5
Education and Public Outreach
NASA is a major source of inspiration and engagement for the people of all ages and nationalities. While the draft Science Plan acknowledges the great importance of education and outreach in engaging young people and encouraging them to join the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, it also notes the proposed reorganization of STEM education programs that will eliminate funding to a broad range of highly successful programs within NASA. Under this reorganization, the development and coordination of NASA’s education and outreach programs will be transferred to the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. The draft Science Plan completely fails to articulate how this new strategy will be implemented. It falls unacceptably short in clarifying how NASA science content will be collected and translated into the education and outreach environment. It also fails to discuss the redistribution of roles and responsibilities between the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and NASA’s Education Office and fails to assess the impact of such redistribution on the maintenance of NASA science content in education and outreach activities and products and how such activities will increase the impact of STEM education programs.
While NASA is not primarily in the business of education (the agency spends less than 1 percent of its budget on education and outreach activities), its innovative and inspiring activities have long been leveraged to engage and educate students and the public alike about science and its value to the nation’s prosperity. In fact, NASA’s education activities are strongly linked to the mandate in NASA’s founding legislation, the Space Act of 1958, to “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination” of the results of its endeavors (P.L. 85-568).
NASA makes unique contributions to K-12 education in ways few other agencies can by inspiring and educating the next generation of students through the scientific and engineering discoveries made by NASA’s missions.1 These contributions are clearly demonstrated by the huge popularity of NASA websites (e.g., Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, Cassini, and the Mars rovers Opportunity and Curiosity). NASA also plays a critical role in STEM education by providing direct access to the front-line scientists and engineers who execute missions and make ground-breaking discoveries. NASA-supported scientists and engineers, and the missions they execute, stand as tangible examples to inspire students to study the STEM disciplines and provide opportunities to achieve the goal articulated in the National Research Council’s well-regarded Rising Above the Gathering Storm reports.2,3 NASA’s educational and public outreach activities also act to strengthen the skills of teachers through cooperative training and education programs. The agency’s activities are not limited to K-12 and informal education for the general public. They also encompass university-level educational goals and activities: undergraduate research opportunities and development of undergraduate and graduate-level coursework in space and Earth sciences.
NASA’s formal and informal education projects are rooted in educational research on best practices, conducted with rigorous evaluation, and strongly aligned with national science standards based on the recommendations contained in the report of the NRC’s Committee on a Conceptual Framework for New K-12 Science Education Standards.4 These programs are built around coordinated collaborations between education professionals, scientists, and engineers working together on mission teams that can then effectively work with the teachers and students in the classroom. Experience and independent
assessments clearly demonstrate that it is these close ties between the subject-matter experts and the students that provide the authentic experience with science, leading to deeper understanding of scientific subjects and process.5 Thus, the connection between the NASA scientists and engineers with deep content knowledge and education professionals is essential to achieve the highest quality educational programs; this connection cannot be “out-sourced” to other federal agencies.
The administration’s planned reorganization will eliminate existing, successful activities at NASA and, at present, there appears to be no plan for how the measured, positive impact of these programs will be preserved.6 Centralizing NASA’s current K-12 efforts at the Department of Education will likely make them more bureaucratic and inertia-ridden, almost certainly less effective, and with no clear cost savings to the U.S. public. Increased interaction between NASA and other agencies to coordinate its educational activities and apply cutting-edge research findings and practices to its education and public outreach is warranted. However, the draft Science Plan provides no clear indication of how support for the subject-matter experts and coordinating education professionals within NASA will be retained and will enable the educational objectives to be met. It is especially important that funding remain where the science is—in the Science Mission Directorate and the NASA Centers. NASA’s proven track record of inspiring, engaging, and educating people everywhere is the envy of government agencies worldwide. A reorganization that undermines these existing capabilities would seriously degrade the return on the NASA investment to taxpayers and be counterproductive, disruptive, and detrimental to a very successful program.
The draft Science Plan fails to provide a clear rationale for how it will implement the Administration’s planned realignment of education and outreach within the federal government. It also fails to articulate a plan to mitigate any negative impacts of such realignment. In particular, there is no clear delineation of how NASA science will continue to be incorporated in educational and outreach activities and products as roles and responsibilities are redistributed within NASA (from SMD to the Education Office) and within the federal government.
Recommendation: Given the administration’s proposed realignment of education and outreach activities, the Science Plan should clearly explain how NASA will retain the strong synergy between the Science Mission Directorate’s science and mission activities and the creation of education and outreach products and activities that engage students and the public and grow the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics pipeline.
NOTE AND REFERENCES
1. National Research Council (NRC). 2008. NASA's Elementary and Secondary Education Program: Review and Critique. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
2. National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine (NAS, NAE, IOM). 2007. Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
3. NAS, NAE, IOM. 2010. Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
4. NRC. 2012. A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
5. NRC. 2006. America’s Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
6. For an example of an award-winning SMD STEM activity scheduled for termination as a result of the Administration’s EPO reforms, see S.K. Boonstra and P. Christensen, Mars Student Imaging Project: Real research by secondary students, Science 339:920-921, 2013.
