In the United States, investment in the teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics has resulted in a rich variety of education innovations (programs, practices, models, and technologies). Despite many promising efforts, these innovations vary in their success in widescale implementation and sustainability across different educational contexts. This often-unrealized potential for broad scale impact leaves questions about how to achieve the major improvements to STEM education that many policy leaders seek.

Barriers to Implementation

Development of widespread and long-lasting innovations is hindered by several key factors, including the STEM education policy landscape, a decentralized public school system, and failures to recognize the contexts in which learning take places. While there are many examples of successful STEM education innovations, these individual cases do not avert the need for systems changes that could produce a durable educational system that can continuously improve itself through cycles of reflection, innovation, implementation, and improvement.

Key Factors


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Federal Funding

Although the federal role in Pre-K–12 STEM education is limited, some previous federal initiatives have shown promise and led to improvements. However, few innovation initiatives have been able to be sustained after federal funding is reduced or withdrawn—which is a common outcome.

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Decentralization

Often policy and decision makers (including teachers) at the various levels of the education system—school, district, state, and federal—may not share the same priorities and goals. The resulting misalignments pose challenges to implementing coherent educational innovations and are especially challenging for ...integrating these programs into existing structures. Policy instability and turnover of key enactors (such as district and school leaders and teachers) are also major threats to sustaining substantive innovations.

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Accountability

K–12 education is shaped by decades of accountability-based improvement efforts that began at the federal level with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. This legislation led to critical changes in the federal education policy landscape and significantly increased the role of states in holding schools responsible ... for the academic progress of all students. However, high stakes assessments have often narrowed the curriculum with an intense focus on English and Math and emphasis on teaching approaches that result in high performance on standardized tests.

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Failure to Recognize Contexts

A common point of failure for efforts to produce a Pre-K–12 STEM education innovation comes from a disconnect between the development and design of an innovation and the real places it will be implemented—isolation from critical feedback and guidance from those most familiar with the contexts and landscapes where an innovation will be attempted.

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Preschool and Out-of-School Time

The challenges of disconnection across levels of the formal education system are compounded for preschool and for learning in out-of-school programs. Each state designs its own preschool system ... through authorizing legislation and funding, and determines eligibility, quality standards, and monitoring. Because of this, the governance is highly variable and fragmented. For out-of-school programs, these sectors function almost independently from K–12 formal education although it can play an important role in the development and implementation of Pre-K–12 STEM education innovations.

Understanding and Achieving Scale


Within this complex, disconnected system, the challenge becomes how an innovation that is successful in a single location or for a particular group of students can be expanded to encompass the multiple dimensions of scale. Scaling is commonly understood to mean “spread;” while reaching more students in more places is an important aspect of this work, the report examines scale across spread, depth, sustainability, and ownership. [Learn More]

The report contains a compendium, developed by the Education Development Center, that identifies and reviews promising, evidence-based Pre-K–12 STEM education programs that have scaled and demonstrated evidence of impact. This compendium informed the report and illuminated some key characteristics of innovations that appear to facilitate scaling.

System-Level Changes

Even with innovations developed with attention to sustainability and various dimensions of scale, it remains unlikely that assembling an array of discrete innovative programs will result in the kind of robust, coherent, large-scale systemic change that is likely needed to create the kinds of major improvements in student outcomes that many policy leaders seek. The report outlines several factors that could enable or constrain growth at the system-level.

Overcoming Disconnects

Collaboration across multiple sites and iterative cycles of design across time can be a model for addressing the disconnect between the context where an innovation is developed and where it is implemented—especially when developed with input from practitioners about the needs of educators and students and with explicit attention to the varying contexts in which the innovation could be implemented.

Research Constraints

Research designs and methodologies that clearly show impact may push against designing flexible innovations. Once a program has scaled broadly, it is challenging and expensive to monitor and evaluate it across many different sites and learners. Understanding how to scale new education resources in ways that maintain their effectiveness over the long term while also adapting them in a variety...of contexts will require new investments in research initiatives specifically focused on scaling and sustainability, including the development of new methodologies.

Capacity Limitations

The preparation and development of preservice and in-service Pre-K–12 STEM educators and education leaders does not routinely include opportunities to develop general capacities to identify, evaluate, and implement innovations and adapt them for the needs of different students. This makes high-quality professional learning supports for those charged with enacting innovations essential. It is critical for... such learning opportunities to be ongoing and embedded in school culture, both to strengthen and sustain ambitious innovations over time and to prevent threats from turnover in enactors.

Recommendations


Based on findings and conclusions from the report, the committee developed a set of recommendations for federal, state and local actors. These recommendations from the report include:

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