From American Institute of Biological Sciences
The administration’s fiscal year 2005 budget request includes a 17.9 percent cut to the National Science Foundation’s Education and Human Resources (EHR) Directorate. Overall, the directorate would lose $167.62 million, putting the FY 2005 total request for the directorate at $771.36 million. The majority of this cut (-$139.17 million) comes from the administration’s proposal to eliminate NSF’s Math and Science Partnership Grant Program. The President has proposed moving these funds to the Department of Education where they would be disbursed to states based on population rather than by NSF’s competitive, peer review process. This proposal could stifle the development of innovative practices for improving student achievement in math and science, the purpose of the NSF program. A February 10th statement issued by the presidents of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, the American Association of Universities and the American Council on Education, urges House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-NY) "to oppose the proposal&to transfer funds for the Math-Science Partnership (MSP) program from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to the Department of Education." The presidents further state, "It is our belief that the current system, in which parallel and complementary MSP programs exist and are funded at both the NSF and the Department of Education, is the most desirable and effective approach to address our nation’s math-science education needs.Other areas of the EHR budget that will be trimmed if the Presidents budget is enacted include $10.44 million (-11.1%) less for EPSCOR, $39.51 million (-18.6%) less for Elementary, Secondary and Informal Education from the phase-out of Education System Reform, and a $7.91 million (-6.8%) cut to the Human Resources Development accounts. Three programmatic areas that would receive increased funding in FY 2005 are the Division of Undergraduate Education (+$3.35 million, or 2.2%), Graduate Education (+$17.93 million, or 11.5%), and Research, Evaluation and Communication (+$8.13 million, or 12.4%). NSF budget documents note that, "Faced with difficult choices for competing and meritorious investments, EHRs FY 2005 Budget Request emphasizes the core areas of attracting and preparing U.S. Citizens for STEM careers (including increasing support for the Integrative Graduate Education and research Traineeship, graduate Research Fellowship and Graduate Fellows in K-12 Education programs)".
Those who support the scientifically demonstrated reform model aspect of No Child Left Behind should be outraged at the the above. The problem with school reform for too long has been that it has not centered on demonstrating the effectiveness of a reform model. Too often reform models were promoted based on little systematic evidence.
One of the serious antidotes to the proliferation of reform models without evidence was the NSF programs that sought to rigorously study models of math and science education reform.
The President is proposing in the above to get rid of the peer reviewed competitive process that weeds out weak proposals to simply give the money out by population of the state. This means the money will not be tied to rigorous studies of school achievement and will simply be doled out on population. Now, more than anytime in the past, we need strong evidence supported models of educational reform. This will undercut a key program that supported such efforts.