Chris Roe: Got STEM? Seems to be that everybody is talking about STEM these days, from Elmo on Sesame Street, and if you've seen recently, Elmo is now a STEM champion, which is terrific. Will.I.Am. There was a great rockumentary, I guess you could call it something like that, on TV recently with Justin Bieber, Will.I.Am, all the Hollywood stars, with first robotics. It was a ABC back-to-school special. It was amazing. President Obama has been inspirational in this area and really a champion in these efforts. But what is Science, Technology, Engineering and Math? Well, we've been, we've been talking a lot about that as a network over this last, well I guess probably about, year. So we've taken a look at what we're trying to define in terms of STEM Education. I'm happy to show you, this is our brand new website that's just rolling out this week. You can see STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering and Math but we'd like to think about this as the new tree of knowledge where each of those elements builds on each other, creates a strong foundation and is very rich in diversity and tapestry. So, if you roll over this tree, you can get some very interesting facts and features about STEM Education here in United States right now. So, we'll roll this website out over the next week and I encourage you to come and visit it, take a look at it. It's still in beta stage. We'd love some more feedback and ideas but we hope that this is gonna be a platform for each of you, as part of our network, to contribute. We've got an events calendar on here that's for the state and the nation. And we're gonna be putting up a lot of resources. There are already some amazing resources on the site but we wanna make this site much more interactive and dynamic to include each of you as members of our network. So, to back up a little bit, Warren talked a little bit about how we define STEM Education as being this mutlidisciplinary, interdisciplinary type of activity that includes lots of different, if I can get into the slide show here, includes lots of different ideas about integration and interdisciplinary. The definition that he just talked about, we actually put into a WORDLE, I don't know if any of you use this in your classes or in your workplace, but this is the definition that we came up with as a network for STEM. You can see it's pretty complex but I think it captures really well some of the complexity that is embedded in trying to create STEM-literate students. So, yes it is about disciplines but it's also about interdisciplinary, it's er, -narity. It's about applied learning. It's about problem-based approaches. So, if this is where we're trying to get to, for all students in California, what's the challenge that we have in front of us? Where are we at today? This is some data that was actually supplied by ACT, the national testing service to the business, higher education forum, who actually ran this data, to see, in terms of our twelfth graders in the United States, where do we shake out? We know, that if students are going to go into STEM, that they need to be interested in STEM careers but they also have to be proficient, largely in Math coz that's the usual, the key gate keeper that keeps most students out. So, when you run ACT's data, and this is on a large number of records, we see that when you look at the intersection of students who are both proficient in Math, means they're ready to arrive at college to take their college-level Math course and are interested in STEM, we only have 17% of all those students who are both proficient and interested. That's a very, very small amount. And if you break it down by men and women, that's 21% of men and 14% of women. Thank you. In the purple, we see a bigger challenge. We have 42% of students who are neither interested in STEM nor proficient in Math. And then we've got about 40% in the middle who are either interested but not proficient or proficient and not interested. So, you can begin to see the challenges that we're facing if we're going to move the needle on really creating a larger pathway, a larger pipeline of students who are capable and interested in going into STEM fields. When we look at this data according to race and ethnicity, we see some really even more troubling signs. On the far left, you'll see for African-American students, we have about 5 or 6 percent of African-American students who are both proficient and interested in STEM but we have more than 60% of students who are neither. For Latino students and for American-Indian students, it's similar. So, we are really gonna have to attack these gaps head on if we're going to make progress. And that's the reason why CSLNet was formed a little over a year ago. It was to really attack these problems head on and really ensure that students are prepared, that they have the right kinds of skills but they also have the right, they have interest in STEM. That's our first goal as an organization. Goal number one: Increased interest and competencies among all K through 14 students in California in STEM, STEM disciplines. Our second goal, which we just talked about, is really to ensure that those students are arriving at post-secondary education without the need for remediation. We have significant numbers of students in this state, that when they arrive at post-secondary education, when they arrive at a CSU campus or a community college where you see need to have remediation and this is a huge drain on our resources as a State and for individual students that they have to go back. I thought I was ready? Well, actually, no. You have to go back and retake those courses. That's a huge inefficiency for a system as large as we have here in the State of California. And our third goal then relates to actually the reason why you are all here today, which is to help build a network. It's an open-innovation network. It's an open network to anybody that wants to be part of this that can connect existing assets. We have a tremendous amount of assets around the State. Tom, you mentioned a number of them. We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to corporations in this state but we need to develop a network that can mobilize these resources, that can share these resources, that can help us innovate and scale what really works. And that's what we're gonna do over the next couple of days. Just a quick snapshot of what CSLNet looks like, and we're a young organization yet, but this is a little bit of the structure of how we're organized. On the left, you can see that we're really working from kindergarten, I would actually even add to pre-K, with a new grant that we have from the Heising Simons Foundation, as that critical point all the way through post-secondary education and into the workforce. Warren mentioned that we have a number of regional alliances that have already begun to affiliate with the network. There are six of them. I'm very pleased, very proud of this group of six. We have a number of other teams that are here today, that are bringing teams from their areas of state, that are interested in joining the network and we're looking forward to partnering with these organizations over the next six months to a year to help them get stronger, smarter. But the regional alliances are really designed to have local interests in mind and to become the local champions in their respective part of the state that can bring together, in a microcosm, each of these unique groups: K12 educators, the higher education community, the business and industry partners, the informal science and STEM organizations and the funders in their region to really get together around a game plan and action plan. Together, these regional networks are all working together. They're sharing ideas and resources and it's quite amazing to see the progress they're making and we're gonna have a panel tomorrow afternoon that's gonna go into much more detail with each of these six regional alliances, that are working on this, to talk about their successes but also their challenges. Together, these regional networks are helping us advance a set of statewide initiatives. We've heard a little bit about some of these but I'll tell you just a brief amount because we're gonna talk more about these during our breakout sessions tomorrow. STEM in out-of-school time is a huge opportunity in the state, thanks to some of the great leadership we've had right here in this room, with Tom and Linda at UC Davis, leading the California After-School Network, to really partner and reach potentially millions of students that are already in after-school programs that have the option to take and get high quality STEM offerings in that out-of-school space. We can potentially reach a couple of million students very easily by, by taking this collaborative public-private partnership. We're gonna have a panel, later this afternoon, that's gonna talk more about that. Our STEM teacher pathways initiative, we know that teachers are the critical component in terms of student interests and achievement in STEM. Teachers need to be prepared. They need to be able to handle the new technology. They need to be comfortable teaching science and these concepts. So, I'm pleased to announce that we've been named as a new partner in the 100k and 10 national effort that was spearheaded through the urging of the President to recruit 100,000, actually, recruit and train, 100,000 new STEM teachers over the next decade. So, CSLNet has been invited to join a group of 80 national partners in this effort. And the really good part is; now we have the opportunity to develop a full proposal for funding to this network, which is seeding with a lot of money for organizations to actually develop proposals and make some real change. So, we'll have the opportunity tomorrow, with our breakout sessions, to really advance some really critical thought work around what that initiative might look like. And then, as Warren mentioned, we're extremely pleased to announce the new grant award from the James Irvine Foundation, which will help us jumpstart two initiatives that have been in the planning stage. But now, we're actually gonna really get moving on them. One is focused on virtual STEM education. We know we've got the resources here in the state to really make some transformational changes in the classrooms and I think we can do that. The second area is engineering pathways. We know that employers in the state need more highly qualified engineers as future workers but we don't have systemic, we haven't thought about how engineering works its way all the way through from the workforce back down into post-secondary education into high school and all the way back into elementary grades. So, the idea of this initiative is to really think about those pathways and how we can really create, again, some systemic change that can actually scale across the entire state. The network is also working on a number of joint activities, policy advocacy, communications, knowledge-sharing, etcetera. But we'll talk more about that over the next days.
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