The Principal Investigator

The same day President Barack Obama called upon Americans to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world” during his second State of the Union address, the results of a nationwide survey probing what America’s kids understand about science were released – and the findings weren’t pretty.

The science tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in 2009 assessed close to 308,000 fourth- and eighth and over 11,000 twelfth graders questions on the physical, life and Earth sciences.

For fourth graders, questions varied in level of difficulty from identifying the benefit of adaptation for an organism to designing an experiment that would allow them to compare types of bird food. Questions geared toward students in grade twelve ranged from being able to compare weather data to tell which city has warmer temperatures to whether they could recognize a nuclear fission reaction.

Just thirty-four percent of fourth-graders, 30 percent of eighth-graders, and 21 percent of twelfth-graders reached the “proficient level” in science in 2009, according to the assessment. Twenty-eight percent of fourth-graders, 37 percent of eighth-graders and 47 percent of twelfth-graders failed to meet the basic achievement level for the exam, compared to a mere one to two percent of students at all grade levels demonstrated advanced understanding of science.

Because the test was changed from earlier versions in 2009, it’s hard to say how, if at all, American students’ science comprehension has changed since the last NAEP was performed in 2005. However, one thing is clear from the 2009 snapshot, said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a statement following the release of the findings: “[O]ur nation’s students aren’t learning at a rate that will maintain America’s role as an international leader in science. When only 1 or 2 percent of children score at the advanced levels on the NAEP, the next generation will not be ready to be world-class inventors, doctors, and engineers.”

The need for schools to accelerate learning in the sciences isn’t an issue the president is blind to, as he noted in Tuesday’s address, where he called for a greater emphasis on training the next generation of educators to help close the gap between American and foreign student performance in science and math.

“We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones,” Obama said during the State of the Union. “And over the next 10 years, with so many baby boomers retiring from our classrooms, we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science and technology and engineering and math,” or STEM fields.

But just how the President plans to achieve the goal to train 10,000 teachers in the STEM fields and whether it will work remains open to debate. ScienceInsider notes that the White House released a factsheet after the State of the Union that addressed the President’s intention to request an investment of $100 million to prepare STEM teachers as part of the budget. According to the White House document, $80 million would go towards beefing up teacher preparation for the classrooms to help train 10,000 more effective STEM teachers annually. The other $20 million would be invested in research to determine the best way to recruit, prepare and retain STEM teachers.

However, as blog points out, it’s unclear from the document “whether the $100 million is actually an increase over current levels or merely are refocusing of what’s now being spent by both agencies on such activities” – a point that won’t be clear until the president releases his budget proposal for fiscal year 2012. “It’s a crucial distinction at a time when House of Representatives Republicans are trying to roll back civilian discretionary spending – the 15% of the federal budget that includes all investments in research, education, and training, along with myriad other programs.”

We won’t have to wait too long to find out what kind of money is behind the president’s push to invest in STEM teachers and the future of science education in the U.S. On Friday, a White House official told Reuters that the president will release his budget proposal for FY 2012 Feb. 14.

With Republicans now controlling the U.S. House of Representatives, we can’t help but note the deepening anxiety in the scientific community over what the GOP’s promises of spending cuts might mean for the federal funding of science in 2011.

Though there was once hope for a $750 million increase in funding for the National Institutes of Health in 2011, for the time-being spending for the NIH is frozen at 2010 levels through March 4, thanks to a continuing resolution passed by the Congress in late December.

While some are keeping fingers crossed that the NIH budget in 2011 will stay at 2010 levels, there’s growing fear that even that may be a stretch, since the Republicans say they’ll stick to their guns on their promise to slash non-defense discretionary spending to levels seen in 2008.

Then there’s Representative Ralph Hall (R-Texas), the House Committee on Science and Technology’s new chairman, and the issue of what the passage of the America COMPETES Act of 2010 will and won’t mean for science funding in the years to come.

Hall raised a bit of a stink when the House went to vote on the America COMPETES Act of 2010, which reauthorizes spending for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Science Foundation. It also endorses a 10-year doubling of these institutes over the next decade and spells out how the NSF is to train the next generation of scientists. The bill passed the House on Dec. 21 and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

A team of reporters over at Nature News writes that Hall’s big beef with the reauthorization of America COMPETES had to do with the fact “he would rather scrutinize and vote on each science programme funded by the bill than give agencies … a wholesale increase.”

Even as President Barack Obama ran through a list of other achievements made during the lame duck session ahead of the holiday, ScienceInsider’s Eli Kintisch writes he was notably quiet about the passage of the bill. “That omission may signal trouble, as passage of the act doesn’t guarantee its funding,” writes Brandon Keim of Wired Science. “In January and February, Congress will decide how much money will actually be spent on it,” he writes.

Science’s Jeffery Mervis writes about how unlike the first COMPETES Act, which was backed by President George W. Bush and Democratic leaders alike in 2007, the reauthorization of the COMPETES Act “quickly became partisan, with Democrats calling it he best way to ensure long-term economic prosperity and Republicans complaining its cost would stifle job creation rather than encourage it.”

Republican’s haven’t exactly been quiet about their skepticism over the funding of some NSF projects. Last month, targeted the federal dollars going to NSF in the inaugural YouCut Citizen Review which asked Americans to weigh in on NSF grants they judged to be “wasteful or … don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.”

“Full funding of the COMPETES Act is among the most important things that Congress can do to ensure America’s continued leadership in the decades ahead, “John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote of the reauthorization of the COMPETES Act on the White House blog.

“As the Chairman of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, I look forward to working with my Committee to provide effective oversight, eliminate wasteful spending, and help ensure America’s leadership in innovation,” Hall wrote in a statement marking the convening of the 112^th Congress. “Advancements in science and technology will create jobs, keep the U.S. at the forefront of innovation, drive economic growth and give Americans a greater standard of living.”

“How will it be possible to invest more in research when many are calling for cutbacks?,” Nature News asked outgoing Chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.). “It’s going to be a challenge. We’re seeing a little increase in the public-sector research dollars and we’re seeing a decrease in private-sector funding. In the rest of the world many are trying to do both: their private and public sectors are investing more. We’re going to have to rally the private sector, the universities and everyone who cares about this to show its importance.”

One more thing, Gordon noted, when asked about tips for his successor: “Try to maintain the civility that allowed us to work together [in the past]. I tried to bring the Republicans in early to make them a part of the process. It made our bills better, and because of that we were able to go to the floor with a unified effort and pass legislation in a bipartisan manner — and if you want legislation to continue here, it needs to be bipartisan.”

Welcome to 2011! A lot of things have happened since we last posted here. One of your resolutions for 2011 is to post more often, and consistently on The PI. Unlike most of our resolutions, this one has survived New Year’s Day.