Kentucky universities, colleges share grant

This from H-L:

KDE gets $2.1 for AP Expansion

LEXINGTON, Ky. --The National Science Foundation has awarded a $12.5 million technology research grant to several public universities and private colleges in Kentucky.

Gov. Steve Beshear announced the grant during an appearance in Lexington on Monday. The money will fund research into biotechnology, nanotechnology and cyber technologies.

Beshear said the University of Kentucky and University of Louisville will be the major recipients. Eastern Kentucky, Morehead State and Northern Kentucky universities will share in the grant, as will Berea and Centre colleges.

Beshear also announced a $2.1 million federal grant to the Kentucky Department of Education to help expand the number of Kentucky high schools offering advanced placement classes in math, science and English.

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science

This from the New York Times; Graphic by Victor Koen:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women...

U.S. Dominance in Science at Risk, Report Says

The United States remains the world leader in scientific and technological innovation, but its dominance is threatened by economic development elsewhere, particularly in Asia, the National Science Board said on Tuesday in its biennial report on science and engineering.

The country’s position is especially delicate, the agency said, given its reliance on foreign-born workers to fill technical jobs.

The board is the oversight agency for the National Science Foundation, the nation’s leading source of funds for basic research in the physical sciences.

The report, available at www.nsf.gov/statistics/indicators, recommends increased financing for basic research and greater “intellectual interchange” between researchers in academia and industry. The board also called for better efforts to track the globalization of manufacturing and services in the high-tech sector, and their implications for the American economy.

Over all, it said, surveys of science and mathematics education are both “disappointing and encouraging.” Fourth- and eighth-grade students in all ethnic groups showed improvement in math, the report said, but progress in science is far less robust. And knowledge gaps persist between demographic groups, with European- and Asian-Americans scoring higher than students from other groups....

This from the New York Times.

Teachers Say NCLB Has Changed Classroom Practice, but not always for the better

A new study tracking the classroom impact of the No Child Left Behind Act in California, Georgia, and Pennsylvania suggests that teachers are adjusting their teaching practices in response to the law—but not always in ways that educators and policymakers might want.

According to the three-year study, which is being conducted by the Santa Monica, Calif.-based RAND Corp., majorities of elementary and middle school science and math teachers in all three states report in surveys that they are making positive changes in the classroom by focusing on their states’ academic standards or searching for better teaching methods.

At the same time, though, sizable percentages of educators are also spending more time teaching test-taking strategies, focusing more narrowly on the topics covered on state tests, and tailoring teaching to the “bubble kids”—the students who fall just below the proficiency cutoffs on state tests.

“This is telling us we’re seeing both positive responses as well as responses that raise some concerns,” said Laura S. Hamilton, the study’s lead author and a senior behavioral scientist at RAND. Her study was among five reports spotlighted here this week at a conference organized by the prominent think tank.

With financing from the National Science Foundation, Ms. Hamilton and her research partners have been surveying teachers, principals, and superintendents in the three study states since 2002, the year the NCLB legislation became law, as well as conducting more in-depth studies in 18 districts spread across those states.

...The findings suggest that educators on the ground are viewing and responding to the federal law in complicated ways. For instance, across all three states, two-thirds or more of superintendents and principals and 40 percent to 60 percent of teachers said that staff focus on student learning had improved as a result of the new accountability pressures, but many also agreed that staff morale had declined.

This from Education Week.