March 6, 2014

Welcome!

Here's this week's edition of the STEM Ed Update. Enjoy.

Coalition Updates

Coalition Responds to Administration's FY15 Budget Proposal

The STEM Education Coalition released a statement in response to the Obama Administration's Fiscal year 2015 Budget Proposal and highlighted some of it's major STEM-related proposals.

Read the full statement here.

Top Article:

Obama Budget Pitches Race to Top for Equity, New Money for Ed Tech

Education Week

Education would be a bright

spot in a relatively austere budget year, if the Obama Administration gets its way. The President's $3.9 trillion fiscal year 2015 budget, released Tuesday - which would largely hit school districts in the 2015-16 school year- includes level funding for key formula programs, such as Title I grants to districts, but makes room for several new competitive initiatives, including a new iteration of the Race to the Top program focused on helping schools close the achievement gap.

Read more here.

Stay in the Know:

Latest STEM Education Policy News Across the U.S.

Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Other Tech Giants Invest $1 Billion to Get Kids Online

Entrepreneur

Kids today are the innovative leaders of tomorrow and if the U.S. intends to be globally competitive for generations to come, kids need to be digitally fluent starting early. That's the idea behind the White House's ConnectED Initiative. The effort was unveiled earlier this month and aims to connect 99 percent U.S. students to the internet through high-speed broadband and high-speed wireless in the 5 years.

Read more here.

Nevada Adopts Common Science Standards

Education Week

Go ahead and add Nevada to the list of states that have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards. Today's unanimous vote by the state board of education makes it the ninth state to have officially adopted the common science standards, which emphasize application, scientific inquiry, and engineering design.

Read more here.

How Our 1,000-year-old Math Curriculum Cheats America's Kids

Los Angeles Times

Imagine you had to take an art class in which you were taught how to paint a fence or a wall,

but you were never shown the paintings of the great masters, and you weren't even told that such paintings existed. Pretty soon you'd be asking, why study art? That's absurd, of course, but it's surprisingly close to the way we teach children mathematics.

Read more here.

2015 Budget: Eight Highlights From the White House Budget

Wall Street Journal

The White House has proposed a $3.9 trillion budget package with familiar proposals and almost $1 trillion in new taxes over the next 10 years. The budget for the year that begins Oct. 1, 2014 would be roughly $350 billion more than the federal government is projected to spend this fiscal year, and the increase comes almost entirely from parts of the budget that aren't set by Congress (Social Security payments, for example). The White House said its budget would produce a $564 billion deficit for the year that ends Sept. 30, 2014, which represents 3.1% of gross domestic product -and expects the deficit to fall to pre-crisis levels by 2018.

Read more here.

Georgia Signs on to STEM Teaching Initiative

Education Week

An initiative focused on better-preparing educators to teach STEM subjects gained traction this week, when Georgia signed on to the program, the first southern state to do so. Georgia Governor Nathan Deal announced on Monday that the Peach State would join the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship initiative, reported the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The fellowship aims to increase the number of outstanding teachers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Read more here.

We appreciate your continued support and involvement.

Sincerely,

The STEM Education Coalition

STEM Education Coalition

[email protected]
2000 M Street NW
Suite 520
Washington, DC 20036

Our Coalition's Co-Chairs

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