 Hi everyone. Good afternoon to all of you. I'm Lisa Guernsey. I'm the Deputy Director for Education Policy here at New America and I also direct the Learning Technologies Project and I'm really, I'm so pleased to see so many people in the room. I wanted to welcome you here today to New America to have this great conversation. Our topic today is what's next for STEM education, boosting teaching pre-K through the 12th grade. So we'll be live streaming this entire conversation and we're glad to be able to bring this event out throughout, out to people throughout the country. Wanted to let you know there are already dozens of people who are online viewing right this very moment. We'll have many more as we proceed to the panel. We are going to be talking a good bit about all sorts of different policy levels here today, but the state piece is really important to us and we have people already online from Arizona, California, Oregon, Alaska, Washington State, Texas, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey. Just wanted to say a big thank you. Tennessee? Oh good. So I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who is online and we'll be tweeting out at hashtag STEM teachers, so don't be afraid to join the conversation that way. So here at New America, as many of you may know, we envision education as a continuum that starts early, quite early. Here in our program, we really are thinking about learning starting from birth and continues up through school and past years of traditional college and really into adulthood. Today's conversation is really in line with this vision, although we won't be describing as much of STEM students in the college years. We're certainly going to be talking about what happens in higher education when we're teaching our prospective STEM teachers. So we're going to be covering the waterfront here, going up and down the grade span. We're going to be talking about two reports. The first is STEM starts early, grounding science, technology, engineering and math education in early childhood, which was published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop with help from us here at New America and with support from the National Science Foundation. And then we're also going to be discussing a new report out from American Institutes of Research. Can you teach, which is the subtitle of which is Assessing the Relative Effectiveness of STEM Teachers. And that's been published by the National Center for Announced Longitudinal Data and Education Research, also known as Calder, which is a program of AIR. So it's really a thrill to bring these two reports together and have a conversation that links the two. We're also going to be showcasing 100K in 10, which is an organization that's dedicated to increasing the number and preparation of STEM teachers throughout the country. And we'll have an opportunity as well to introduce you to EDC and that research firm's work to prepare early educators to support children's development in STEM subjects and they do work in other areas as well. So there's a lot of ground to cover. I wanted to just take a moment to describe a little bit of our partnership with the CUNY Center and being able to do the work on the early years in STEM. This is something that has been a wonderful kind of labor of love for me and for Michael Levine, who is the Executive Director and Founder of the Joan Ganz CUNY Center at New America. We've been working on this project together for more than two years now, ever since the National Science Foundation came to us with some interest in exploring it more deeply. And we certainly are excited to be able to bring conversation about the early years into this broader question about how we improve STEM teaching overall. So I just want to take a moment to say thank you to Michael Levine, who's here. If you can stand up for a minute, Michael, thank you so much for your help with this project and for everything CUNY Center's done. So now I'm going to turn the podium over to Courtney Tannenbaum, who's with the American Institutes of Research. And I'm very thankful as well to you, Courtney, for helping us pull this together, for coming to us to think about how we could co-partner on an event like this and right to have your leadership. Okay, thank you, Lisa, for that great introduction to this really timely and important discussion. So again, hello and welcome. I'm Courtney Tannenbaum from the American Institutes for Research, where I serve as a principal researcher, as well as a STEM practice area director. And at AIR, in response to the growing attention around providing all youth opportunities to excel in STEM academic and career pathways, we've really been engaged in several projects that bring the best research forward to help improve and inform STEM policy research and practice. So I'm really excited about this discussion because it's going to pull together all of those really important realms and avenues where there can be some real collaborative partnerships to work together to really push policy research and practice and build those types of partnerships that are needed to improve STEM pathways for all kids. And indeed, building on Lisa's opening comments, what we've learned and what we really know in the field now is that strong teaching and access to information and resources are really key to improving the STEM learning experiences for all youth. And this, again, as Lisa was saying, begins not in that middle and high school years, but really early, early on to expose children to the types of learning experiences and information that they need to see themselves as part of the STEM community and to see their teachers as part of the STEM community and to have teachers see themselves as part of the STEM community, especially early educators who haven't had that sort of professional growth or engagement in traditional structures. So really, I think what we're hoping to achieve here with this discussion is to help the broader community and policymakers and researchers see that P-12, pre-K through 12 teachers are all capable of integrating STEM learning into their classrooms. But there's a lot of questions that loom in achieving this vision. Right now is, is our education system set up to do this? Are we promoting all teachers to be and see themselves as STEM teachers and give them the sorts of resources, tools and training they need to be able to integrate STEM experiences using developmentally appropriate means and methods to help kids see themselves as part of STEM and belonging in STEM. So I'm really looking forward to today's discussion and for all of your input and thoughts, it'll be a great Q&A, I think, and I don't want to take up too much of any more time in terms of the discussion. So I think I'll turn it back over to Lisa to introduce our moderator and the panel. Thank you so much, Courtney. So, yeah, we're gonna get straight into the panel discussion now and I'm gonna introduce you to our moderator, Greg Toppo, who is here with us from USA Today. Many of you have probably read Greg's stories over the years. He's known as one of the most both accurate and beautiful writers out there who's looking at the full landscape of education and really able to track the news and give us the context that we need. His full title for USA Today is National Education and Demographics Reporter. He has also been a teacher and this is something that I think is why he's able to write with such flair about what's happening in education. He's taught for both public and private schools. He taught for eight years before moving into journalism. He was one of the 2010 Spencer Fellows at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and when he was there, he was able to do some deeper research on the intersection point between technology and education. I remember when Greg was a Spencer Fellow there and meeting him for the first time in some of the just really deep questions he was asking about how games might be affecting and video games in particular might be affecting the way children learn. The result of his investigation to that is a book that I highly recommend that's called The Game Believes and You, How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter, which just came out about a year and a half ago. So it's really a pleasure to have Greg here to moderate this wide-ranging discussion today and I want to bring him up and then he will introduce the rest of our panel. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Lisa and Michael and Courtney. There are only four more introductions and then we can get started. I promise they'll be the last ones. You know, Lisa mentioned that I covered demographics too and one of the interesting things that happened to me when I, you know, as you know, like every other newspaper in America, USA Today, you know, people moving, people leaving and they don't fill slots and so my editor turned to me one day and said, listen, our demographics reporter just left. You can cover demographics too, right? Sure, okay. And, you know, it was actually, I'm actually glad that this happened to me because one of the things that taught me is that it gave me a different news is because if you think about demographics, news happens when things change. You know, more babies are born or more people move to Florida or fewer people move to Florida or more people are dying than being born in Maine. All these things make news. In education, you know, what I've found is that news is made when two people are fighting. So it's really sort of forced me to think about, you know, what news is. So we're going to actually hopefully concentrate a little bit on what's changing in this particular field, not what I want to talk to our panelists and we'll kind of dig right in. In no particular sense, Cindy Hoisington from EDC. Come on up. Elisa Beth McClure from CUNY in New America. Dan Goldhaber from Calder. You guys have figured out where you're going to sit already? Oh, you were told? Okay. Grace DeRamos from a hundred and K and 10. Fabulous. So, all right, the introductions are over. So I want to, you know, I wanted to just start with an observation, you know, this morning, my morning paper today, you know, it's for lack of a better term. It's budget day in America. I mean, usually budget day happens in February, but all right. So a couple of interesting developments this morning, if you haven't heard, you know, so our president's 2018 budget going to cut more or less 18 agencies related to science. We don't really know for sure, but probably a 10% cut to the National Science Foundation, 20% cut to NIH, 5% cut to NASA's Earth Science budget, maybe 30% plus cut to the EPA, $9 billion cut to the Department of Education. So, you know, we're in an interesting time here to be talking about STEM and students and teachers. One thing caught my eye this morning reading the paper. So one of the things they want to cut at NASA, one of the line items that's on the chopping block is its asteroid redirect mission. Okay. So, and the reason I bring that up is because, you know, it makes me wonder like, you know, we want to get eight year old boys or girls for that matter, you know, into science, right? They're not going to be able to blow up asteroids anymore. So like, we, where did we hear? That's not a serious question, by the way. We're just going to, okay, true. They can blow up asteroids in games. I guess, you know, I actually wanted to start with Grace and just ask her to sort of set the table for us if you would. Just a little bit about, you know, this issue of STEM teachers, you know, how many we have, how many we need, where we are, and where we're going. How big is the problem? And maybe sort of as a separate answer, talk about a little bit about where you see what your work is in this. Let's start with that. Great. I won't dig too much into the budget situation. We've heard all you need to know. Right, right. There we go. But, so this issue has been around the need for STEM teachers. We've known about it for a long time. And, you know, we started about six years ago, nearly, in response to the president's call for 100,000 math and science teachers or STEM teachers. And we've been at that work since then. Talk about that number. Why is that number important? Where do we get it, first of all? So it comes from the president's council of advisors on science and technology. This was a council that President Obama pulled together and they did a whole bunch of research around what we need to do to make sure our country is STEM prepared. And one of their recommendations was to prepare 100,000 excellent science, technology, engineering and math teachers in the next decade. And so that report came out in 2010 and President Obama really amplified this call for teachers in 2011 in the State of the Union address. And our network came together beginning with just 28 organizations now we're 280 to respond to this call. So that number came from a commission of many advisors who have a lot of different kinds of expertise. You can see the full list online, but there isn't a, they give you a pretty good understanding of where that number comes from. But they also say that's really the baseline number. Like 100,000 is just a minimum number. We definitely need more than that. We also need to think about how we support our teachers who are currently in the classroom to get the kind of professional development they need and to get the kinds of supports that they need to stay teaching and to continue to improve their skill and grow on that skill as they stay in the classroom. And so you know there's definitely, the other thing that's really interesting about the 100,000 number is that it's just a number that is national and scope. It doesn't actually go into, as we all know, the many nuances of that number that you know in our rural areas we need more STEM teachers that in certain, you know, we need more STEM specifically in their early grades as we talked about. And so there isn't that sort of nuance that we understand. And so at 100,000 we have been working on this 100,000 number now for about six years as I said. We do have data through the first five years of the effort and to date we've trained or our partners have trained 40,000 teachers and we are on track to reach the 100,000 goal which is some work that ARR has done with us as a matter of fact to help us understand our data. And you know as we shift into the second half of our 10-year effort which is closing in 2021 we are thinking about how do we think beyond that 100,000 number knowing that that's not going to fill all of our gaps and so we've been doing work for about two and a half years to map the big systematic challenges or the grand challenges to training and retaining excellent STEM teachers. And we'll be launching that this summer. We've done that alongside hundreds of stakeholders and thousands of teachers and are thinking about how we need to shift our work to not just think about the 100,000 number but to really get deep at the systematic and trans issues that are really making that have created the need in the first place for the 100,000. And that's actually what I want to kind of turn to Cindy for is maybe kind of unpack some of those issues and talk a little bit about it sort of how this looks on the ground. How you know what are some of the places that are that are having success doing the kind of work that Grace is talking about. Well, at Education Development Center we've been doing science education. We started, I mean that's how it was born was back in the Sputnik days. And so there was this real push to improve science education. And here we are again, you know, back trying to do it. And I guess when it comes to STEM, what I find in again my role at Education Development Center is I work mainly with early childhood educators and early elementary teachers in science and STEM integrated science that we have never done the professional development very well. We didn't do it well in science and we didn't do it well in math. And suddenly it's all about STEM because the culture and technology is moving ahead at a much quicker pace than the education field is. And not only that, but just to speak to a couple of the challenges we have for about the past 20 years since the National Early Literacy Panel report came out. Demandated really that early childhood and early elementary was all about learning to read. And so all of our early childhood and early elementary policies, all of our standards, all of our policies around professional development, all of the assessments and the assessment tools and the curricula that were developed were all around early literacy. And you know I said to someone this morning it's kind of like you wake up one day and suddenly you're it's not about early literacy anymore. Now it's about STEM. And so the field, the teachers in the early childhood in the early elementary years are really kind of being shell shocked right now because there's no changes in the policies related to early literacy in order to accommodate this new focus on STEM. Many of them didn't grow up with high quality science and math STEM education, if you will, themselves. So there's a certain discomfort and intimidation around it. And so what we find, to answer your question and I'm sorry to go all the way around it, a circle like that, what teachers need and what they needed in science, what they needed in math and now what they need in STEM, it's not, there's not an easy fix. And we're living in this world in which everyone wants a simple solution to a complex problem. And so, you know, even with literacy, I see so much the focus on basic skills versus on comprehension, for example, and versus on oral language. The focus is on, you know, segmentation and blending and letter awareness. Why is that? Because those basic skills are so much easier to assess. So we have this circle too. We don't have any good assessments in early science. We don't have any good illustrations or visions of what early science or STEM looks like in the early years and when it's really high quality. And so it's a circular pattern of intensive teaching. But what we know and what we believe and what we provide to teachers is real partnership between researchers and educators. Okay, so we're going to come back to that in a second. But it's, you know, really intensive long term, their own opportunities to engage in STEM experiences and STEM inquiry and learning so that they can learn the content and practices themselves from the ground up and have a deep understanding of the concepts that they're going to be teaching their grade level concepts, as well as hopefully the grade before and the grade after. Deep knowledge about how children learn and how children learn STEM and science concepts. Can I turn to Lisa for just a second? Just started to work off one of the points we just heard. So you know, are we going to wake up in a couple of months or a couple of years and say, you know what, okay, that was fun. STEM was not really what we had in mind. Not really what was important. What's important is, you know, fill in the blank. Or do you think, you know, this concern is here to stay? That's a really excellent question, I think. So I think, you know, Cindy just said something that I also want to kind of move into this, which is that it's these are only suggestions, by the way, my questions. You guys are actually start a conversation, if you like. That yeah, that it's difficult to get an idea of what it looks like for young children to be learning STEM. So I think that's that's one thing that I just want to clarify right up front is when we're talking about early childhood, first of all, we're talking about ages zero to eight. And a good example that we like to use is children working in a community garden. So if you see, let's say a bunch of toddlers and preschoolers all get in their hands dirty, digging in the dirt, planting, planting some plants. It's really cute, right? And I think because it's cute, we tend to write it off. It's not just cute. They're also, they're also doing some really incredible, incredible things when you when you really look closer. For one thing, they're laying a foundation for later learning that that is going to accrue to them all throughout their education. So they're, they're picking up particular STEM skills that they'll be using throughout their lives. But it's also giving them an opportunity to be scientists in the moment. And I think that's really critical to focus on. This isn't just about the future. It's also about what they're capable of doing right then. So they're collecting data, they're observing their forming hypotheses about what will happen when they plant something a certain way or water at a certain amount. They're revising those hypotheses, revising the techniques that they're doing. These are all, you know, really critical STEM activities and STEM skills that they're that they're practicing in that moment, and they're expanding that capacity. So I think that's really important. But to kind of come back to what you were saying about what's going to happen, you know, in a few months, if we wake up and start talking about something else, those skills that I'm talking about the critical thinking skills, the attention capacity that's being expanded when they're engaged in those sorts of activities, the cognitive flexibility, all these things that we talked about when we when we bring up executive function skills. All of that is great for almost every other domain of learning. So it's really important for literacy, it's really important for I mean, literally, I mean, you can bring up almost any other domain. And there's research that shows that that STEM experiences in early childhood, they're going to impact that in a really positive way. So I think when when we're thinking about some areas to devote some really efficient dollars, I think, focusing in on early childhood is is really important. And maybe just as important for STEM as it is for literacy, we're thinking about literacy all the time, as Cindy said, but we're finding that that their income based STEM background knowledge gaps that are already there starting in kindergarten. And for a lot of children, they don't go away, they're still there in eighth grade. And that that math experiences in early childhood end up predicting general academic outcomes more consistently than then attention and reading skills in early childhood. So that's really important to pay attention to this is really critical at Sirius in case they went by too fast. See it again. The last bit. Yeah, I think that's really important thing. Yeah, the high quality math experiences in early childhood, end up predicting later academic outcomes more consistently than early reading and attention skills. So this is, these are skills that are really integrated into all these other skills are wanting them to learn. And you can think of it as as sort of skills ropes that that kids are are building across their educations and stem stem skills work into almost every other rope that they're trying to weave. So even if stem sort of goes out of fashion, if you will, you know, year or two, the things underlying it aren't going away. Exactly. Yeah, you know, I don't think it's going out of fashion. Okay, I'm just trying to I'm looking at things from through the lens of some of the teachers that I work with and kind of how overwhelmed they're feeling and how they're feeling. Things are getting layered on and layered on and layered on and they just don't have any more time in the game. So I want to turn to the labor economist, just who that is in our group here. So you know, just coming up with what at least that said, you know, this idea, metaphor, planting seeds, I want to kind of extend to teachers. You know, there's this idea that we need to grow stem teachers, right? And there's other to me, sort of maybe even more attractive idea that no, we just need to import them from elsewhere. Can you talk about some of your findings in terms of, you know, what's effective in terms of getting stem teachers who really number one know their stuff and number two can teach it. So it's it's very hard to know. It's it's hard to know empirically whether what makes someone an effective teacher and effective stem teacher or effective teacher in general is about who they are when they arrive at a teacher education program to get trained up or about the training that they get in in the program. So the short answer is that I and it's and it's of course it's not neither or but I but I don't think I can answer that question. I don't think I can answer that question definitively because I just don't think that we know and but we need to know because the the implications for public policy are very different. So I guess, you know, we're to sort of think about where we should be going as a field. One of the things that I think we need to start to learn is what are the kinds of experiences that teacher candidates need to have and who are the kind of people that we need to bring into teacher education programs to be the stem teacher candidates to develop an effective teacher stem workforce. And just to go with the the seed analogy for a second. That is that is a long term investment. And so that's that's what makes this a really a difficult issue is because politically, right, you think about very sort of short term, you know, turnarounds. And yet if we're thinking about growing an effective stem workforce as as the folks that are on the ground, no, you know, you need to think about the course of many, many years. So can I just say one other thing? One of one of one of the things I just I kind of want to I want to provide just like some context, broader context about the labor market labor market. So the teacher labor market in terms of who is in the teacher labor market has changed tremendously over the last 20 years. And that's true not just for stem teachers, but teachers in general, because women in minorities were excluded from lots of other occupations from the 60s and 70s. So if you went to college and you were sort of a top tier student, you used to go on oftentimes into the teaching profession. So that's changed, which is obviously a very good thing, but it means that the teaching is no longer getting that kind of the subsidy that came from discrimination. And I think that that is particularly problematic for for stem because the other thing that's happened at the same time is that the rewards in society, the economic renuminal, the economic rewards. Yes, that was what I was trying to go for that that they have accelerated for people who have technical training. So if you think of someone who in the you know, the early 70s was thinking about becoming a stem teacher, you know, they might be sacrificing some salary to become a stem teacher in the 70s. Today, they're probably sacrificing a whole lot more salary. And yet the the systems in education, they really haven't changed at all in terms of the way we reward reward teachers, according to their skill sets. The salaries for early childhood education are even lower than for older the older grades. So I mean, as long as as the, you know, pre K teachers are are getting 10, 20, 30 K less a year than kindergarten and first grade teachers, we're going to be losing the best talent to the older grades, which is, you know, just great for the older grades. But when we're talking about how important it is to intervene early, that's a huge, huge loss for everyone if we don't have, you know, really high quality teachers in stem, there are two areas, three areas where where you hear school systems complain, it's really hard to get and keep staff. We just we across the board, particularly for disadvantaged schools. And that's stem, special ed, and ELL. But the problems are different, right? It with special ed, it's a turnover problem. So if we could do things to keep the special educator educators in the system, we'd be we'd be making progress. STEM, it's a production problem. There are fewer people that are choosing to become stem candidates. And that is been a really persistent problem for, you know, as near as I can tell at least the 25 years where we have really good records that we can track them in some states. So I want to make sure I understand this. So are we saying, and Grace, you can jump in on this too, if you have some observations. I mean, are we saying that we've got, you know, math and science, people with math and science degrees graduating who who rather work for Google or Apple, then, you know, teach in a preschool? I mean, are we even talking about the same populations? Or are we? No, I mean, exactly. Well, I mean, that that is one break this down just for two minutes, just so we understand. Well, I think that is one of the issues that you have people coming out who have the STEM skills who would rather do another job. Maybe it's at Google, maybe it's coming a doctor, maybe it's something else, and they're not interested in going into teaching. Partly with the salary difference. Partly with the salary right. And there's also a prestige issue at play, which is a social issue, which we've, you know, partly stems from the issue you were just talking about because of the discrimination in the 60s and 70s and before that. But there's some deep seated issues there. But, you know, we it is a really big problem. And that's that's also both of those issues. The salary one and the prestige one are not easy fixes. But I think in terms of like seeing some different bright spots there that are, you know, where we're seeing some progress and some folks doing some really great work out there to try to work against this. We do have partners who are working on the, you know, on the very early side of the teacher pipeline. So looking to get middle schoolers, high schoolers engaged in teaching opportunities early on, so that they're beginning to experience the joy of teaching. Because what we do find is that if you do give people the opportunity to try teaching, they are often willing to forgo some of that salary to go into the classroom because it's they're they're doing, you know, a career that they feel really good about that they're giving back to society. And so we've seen that to be, you know, a really great approach to trying to get people involved earlier in the teaching career. And then I think also, you know, back to the early childhood issue, there's also the all along a student's career having teachers who see themselves as part of the STEM community and who are supporting their students and saying, hey, I'm a STEM teacher and I love being a STEM teacher and being that role model is also really important. And we're seeing some trends around how literally having your own teachers from your the earliest grades all the way up through college pushing like pushing that prioritizing it for their for their students is really helpful. And begins to push back against this salary and prestige issue, even if we're not changing the salaries, because that that is a longer term harder thing. But so that's part of the issue for saying, you know, before you go any further, I want to make sure Dan gets a chance to talk about you teach just just as a model. Can you just kind of give us a quick one on one on that? So I think it's an important piece of this equation. So you teach as a model that that started at UT Austin. And that's the UT. Yes. Yeah. And it was basically to try and address the problems of the production of STEM teachers, the lack of production of STEM teachers. And so there's a number of things that that are included in the UT you teach model. One thing is that they they try and give teacher candidates earlier experiences in the classroom to try and get them engaged and figure out is this actually a career that they that they want to pursue? There's some different evaluation. There's encouragement to draw people into the into the teaching part of UT Austin. And it's now spread to a number of other replication sites to draw people in who have background in STEM, which is, of course, very important. So the research was to try and assess like, does it look like beyond the production side where it's pretty obvious and pretty straightforward that there is an increase in the production of STEM teachers coming out of the UT programs? But the question is, are the UT programs more effective? And I mean, I guess I would just say I am quite I'm used to finding when I do these kinds of studies that nothing works. That's that's more often than not you find null effects that there's there's no difference between programs. And we didn't find that with with you teach. We found that the you know there's all else equal as best as we can make all else equal. You teach teachers look like they are more effective on average than STEM teachers who come from other programs, not just the Austin site where they are particularly effective, but also a lot of the other replication sites in in Texas. So that's that's really encouraging. And I think that it suggests something can be done to address the issues with the production of STEM teachers. About the issues around the production of STEM teachers. And this goes to a little bit of what Cindy was talking about, I think, and actually some of the introductory remarks is that it's not just on the production side that we have to think about, but the whole professional experience of a teacher, both all general teachers, but particularly STEM teachers and thinking about how we change their once they're in the classroom, how we change, how we support them and give them professional growth opportunities because that definitely affects the cycle. If students or young people are seeing the teaching profession as being one that is not a place where you can grow professionally, then then we're not, you know, we're only fixing part of the problem by focusing on the production side. So it is important to see the whole continuum. The thing is that if you're talking about less prestige, and again, you know, sometimes I feel like a naysayer, but I'm not at all. And I spend my life working with teachers and in her. But if you see a lack of prestige at the high school STEM teacher, science teacher, math teacher level, once you get down to elementary school, elementary school teachers and early childhood teachers are generalists. So they need to be able to support develop language and literacy. They need to be able to introduce and teach social studies. They need to know, you know, all of the STEM subjects, whereas at the high school level, you have specialists who teach biology, chemistry, algebra, each calculus. And so the idea that you would actually be producing people, I really appreciate this, that the more knowledge that you can embed into the four year, the more STEM knowledge you can embed. And the earlier you can get teachers into the classroom, those are critical features. But in the elementary and early childhood world, I think some of those challenges are different. You're not going to get someone from a new teach program, I can guarantee you coming to teach in first grade. Just because of STEM and science, and I don't know what the exact percentages are, but they're pretty depressingly low in terms of how much exposure children even get to STEM subjects. And STEM teachers may come in a half an hour or an hour a week. And the regular classroom teacher may not be making the connections for children to have connected STEM experiences over time. And again, can I push back on this? You can push back. I just want to add one thing before you push back, that the other thing about early childhood and elementary, you know, I'm going to try to push all you pushing back. I'm going to try to make the push back. It's called a pre-bottle. Right, a pre-bottle, I like that. But the kinds of programs, I mean, and I think the STEM starts early policy paper really addresses as well, are so remarkably diverse. I mean, you have family child care, you have center-based child care, you have preschools, which I call like center-based, outside of the public school system, you have pre-K inside the public school system. You know, you have religious schools that the variety is so great that it's very, it's hard to make generalizations in terms of how they do STEM. So some of the ones I'm making are certainly very broad. Go ahead. Yeah, you know, I guess the thing I was going to push back on is this, this kind of assertion that you're not going to get certain kinds of people to do early childhood. Not STEM people. Right. Because there's simply no opportunity in the early childhood world to use. So here's my pushback. I would love to see STEM people. So here's my pushback. And this is a proposal of almost nothing except an observation I'm about to make. So I'm driving around the other day listening to a podcast in my car. And this is the fresh air. Okay. Absolutely has nothing to do with actually the podcast itself. But one of the ads for it is this home, like home science kit you can buy for your kids. And I'm, you know, and I'm sort of immune to this stuff. Like, you know, I can't believe the junk that usually gets marketed to families, you know, to teach your kids science. But I sort of stopped me cold because they said, you know, one of the lines was, after two weeks, your child will extract DNA from a strawberry. Like, oh, okay. All right. And I thought, okay, I hadn't heard that before. I didn't know that. Yeah. My seven-year-old can extract DNA from a strawberry. I think we're in a different time. And so I... But we're in a different time in terms of STEM. There's no question about it. And I was being tongue in cheek when I said earlier is, you know, I'm talking about from a teacher's perspective, it feels like the world is changing so fast and what they're expected to do in class and what children is changing so fast. We're living in a different time in terms of technology. But that's part of the challenges. The way children learn doesn't change as fast as our technology is changing. So children... You want to push back some more? I'll keep it up and you can go ahead. But so extracting DNA from a strawberry is great. It's not very meaningful for a zero to eight-year-old. I don't know what it means. I just think it's amazing that you can do it. But yeah, I was going to call on you anyway. Oh, you called on me? Yeah. So I mean, I think you're onto something when you say that it's not meaningful. And I heard some grunts of agreement. I think one really, really critical element to add in here about, especially about early childhood STEM, but really across learning in general, is that this can't just be about learning vocabulary and having kids imitate these things that we think of as older STEM skills. So when we think about STEM, it's really attractive to think of somebody extracting DNA. But you can't just take that and then kind of go backwards and put it in preschool or put it in kindergarten. That's not what STEM looks like. That's not how they learn. You know, I said earlier that there are all sorts of connections between early STEM learning and literacy and language. And so they are picking up vocabulary. But when they're six years old, we don't just want them to be repeating things like DNA. We want them to be, we want that kind of learning to be inquiry-based. We want it to be about curiosity and wonder. We want to be instilling these habits of mind, critical thinking. We want them to be asking, what is DNA? Why is it that way? What does it mean for me? What does it mean for the world? And then actually pursuing their questions in systematic ways that are developmentally informed. So when you look at things like these STEM kits, it sort of misses the point. It turns it into this cute thing that I was talking about earlier. It's really cute when you get a six-year-old to say something like, I extracted DNA. It's a cocktail party chatter. Right, exactly, exactly, yeah. It'll get your attention, but it's not the kind of learning that actually does transfer to all of these other skills and domains that I was talking about earlier. I'm going to push back on you now. OK, because one of the things in the Kuni report that was really interesting to me was the discussion of technology and how it's changing families' relationships to this topic. And one of the things that I was really fascinated by was this mention of bedtime math, this app. And their motto, for lack of a better phrase, is to make math as beloved as bedtime stories. And it strikes me that you can have both, right? Can't you? Can't you have, you know, you can brag on your child because they're doing something high-level. You can also have them love this thing, you know, enough to want to do it at bedtime with you. I don't feel like it's either or, but... There's some really great card games that you can play with your kids that it's clearly all about developing math skills with young kids. But I think it's... I mean, I just want to second what Elizabeth was saying, because I think it deserves to be seconded. And it's about helping children at any age learn to begin to ask interesting questions, begin to make observations and collect data, begin to think critically about the data, and to generate ideas and new questions and solve problems based on evidence. But there has to be something interesting to investigate. And what's going to be interesting for a three-year-old to investigate or an eight-year-old to investigate is going to be very different than what's interesting for a 12-year-old or an 18-year-old. And that provides the motivation for wanting to go through that process of inquiry and investigate. And I think that's an important point because I think that's where the adults get involved. And that's a big part of what we're talking about today is that you can't just plop a kid in the garden and expect them to come out with these great STEM advancements. You really have to have these engaged, curious adults around them who are modeling these inquiry methods and modeling what it means just to be curious, just to ask questions and wonder about how something is the way it is. And that's super important. But I also want to come back to what you're saying about doing this at home. I don't think it necessarily requires STEM kits and doing these massive science experiments at home or that sort of thing. But I do think it is absolutely foundational that the learning that kids are doing with STEM is not just in the classroom. It has to be all over just like with literacy, just like with learning a language. Immersion in those topics is really what leads to fluency. It's the same with STEM, it's the same with language learning literacy. So what we like to say in the report, one of our recommendations is that we need to expand the charging stations that are available to children all throughout their lives. Charging stations where they can power up their STEM learning and extend it outside of the classroom in order to get that immersion and then that fluency. And so that includes places like libraries and museums. It includes the homes. So really getting families engaged and parents engaged is really important, especially because those parents are models. They're gonna be with them continuously across grades to connect learning. The power of libraries and museums is absolutely critical. And that kind of comes back to the budget issue that it sounds like they're on the chopping block. Yeah, but you know, we to let a couple other people get a word in before we go to the audience. Lauren here, where's Lauren? Lauren Allen? Is she here? I guess not. Koss is here, right? Yeah, hi Koss. So we wanted to hear from a couple of folks who are doing some of this work on the ground. So if you don't know Koss, stand up Koss, sorry. Put you on the spot. So standing is required. Koss has some changing equation and we've asked him here just to, talk a little bit about what this problem looks like from your point of view. Sure. And we have about like 10 minutes total and that includes getting audience questions. So I have a small subset of that. I don't wanna sort of reiterate what's already been said because I know some excellent points were made, but I kind of actually did have a question that I don't have an answer to. And that is one of the big forces in STEM education was federal, right? We had common core state standards, we had next generation science standards. That drove assessment creation, that drove things that were very important for teachers and that is teaching materials and curriculum. Now that's still happening to a degree in states, but with budget cuts, state problems and no big bully pulpit for that move. My question is that going to continue because I think you can have excellent teachers have been well trained, but they're gonna be swimming upstream if they don't have really, really good materials and curriculum aligned to good standards. And right now that's fallen out of favor, so it's a concern. Two things. The bully pulpit and the materials, correct? Yeah. So I guess I wanna push back a little bit about the way that you've ordered it because I think that having good materials, good curriculum is important, but the empirical evidence is very clear that that's secondary to the quality of the teachers. And so I think that to sort of focus first on them, and I know that's not necessarily what you were suggesting, but to focus, if we were to focus first on sort of the materials in the curriculum, I don't think that that's the right focus. And the right focus is on the quality of the teachers and then one of the things that they will do is to try and figure out how can they get good material, a good curriculum? That's one of the things that good teachers do. And I guess, can I just say one quick little thing? Please do. One of the things that I've noticed as time goes on and the teaching and the standards and the STEM concepts and skills get more complex, there's a tendency to move teachers out of the equation and to focus on the standards and the curriculum and the materials as being the things that teach with the teacher kind of as the funnel for that versus those being tools for the teacher to use as he teaches or he teaches. And that makes me really nervous. On the other hand, I can only speak for early elementary and younger, there are not enough good science curricula out there. Teachers cannot be curriculum developers. I mean, they can be, but they can't be expected to be. They need the tools, they need good standards. And the next generation science standards, once you get down to the elementary level, they simply don't lay out enough learning progress to act as a guide for teachers. They tell you the one big standard in physical science of what children should know and be able to do at the end of the year, but it's not enough to help teachers scaffold children's learning through the year. You know, Koss, did you have a reaction to that? And then we'll move on. Yeah, I believe they're all important and I believe that if they don't work in concert, we're actually not squeezing all the juice out of the orange. Okay, let's go on. I hope you don't mind, because we have seven minutes and more than seven people who want to ask questions. So three things. Tell us who you are and where you're from and please make it a question, okay? You can choose. Keeping us in some time. Hi, my name is David Armstrong. I work at Center for Inspired Teaching and I train science teachers all day long in D.C. and I think something that I've recognized is that more and more teachers that I work with, especially at the middle school level, don't have a science background and I know that was true for elementary schools a long time, as we pointed out, a lot of STEM folks don't go into elementary. So my question is, what can we do to help improve the science background knowledge of teachers who are teaching mainly pre-K through eight so that they feel comfortable teaching science even though they're not a science or a math major? Great question. Somebody? I mean, I'll throw out a couple ideas. I think we're seeing programs, preparation programs that are calling for more math and science units in the general preparation of their teachers no matter what direction they're going, even if they're not going into the high school grade. So making sure that our early childhood, all the way up to eighth grade or middle school teachers are getting more math and science in order to graduate as a teacher. I think that's one play. I think another play is farther back than that ensuring that all kids in pre-school to 12 are getting the kind of STEM foundations that they need because if we have teachers in the classroom now teaching kids who aren't then getting the STEM skills and we're not gonna be getting the teachers eventually. So there's that long-term play and then there's how we support our teachers currently and so there are amazing resources out there actually and a lot of great research going on about how we do that, how do we, what are the kinds of resources that our teachers need to both get the kind of STEM support they need and get the STEM skills and then also how do we help teach them to teach the STEM skills. So I think that there's plays all along the continuum that we're seeing. That are great. I think it's, it also can't just be about increasing the quantity of STEM content knowledge for teachers and increasing the number of STEM courses for example that they take during preparation programs. It really has to be also about increasing the integration of those preparation programs so that right now often in a preparation program teachers will get their STEM content course absolutely separately in a different department than they get their child development course which is not aimed towards them. It's just about development in general which is in a totally different department from the pedagogy course that they're taking and those really have to be combined because if teachers can get the developmental trajectories, the learning trajectories having to do with STEM content areas for kids and learn it in a pedagogical way that they can pass along so not just in a lecture format then they're gonna be equipped to do the sorts of things that Cindy was talking about. That they understand the learning trajectories with STEM that kind of sets a basic curriculum for them. They know what comes before, they know what comes after so they can take a look at their classroom and they engage where their students are and adapt their lessons for students who are at different levels. I see something quickly. Very quickly, yeah. Very quickly. That statement should make everybody depressed and a little bit cynical. Here's why. That sounds a lot and I don't disagree with you but it also sounds a lot like teachers for a new era and some of the stuff that Deborah Ball from Michigan has been saying for a very long time and so this is not a new message and it's not something that we have taken very seriously as a country and I think that there's a lot of this STEM work where we really haven't taken it very seriously. Yeah, well, it's like New America, old message, right? We can just, you know, sort of, um, sorry, Lisa. I mean, just the final, I'm just gonna add one sentence to promise. Okay. We have to help teachers who have been so steeped in language and literacy teaching believe and figure out and find ways to teach what they need to teach in language and literacy and do it in the content area. So meaningful integration. Let's do a lightning round. Let's do like the quickest question you can ask or we're gonna give you the quickest answers. So, okay, I, people, go ahead. Hey, Boris Granovsky from the Congressional Research Service. My question is this, there's a lot of talk about, you know, the speed at which technology is progressing and so the obvious extension is, you know, can technology be used to solve the teacher shortage? Okay. Obviously there's a lot of, you know, online learning and, you know, massive online courses. So what, in your opinion, is the path forward in terms of using technology to solve the teacher shortage? Great question. Did you have anybody in mind or? So I'm just gonna say quickly, I think the short answer is maybe, but there are institutional structures that make it very difficult to test it. And the best example is that it's very rare to see someone hire it into a physics teacher, hire it into a rural district who can teach in other districts that surround, you know, there's so much about the way that the, you know, the hiring process and the pay process and all that works that even if you could do that or you could, you know, use extended learning techniques with a particular person, it's hard to get those kinds of spreads to occur and so we need to think about those kinds of institutional structures that make using technology difficult. I think also as someone trained in child development, I have to put this out there that children learn through social-emotional engagement. So technology will never replace teachers, it's never going to solve that workforce problem in that way. What technology can do is get resources to teachers on a really broad scale. It can help teachers by giving them a tool to engage their children. It can, I mean, just the kinds of tools and the ways that teachers are using technology, it's just amazing, even if it's just a digital camera, ways to kind of look back and rehearse practicing STEM that they've done on previous days, that's so wonderful. So I think there are ways that it can help with professional development, ways that it can help in infusing resources into communities, but I think it's really critical to understand that children in order to learn well have to be interacting with really high quality engaged adults in their learning. Paula Stern, the National Center for Women and Information Technology in CWET. We opened with reference to the new Trump budget with all the cuts, and I would like to ask where this group thinks STEM K through 12 will be going given the fact that President Trump has put a major emphasis on jobs and on cutting the federal budget, including the budgets that were ticked off in your opening statement. I ask this because I think that we're going to have a resource fight and STEM encompasses over 60 different categories. And if the president is concerned about job for the future, I think we need to be asking ourselves in the schools and I'm asking you to be responsive how you're going to make that sell. Computer science, for example, seems to be the job demand supply mismatch which is the biggest in this country. We do not have enough coming out of the schools and going through the pipeline. Are we going to be forced to try to make some choices and deal with our existing executive and congressional branches that are in power now and kind of shift our arguments in order to make sure that we have the resources to meet the jobs by educating these kids in the K-12 area? One thing that I want to say, I don't know if Russ Schilling is here but this is something I heard Russ Schilling say and he might be able to source quote it from there. I heard him say that just as the industrial revolution made it necessary for all children to be literate, the digital age has made it necessary, absolutely necessary for all children to have STEM skills and I think that's a really good way to sell this to people in a really quick kind of lightning way. I think if you want a more long-term communication strategy for really getting people in positions of political power to really get it, to really understand this, we actually have a section of the report STEM starts early that's about a communication strategy that the Frameworks Institute put together and what it does really effectively is helps explain what images are already in people's heads when you bring up this idea of STEM, what sorts of values you can bring up to help get them on the same page as you and then what sorts of metaphors you can use to bypass the ineffective models that they already have in their minds and I think it's, I can't say how important it is for us to be using that communication strategy, all of us together when we talk to people who are in positions of power to actually make these changes, we need to be all on the same page using those same messages. One more question and then we gotta go. Thank you. And to folks who couldn't get a question in, I'm sure these folks would be happy to talk one on one afternoon. Hi, Chris, research intern at Thomas B. Fordham Institute. I wanted to ask if you have any knowledge of mechanisms to get mid-career STEM professionals, people with deep content knowledge into the classroom to teach pre-K through 12th. There, that's actually something that is increasingly popular among folks with STEM backgrounds. I'll try to make it quick, but there are some programs that are specifically focusing on that, like Encore out in California who are really thinking about how you help both folks with STEM degrees, sorry, with 20 years of experience in a STEM field move into the teaching profession and make that transition and so there are some alternative routes to preparation like Encore that help folks do that. There are also some groups who are really thinking about how you bring veterans into the classroom is another interesting like field changing example. And so I think that there are, there is definitely that kind of work happening out there that folks are, yeah. You know, I just have to throw that. I mean, I heard a figure the other day, 11 million STEM trained adults not working in their field. Does that sound right to you and are you capping those folks? Well, I don't know that particular statistic, but they're- 7.4 million actually, but go ahead. That's great. But I think- It's like a hundred times more than you need. Right, well I think that part of that also shows that STEM is relevant to almost every kind of job out there and we're seeing that, and that kind of goes to your question about how we don't need STEM skills just for STEM jobs, we need STEM skills for all jobs and that we need to be thinking about the workforce of the future and so the kinds of creative thinking and problems-helping skills you were talking about earlier, go to serve the kinds of jobs that we don't know we're going to need in the future and so it's very important that we're not just giving computer science skills which are, you know, we are at the critical need for that right now, but that we're thinking about the kinds of thinking that we need our kids to do to be ready for the future. You know, I'd love to continue this conversation or unfortunately at a time, like I said, if you have a question for someone specifically, feel free to come on up and politely ask them to chat. Thank you very much, folks.