorate for Education & Human Resources Mary Harley Kruter Conference Consultant Ann T. Lanier Science Resources Analyst Directorate for Social/Behavioral/Economic Richard Lesh Program Director Directorate for Education/Human Resources Herbert Levitan Section Head, Div. Undergraduate Education Directorate for Education & Human Resources James H. Lightbourne Program Director, Div. Undergraduate Education Directorate for Education & Human Resources Ivo E. Lindauer Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Deborah F. Lockhart Program Director, Div. of Mathematical Sciences Directorate for Mathematical/Physical Science Madeleine J. Long Special Assistant, Comprehensive Design & Planning Directorate for Education and Human Resources Barbara E. Lovitts Program Director, Research/Evaluation/ Dissemination Directorate for Education & Human Resources Marsha Matyas Program Director Office of Legislative/Public Affairs William E. McHenry Program Director, Div. Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources Alice J. Moses Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Michael W. Oliver Asst Program Director, Office of Systemic Reform Directorate for Education & Human Resources Patrick M. Olmert External Affairs, Outreach Coordinator Office of Legislative & Public Affairs Irene C. Peden Director, Division of Electrical/Comm. Systems Directorate for Engineering George D. Peterson Section Head, Div. Undergraduate Education Directorate for Education & Human Resources Stanley Pine Program Director, Div. Undergraduate Education Directorate for Education & Human Resources Terence L. Porter Director, Div. Graduate Education & Research Dev. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Charles R. Puglia Former Division Director, Office of Systemic Reform Directorate for Education & Human Resources Wayne Ransom Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Eric Robinson Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Directorate for Education & Human Resources Lola E. Rogers Program Director, Div. Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources George M. Rubottom Program Director, Div. of Chemistry Directorate for Mathematical/Physical Science Robert L. Russell Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Nora Sabelli Program Director Directorate for Education/Human Resources Gerhard Salinger Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources James Sandefur Professor of Mathematics Georgetown University Lawrence A. Scadden Sr. Program Director, Div. Human Resource Dev. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Chalmers F. Sechrist Program Director, Div. Undergraduate Education Directorate for Education & Human Resources Rose Marie Smith Program Director, Presidential Awards Program Directorate for Education & Human Resources Susan P. Snyder Sr. Program Director, Office of Systemic Reform Directorate for Education & Human Resources Joseph Stewart Unit Head, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Directorate for Education & Human Resources Jane Stutsman Deputy Assistant Director Directorate for Education & Human Resources Wayne W. Sukow Program Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources Judith S. Sunley Executive Officer Directorate for Mathematical/Physical Science Elizabeth J. Teles Program Director, Div. Undergraduate Education Directorate for Education & Human Resources Lourdes Tinajero AACC Fellow, Div. Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources Kenneth J. Travers Director, Div. Research, Evaluation & Dissemination Directorate for Education & Human Resources Thomas Ubois Deputy Director, Office of Systemic Reform Directorate for Education & Human Resources Jean E. Vanski Deputy Director, Elementary/Secondary/ Informal Ed. Directorate for Education & Human Resources William Y. Velez Program Director, Div. of Mathematical Sciences Directorate for Mathematical/Physical Science Patricia A. Vinson Administrative Officer, Office of Systemic Reform Directorate for Education & Human Resources Julia Wan Program Director, Office of Systemic Reform Directorate for Education & Human Resources Wanda E. Ward Program Director, Div. Human Resource Development Directorate for Education & Human Resources Robert F. Watson Director, Division of Undergraduate Education Directorate for Education & Human Resources Diane B. Weisz Program Analysis, Budget Division Office of Budget/Finance/Award Management Joel M. Widder Director of Legislative Affairs Office of Legislative & Public Affairs Luther S. Williams Assistant Director Directorate for Education & Human Resources Christina Wise-Mohr Policy Analyst Office of Legislative & Public Affairs Terry S. Woodin Program Director, Div. 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Publications should be received within 3 weeks after receipt of request. 1 Re:Learning is a joint effort between the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Education Commission of the States operating in 13 states to promote systemic change "from schoolhouse to statehouse." 2 Twenty-fourth Annual GALLUP/Phi Delta Kappa Poll of the Public's Attitude toward the Public Schools. 3 This information appears in more detail in the ECS series on Restructuring the Education System (Introduction to Systemic Education Reform, Creating Visions and Standards to Support Them, Building Private Sector and Community Support, and Bringing Coherence to State Policy). Page {page \* roman|1}, Beyond National Standards and Goals Agenda, Page {page \* roman|1} Opening Plenary Session, Page {page |1}