WASHINGTON, D.C. – House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert
(R-NY) today delivered the following speech this morning at the
Congressional Breakfast for the 2003 Presidential Awardees for Excellence
in Mathematics and Science Teaching:

“It’s a pleasure – and indeed an honor – to be with you this morning.
It’s not every day that I get to speak to a profession’s acknowledged
‘cream of the crop.’ And your ‘crop’ is extra special because you’re the
folks who ensure that our nation will continue to lead and to prosper. To
carry my metaphor just one step further – you’re the crop that provides
the seeds for our future.

“It’s also a pleasure to speak to you this morning because, quite frankly,
Members of Congress don’t spend enough time with teachers. We talk about
teachers and teaching a lot – more than ever, perhaps. But we don’t spend
enough time truly listening to you, the people on the front lines of our
educational system.

“I’d like to hear ideas and questions from you this morning, as well, but
first let me make some relatively brief remarks about the context of your
visit to Washington.

“The first thing to be said is that this is a critical time to be in
Washington. The debate on the fiscal year 2005 budget is just beginning,
and this is likely to be one of the most stringent budgets in recent
memory. What to do about education funding will be a central feature of
the debate.

“And I needn’t mention, I’m sure, that this is a Presidential election
year, and it’s safe to say that both candidates will be making education
central to their platforms. And, as you know better than I, the education
debate is also becoming even more central as the No Child Left Behind Act
is fully implemented.

“But, actually, education has been an especially high profile issue here
for at least the past three years.

“The President put education on the “front burner” early in his term, and
that had real impact. Both the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA) reauthorization, and the ‘Mathematics and Science Partnerships
Act,’ which I introduced, were signed into law.

“Education funding has increased in each of the past three years. In
fact, overall funding for the Department of Education has grown by $13.8
billion during that period, with the largest increases going to the Title
I program for disadvantaged students, special education and teacher
quality.

“But all this attention may be a cause for concern as well as
satisfaction. First, everyone is focusing on education because of a sense
that our educational system – one of the great inventions of American
democracy – a sense that our educational system is failing. Obviously,
there are plenty of schools and teachers and students who are doing well,
but the system as a whole seems deficient.

“The evidence is all around us, but perhaps the best known damning
evidence comes from the TIMSS exams, the Third International Mathematics
and Science Survey. The TIMSS work in 1995, supplemented by a follow-up
in 1999, found that U.S. fourth graders perform pretty well in math and
science, but the performance drops to around the international average by
the eighth grade and is near or at the bottom of the barrel in twelfth
grade.

“One can raise legitimate questions about the accuracy and meaning of the
TIMSS international comparisons, but the decline over the years of
schooling alone is cause for alarm. We have simply got to do better.

“But how? Well, here’s the second way in which all this relatively
new-found Washington attention may be cause for concern. Intervention
from Washington can make things worse as well as better.

“I don’t say this from a conservative perspective. I’m a proud,
card-carrying moderate. I think the federal government has an important
role to play in K-12 education.

“I think we need more federal money, not less, flowing into our local
school districts. And my guess is that when all the debates on next
year’s budget come to a close, that will be, once again, where we end up.

“But there are still many policy questions that need to be answered before
we’re sure that federal policies will lead to improvement in education.

“For example, how can we ensure that technology actually improves
education? The government’s focus needs to shift from merely providing
access to technology to figuring out how to use it in a manner that truly
offers education, not distraction or empty entertainment or even mere
information.

“I’m not sure how we do that. I don’t think that block granting education
funds – which may be a good idea in many ways – will necessarily resolve
this particular question. There’s no reason to believe that state or
local authorities will be any more creative in their use of technology if
left to their own devices (so to speak).

“Or another question: how can we use exams in a way that promotes
critical thinking, retention of knowledge and a love of learning?

“The current mania for measurement is a necessary antidote to an era
marked by a lack of accountability. But the wrong kinds of tests will not
only mask evidence of a continuing decline; they could contribute to it.

“We need to think more seriously about this issue. Too often, the
discussion in Washington about testing degenerates into an ideological
debate – an unusual one, though, where the left and the right unite – each
for their own reasons – in opposing anything that smacks of a national
testing requirement.

“But it seems to me that the issue is not whether to have tests, but what
kind of tests to have and how to use the results. And there’s remarkably
little discussion about those matters.

“Another question: are we taking full advantage of the latest research on
teaching and learning? The author Kurt Vonnegut once defined the
‘information revolution’ as the remarkable fact that people could actually
know what they’re talking about, if they really want to. That
‘revolution’ he said should supersede centuries of ‘mere guessing.’ But
we seem often to still be in the ‘mere guessing’ stage when we talk about
curriculum and teaching methods.

“And a final question: what can we be doing to help attract more top
students into teaching science and math? It seems to me that this is the
most critical question of all. No curriculum, no technology, no test will
improve education unless we have the best-qualified, best trained people
teaching our students. We need to ensure that we have future generations
of Presidential Teacher Awardees.

“I don’t think that we’ve thought enough about this question, although
things are looking up.

“Years ago, I began proposing to give federal scholarships to top math and
science majors who agree to teach for a set number of years in return for
the tuition assistance. Senator Rockefeller and I got such a program
enacted a decade or so ago, but it was never funded. Until the President
signed the “Math and Science Partnerships Act” at the end of 2002.

“For the current fiscal year, NSF will spend about $8 million on the
scholarship program. That’s just a start – the program would cost $20
million a year when fully funded – but finally everyone has rallied around
the idea.

“Obviously, a scholarship program will be able to reach only a small
number of students, and not every top math and science undergraduate would
make a successful teacher. But the federal government needs to start
sending a stronger signal that teaching is an honorable – indeed, a
critical – career.

“I don’t mean any of these issues I’ve raised to be rhetorical questions.
They are tough questions to which we don’t seem to have ready answers. My
goal is simply to ensure that we don’t sweep these questions under the
rug.

“In the Science Committee, we continue to explore these questions as we
continue to work to improve the education programs of the National Science
Foundation (NSF). Our Committee oversees NSF, but does not have any
control over the Department of Education – two agencies that should be
coordinating their efforts much more closely, by the way.

“That’s also improving – a bit. NSF and the Education Department are
working together on the Math and Science Partnerships that are designed to
bring the expertise and resources of universities and businesses to bear
on the problems faced by K-12 teachers like you. NSF and the Department
each have their own particular attributes and assets, but they must
coordinate their work to get the most ‘bang for the buck.’

“In any event the Partnership program at NSF, which was proposed by the
President, is a promising idea. That program is receiving $140 million
this year, and would receive $200 million if fully funded. I believe our
universities – and not just in their education departments – ought to be
doing much more to help K-12 teachers.

“Unfortunately, the Administration has proposed what is frankly a crazy
idea for fiscal 2005 – shutting down the NSF program and merging it with a
different partnership program at the Department of Education. It looks as
of now that the idea of moving the program has no support in Congress. I
will certainly do everything I can to fight it.

“What’s at stake is not a turf battle between two agencies – it’s the
nature of a successful program. At NSF, the program focuses on bringing
higher education together with school districts, and the program funds
only those applications that pass a rigorous peer review. The NSF program
funds innovative efforts involving a variety of subjects at different
levels of schooling. The Department of Education program is distributed
by formula, is geared to disseminating approaches that already exist, and
is focused on middle-school mathematics. Real benefits would be lost by
moving the program.

“But all the debate simply underscores the point I started with – you’re
in Washington at precisely the right time. We need your guidance and your
experience to figure out how to turn our good intentions toward education
into good results.

“In science and math education, those results need to include an educated
and scientifically literate populace; a large, diverse and well trained
workforce; and an intellectually curious culture.

“That’s a tall order. And it’s one we’re going to have to address
together. For as the writer H.G. Wells said long ago, ‘Civilization
becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’ I look
forward to hearing your ideas. Thank you.”