Mark Your Calendars: NASSMC 2007 Annual Coalition Directors' Meeting, April 12-13

Registration information for the April 12-13 NASSMC Annual Coalition Directors' Meeting is available on the NASSMC website. This year's theme is Sharing What Works: Success & Opportunity, and the agenda includes speakers, a panel discussion, and an extended Directors' Forum focusing on coalitions' major activities and successes.

In Washington, interest in working with the coalitions has never been higher. Your efforts have raised both the visibility and credibility of state-based STEM coalitions. It is time to look at where we have been and what has worked (and what hasn’t). State coalitions have significant accomplishments to showcase. There has been progress and improvement in STEM education. Perhaps the current national climate may be in part an indication of that progress.

Please complete the entire conference form and submit with payment to NASSMC. A complete registration entitles you to admission to the NASSMC 2007 Annual Coalition Directors' Meeting. The final registration deadline is April 1, 2007.

For registration and accommodations information, as well as the draft conference agenda, please visit (and bookmark!) the 2007 Annual Coalitions Directors' Meeting webpage. Please note that rooms are no longer available at the conference hotel so please email registration@nassmc.org so that lodging can be arranged for you.

If you have special needs or have any questions, please notify NASSMC at registration@nassmc.org.

We look forward to seeing you in April!

National Survey Indicates that Schools and Districts Prefer to Partner with State Business Coalitions

According to Community/School Partnerships: A National Survey, rural, suburban, and urban schools and districts all value potential partnerships with business coalitions above other types of partnerships. This survey offers insights into how community/school partnerships are structured and what types of relationships schools and districts have established.

• When asked to rank the importance of current partners to their efforts, respondents put individual businesses first, parent organizations second, and booster clubs third.
• When asked to rank the partners with whom they’d most like to develop relationships, business coalitions came in first, followed by individual businesses and regional/national foundations.
• Businesses are listed most frequently by schools and districts as supporters (82.2%), with parent organizations mentioned nearly as often (76.1%).

DeHavilland Associates and NSFA conducted this survey between January 25 and February 6, 2007. The survey was promoted via email to a list of 31,000 superintendents and principals and the newsletter lists of the National School Foundation Association and the Business/Education Partnership Forum. Notices were sent out on January 25 and February 1. The only incentive offered to respondents was a copy of the survey results.

Community/School Partnerships: A National Survey is available for download from DeHavilland Associates.

DeHavilland Associates is a consulting and communications firm that helps its clients understand and connect with the K-12 community. The company designs, manages, and evaluates outreach campaigns and partnership programs for its corporate and nonprofit clients and creates original initiatives to help educators and education stakeholders establish and strengthen dialogue for the benefit of public education.

The Center for Public Education's Round-up of National Education Report Cards

The Center for Public Education has identified more than a dozen national "report cards" on various aspects of education from pre-kindergarten through college. While there is some overlap among many of them, they have different emphases and use different criteria for rating performance. The Center for Public Education developed this guide to national report cards in order to help visitors become better consumers of the information they offer. They provide a quick overview of several major report cards and describes who publishes the report card, what it is grading, and the criteria used for making judgments.

View the Round-up of National Education Report Cards here.

Highlights of the FY 2008 Education Budget Request

The President's request of $56 billion makes investments in the core priorities of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) by increasing funding to $24.5 billion, up 41 percent since 2001. The President proposes an overall increase of $1.2 billion to help fund his priorities for NCLB reauthorization this year. Among the highlights are the following requests:

• $1.2 billion increase for Title I, up 59 % since 2001, to increase high school share of Title I allocations and expand the impact and rigor of NCLB standards into high school.
• $500 million in first-time School Improvement Grants for states to support school improvement and increase support for Local Educational Agencies improvement efforts.
$300 million for Promise Scholarships ($250 million) and Opportunity Scholarships ($50 million) to expand school choice options for students in low-performing schools.

• $365 million for American Competitiveness Initiative, including:
• $250 million for Math Now ($125 million each for Elementary Math Now and Middle School Math Now)
• $90 million increase for Advanced Placement/IB
• $25 million for Adjunct Teacher Corps
• $199 million for the Teacher Incentive Fund for locally developed incentive-based compensation and assignment systems

• Increase maximum Pell Grant to $4,600 in 2008, (up $550 for largest increase since 1974) and to $5,400 by 2012, with 5.5 million recipients in 2008.
• Raise Academic Competitiveness Grants (ACG) by 50%, from $750 to $1,125 for first-year students and from $1,300 to $1,950 for second-year students.

Resources & Reports: The Aspen Institute, The Nation's Report Card, AAAS, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Mathematics Awareness Month, Center on Education Policy, The Sloan Consortium

The Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind Issues Recommendations
The commission issued 75 specific recommendations to NCLB concerning accountability, highly qualified teachers, school improvement, and standards. The Commission is a bipartisan, independent effort dedicated to improving the No Child Left Behind Act. It has spent the last year traveling across the country, listening to the experiences of students, educators, parents, administrators, state and district officials, experts and policymakers in order to develop this report which outlines specific and actionable recommendations for establishing a high-achieving education system. The full report is available for download here.

AAAS Preliminary Analysis of R&D in the FY 2008 Budget
The newly released AAAS Preliminary Analysis of R&D in the FY 2008 Budget is a comprehensive first look at R&D funding in the budget, and kicks off AAAS coverage of R&D in the federal budget process. All figures are preliminary and will be revised in later releases. The analysis includes new 2007 figures based on AAAS estimates of R&D in the joint funding resolution currently before Congress, and is supplemented by detailed funding tables and charts on the new "FY 2008 R&D" page on the AAAS R&D web site. In coming weeks, details of agency R&D budgets, additional budget information, and revised estimates of R&D will become available.

Click to access interactive map.

Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness
This U.S. Chamber of Commerce Center for American Progress report gives states poor marks for attention to educational effectiveness. Using existing studies to determine how well states are preparing students for college and the workplace, researchers looked at the proportion of high school students passing Advanced Placement tests, the percentage of students who graduate from high school in four years with a traditional diploma, and the percentage of ninth graders who finish high school in four years and go on to college. The full report and other information—including an overview, major findings, how the report was created, the conclusion, methodology, FAQs and state report cards—can be found here.

Mathematics and the Brain: April is Mathematics Awareness Month
Mathematics Awareness Month is held each year in April and is sponsored each year by the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics to recognize the importance of mathematics through written materials and an accompanying poster that highlight mathematical developments and applications in a particular area. Its goal is to increase public understanding of and appreciation for mathematics. Mathematics Awareness Month began in 1986 as Mathematics Awareness Week. Each year a national theme is selected and theme materials are developed and distributed. Summaries and results about each year's activities are collected each spring. The theme for 2007 is Mathematics and the Brain.

State Implementation of Supplemental Educational Services under the No Child Left Behind Act
This Center on Education Policy report describes state efforts to carry out the supplemental educational services requirements. It is the first in a series of CEP publications on the NCLB implementation that will report on the results of our 2006 surveys of officials from 50 state educational agencies and a national sample of school districts, as well as case study research. Download the report here.

Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006 - Southern Edition
This report based on data collected for the fourth annual national report on the state of online education in U.S. higher education. Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group in partnership with the College Board, the report, based on responses from over 2,200 colleges and universities, examines the nature and extent of online learning among U.S. higher education institutions. The sixteen southern states represent over one-third of total online enrollments, with over 1.1 million students taking at least one online course in the fall 2005 term. More than 99 percent of the very largest southern institutions (more than 15,000 total enrollments) have some online offerings, which is more than double the rate observed for the smallest institutions. In 2003, 56 percent of academic leaders in the sixteen southern states rated the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those in face-to-face. That number is now 65 percent. Only 3.3 percent of southern Chief Academic Officers agreed that there are no significant barriers to widespread adoption of online learning. Download the PDF version here.

Nominations Sought for 2007 Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching

The Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST) are the Nation's highest honors for teachers of mathematics and science. The Awards recognize highly qualified K-12 teachers for their contributions in the classroom and to their profession. Since 1983, more than 3,700 outstanding teachers have been recognized for their contributions to mathematics and science education. The PAEMST program is administered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on behalf of the White House.

Eligible candidates can be from the 50 states and Washington, DC; Puerto Rico; the Department of Defense Schools; and the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Applications for 2007 are due by May 1, 2007. To nominate a 7th-12th grade teacher, visit www.paemst.org.

Barbarian Science

NASSMC has received a limited quantity of Executive Director Jim McMurtray 1999 book, Barbarian Science. These books will be sold with 100% of the proceeds going to NASSMC's general fund. The $20 cost includes shipping. Published by Town Square Books (the Jackson State University Press), Barbarian Science was originally written for marketing to universities offering courses in the literature of science through the English Departments. It later reached a secondary audience in colleges of education.

This short book (100 pages) is about science literacy in America and the need to make science accessible to the general population. The current national attention toward making science available to a larger population has made the book more timely now than when it was written. Barbarian Science has been used in universities across the country and is still sold in college book stores here and there.

To order Barbarian Science, please send your check, payable to NASSMC, at $20 per copy, to Deborah Jones, National Alliance of State Science and Mathematics Coalitions, 1840 Wilson Blvd., Suite 200, Arlington, VA 22201-3000.

Of Interest...

+ Paleontologists discover new mammal from mesozoic era: An international team of American and Chinese paleontologists has discovered a new species of mammal that lived 125 million years ago during the Mesozoic Era, in what is now the Hebei Province in China. The new mammal, documented in the March 15 issue of the journal Nature, provides first-hand evidence of early evolution of the mammalian middle ear—one of the most important features for all modern mammals.

From December 2003 to December 2005, MODIS captured these two images showing a draw down of water in a subglacial lake (left)and the rise of water in the same subglacial lake (right). Color coded ICESat tracks across both images indicate rises and falls in the elevation of the lake's water. Credit: NASA

+ NASA satellites unearth Antarctic 'plumbing system,' clues to leaks: With the aid of the satellites, Bindschadler and a team of scientists led by research geophysicist Helen Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif., revealed a new three-dimensional look at an extensive network of waterways beneath an active ice stream that acts like a natural "plumbing system", and clues to how "leaks" in the system impact the world's largest ice sheet and sea level. They also documented for the first time changes in the height of the ice sheet's surface as proof the lakes and channels nearly half a mile of solid ice below filled and emptied.

+ Finding cures from corals: Surrounded by countless predators, many of the ocean's sedentary animals rely upon powerful toxins for defense. NSF-funded researcher William Fenical and his colleagues have shown that in addition to defeating hungry sea creatures, these potent chemicals can actually help humans defeat disease.

+ Saturn moon 'sandblasts' its neighbours white: Particles spewed from Saturn's moon Enceladus are sandblasting neighbouring moons, leaving them sparklingly bright, a new study reveals. If life exists beneath the surface of Enceladus, these particles might be spreading it to other moons, scientists say. Icy Enceladus is just 513 kilometres wide, but it spews ice particles into space to create Saturn's giant E ring, which is hundreds of thousands of kilometres wide.

The E8 root system consists of 240 vectors in an 8-dimensional space. Those vectors are the vertices (corners) of an 8-dimensional object called the Gosset polytope 421. In the 1960s, Peter McMullen drew by hand a 2-dimensional representation of the Gosset polytope 421. This image was computer generated by John Stembridge, based on McMullen's drawing. Credit: American Institute of Mathematics

+ A Mathematical Solution for Another Dimension: Ever since 1887, when Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie discovered the mathematical group called E8, researchers have been trying to understand the extraordinarily complex object described by a numerical matrix of more than 400,000 rows and columns. Now, an international team of experts using powerful computers and programming techniques has mapped E8—a feat numerically akin to the mapping of the human genome—allowing for breakthroughs in a wide range of problems in geometry, number theory and the physics of string theory.

+ THEMIS will judge what causes highly dynamic aurora: The purpose of NASA’s Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission is to understand the physical instability (trigger mechanism) for magnetospheric substorms. On a clear night over the far northern areas of the world, you may witness a hauntingly beautiful light display in the sky that can disrupt your satellite TV and leave you in the dark. The eerie glow of the northern lights seems exquisite and quite harmless. Most times, it is harmless. The display, resembling a slow-moving ribbon silently undulating in the sky, is called the aurora. It is also visible in far southern regions around the South Pole.

+ Origami optics promise better spy cameras: The cameras in cell phones and robot spy planes could become more powerful by using optics folded like origami, researchers report. To zoom in on distant objects, professional cameras use telephoto lenses. These conventionally must be super long to bend and focus light. Since cell phones are small, they can only use digital zoom, leading to images "that are blurry, dark and low contrast," explained researcher Joseph Ford, an optical engineer at the University of California at San Diego. To make cameras thin and still capable of taking quality pictures, doctoral candidate Eric Tremblay at the University of California at San Diego, along with Ford and their colleagues, are replacing traditional lenses with inventions dubbed "folded optics.

+ Earth's hum linked to coastal waves: The Earth's hum comes from the bottom of the sea and not from turbulence in the atmosphere, says a US researcher, backing a novel theory put forward in 2004. The hum is a low rumble continually present in the ground even when there are no earthquakes happening, but is detectable only by very sensitive seismometers. Its frequency is near 10 millihertz, below the range of human hearing.

+ Robotic exoskelton could help people walk: A robotic ankle exoskeleton developed at the University of Michigan helps people regain limb function; it is controlled by the wearer's own nervous system. As the subject attempts to walk forward, electrical impulses from the brain tell muscles how to move. People with spinal injuries, as well as some neurological disorders, may have problems walking because these impulses do not arrive in a coordinated fashion, or because the impulses are too weak.

+ Missing: a huge chunk of the earth's crust: A team of British scientists has set sail on a voyage to examine why a huge chunk of the earth's crust is missing, deep under the Atlantic Ocean—a phenomenon that challenges conventional ideas about how the earth works. The 20-strong team aims to survey an area some 3,000 to 4,000 metres deep where the mantle —the deep interior of the earth normally covered by a crust kilometres thick—is exposed on the sea floor. Track the research team's progress online.

Girih strapwork pattern (left) on an interior archway in the Sultan's Lodge in the Green Mosque in Bursa, Turkey (1424 C.E.). At right, a reconstruction of its precise geometry. Images courtesy of W. B. Denny

+ Medieval Islamic mosaics used modern math: The swirling Arabesque ceramic tiles used in medieval Islamic mosaics and architecture were produced using geometry not understood in the West until the 1970s, a new study suggests. The inlaid patterned tiles grace the walls of many structures worldwide, in patterns of mind-boggling intricacy called "girih." Historians have always assumed that medieval architects meticulously developed the patterns with basic tools. But manuals written by the architects to share tricks of the trade actually include model tiles—like geometrical tracings—that helped lay out the complex "girih" designs [image] on a large scale, researchers discovered recently. The efficient system eventually allowed artisans to produce "quasicrystalline" wall patterns—a concept that was discovered by Western mathematicians just three decades ago.

+ A brainscan can tell whether you're about to add or subtract two numbers: Just by looking at the pattern of firing in your brain, neuroscientists can tell whether you are thinking about moving your hand to the left or to the right. They can tell if you have seen something you didn't even know you saw, and, now it seems, they can tell which mathematical operation you secretly have in mind.

+ Universe contains more calcium than expected: The universe contains one and a half times more calcium than previously assumed. This conclusion was drawn by astronomers of the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, after observations with ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory. This research offers scientists new insights in the formation history of the elemental building blocks of the cosmos in which supernovae play a crucial role.

+ Domesticated chillies may have seasoned cuisine more than 6,000 years ago: According to an analysis published in Science, farmers in the Americas domesticated the chilli pepper more than 6,000 years ago. In some regions the desire for its flavour even predated the use of pottery.