Senator STAFFORD. Thank you very much, Senator. Senator STAFFORD. În seriousness, we can assure you that this subcommittee will review very carefully what you have said and the bill that you will be introducing, and we do intend to come up with a bill at the subcommittee level that combines the best features of all of the legislation that is placed in front of us. So, we are very grateful to you for helping us this morning at a very busy time for all of us. Senator CHILES. Well, I know this subcommittee has a great deal of expertise and I am sure that you are going to produce a bill that will be sound and beneficial to the problem that we are trying to address. Senator PELL. It would help us, too, if you got the main points of your bill to us as quickly as possible so we can crank it in. Senator CHILES. All right, sir. Senator PELL. I would also add that we very much appreciate the role you play in the Congress both in the Budget and in the Appropriations Committee. So, to get it enacted, we appreciate your position, and afterwards, to make it alive and fleshed out, we appreciate your position. Senator CHILES. Thank you. Senator STAFFORD. Thank you very much, Senator. Now, we will resume the panel that was interrupted for Senator Chiles. Gentlemen, our apologies for the interruption. This is a morning of interruptions for all of us. We are going to have a vote on an important treaty in about 7 minutes, which particularly will involve my colleague, Senator Pell, since he is the ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee. We will have to stand down during that period long enough for this Senator to get over to the floor, vote, and get back here. So, I will apologize in advance for that second interruption, and without anything further, I guess the bell system was explained. Senator PELL. It was. It would be nice if we could finish the panel before you had to leave for the vote. Senator STAFFORD. We will try, but that seems a little doubtful. In any event, Dr. Rutherford, our apologies, and we will start with you again. We understand that staff has advised you that there is a 5-minute limit, if that is agreeable, gentlemen. We never do have enough time to do justice to statements. Your full statements will be in the record and any material you wish to have included along with them. That stop-and-go thing is something Senator Pell and I see every morning trying to get to work. It just seems like the lights we are looking at take 5 minutes to change. Anyway, Dr. Rutherford Dr. RUTHERFORD. The first point is really to commend the notion that Congress is at work; I think that is good. It is important that you report out a bill and get it through the process this year. Generally speaking, the emphasis of the bills seems to me to be the cor rect one. My second point is, however, that as I look at those bills, I find them, in fact, to be insufficient, incomplete and not to have the characteristics that Senator Chiles just described. There still is not yet enough thought in them. There are things missing. The magnitude is not yet up to the nature of the task we have before us. As much as we might like to reform American education with a few cents here and there, in fact it is going to take a very large investment. The bills are not complete; they leave out children; they leave out talent identification. There is not enough emphasis on research; not enough emphasis on the searching out of minority children; not enough on modernization and on curriculum develop ment. But it is a first step, and I think if it is recognized that what Congress is up to this year is getting something started in this area, with this recognition that we do not have before us a comprehensive plan, then I think we are moving in the right direction and can look to the future. Then I would like to turn, in that regard, to the third point, which has to do with the problem of mobilizing resources and managing them. Most of the bills really adopt the plans we have had before. There is talk about the Department of Education and about the National Science Foundation, and how they can coordinate their efforts with 50 States and 15,000 school districts and with libraries and colleges and universities. That is one of the things about our country; it is very difficult to organize ourselves, to form a direction, to have coherence, and to stick with something long enough to get the job done. In that regard, then, I would like to offer merely suggestions of the direction that the discussion might take over the next year or so, and the thought that we look for other kinds of solutions to the resource problem and the management problem. Let me offer two examples. One, I am referring to under the name of the Corporation for Educational Assistance, an agency or an entity to be modeled something after the Reconstruction Finance Corporation or the MAC that got New York on its feet, or perhaps the World Bank; that is, the notion of a place where we accrue the capital that it would take to make an investment in the recapitalization of the educational system to bring about the kind of change that is needed in teaching and learning. Such an organization, headed by a strong team of people from business, labor, education and science, operated by a CEO of the equivalent of our best people in business and education, would do some of the things that Senator Chiles mentioned. They would have money available for grants and for loans to States. The States, therefore, instead of having to deal with block grants, which generally are directionless, could, in fact, design programs that would be comprehensive, deal with the problem of teacher salaries, deal with the length of the school year, deal with the curriculum, or whatever was important in that State. The Corporation for Educational Assistance could provide, then, the additional capital funds that are necessary to carry out an authentic and sophisticated State plan. The money for this fund might very well come from an annual appropriation from the Congress, the issuance of interest-paying bonds, contributions from the private sector that would qualify for special tax credits, and rev enues from earmarked taxes on electronic arcade games, which are a multibillion dollar enterprise in America that adds a little to education and utilizes the most sophisticated technologies and the intellect of many of our best people. It seems to me that those funds ought to legitimately and appropriately go back into the educational scene, and it would not at all be onerous when one understands where all those quarters come from to operate those games. This corporation then would review plans and provide funds for long-term investment in the educational system to provide the decades-long effort it takes to really reform the system in all of its parts. Now, that would include, in my judgment, finally building a modern communications system in this country to serve the children and teachers; that is to say, an educational communications system that exploits the state of the art. To that end, I think we should consider EDSAT, the educational satellite, as the center of a national system in which every school and college in the land would have a land receiver-they are not expensive these days-and be connected by cable; that is to say, in which every educational institution, through EDSAT, would be connected to themselves and to the finest scientists and materials developers in the land 24 hours a day. These materials would be developed, presented and copied on site, utilized at the school's will for the students and for the education of teachers. I would point out to you that there are not enough dollars available to train and retrain all of our teachers simply by the institute method. I offer these not as pat solutions, but to show that one has to investigate some new mechanisms and ways of thinking about how to obtain the resources and utilize them to do what needs doing. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Dr. Rutherford follows:] TESTIMONY TO THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION, ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES OF THE U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND HUMAN RESOURCES PRESENTED BY DR. F. JAMES RUTHERFORD AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE MARCH 8, 1983 Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to testify and give you my views on science and engineering education. My testimony does not represent the position of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on these issues. Certainly the strength of our economy in the decades ahead depends greatly and directly on two things. First, we depend on the quality of our basic and applied science. Ours is a society that from the very beginning has based its progress on the application of scientific knowledge to real world affairs, and this dependence is increasing. Secondly, our future depends upon how inventive we are at developing new technologies and using them for productive and humane purposes. High quality science and technology are essential to the United States. How we accomplish strengthening of our economy depends, in turn, upon the education of our citizens. We can do good science and use new technologies inventively only if we are all properly educated. Today, this means that our citizens must have a reasonable grasp of science, along with problem-solving skills, and the ability to understand the relationship of this knowledge and these skills to technology and productivity. It must be noted that this kind of science and technology competency is becoming ever more important for all of our people, not just those relatively few who will become scientists or engineers. To produce technologically literate citizens will require involving the entire educational system from kindergarten through post-graduate education, and it will cut across all disciplines and fields. The effort must take place not only in our colleges and universities, but also in other community institutions that serve youth and adults. The educational system, in other words, must be redesigned to take science and mathematics education seriously at every level and for all students. The future worker, the future manager, or the future journalist or legislator needs to be scientifically and technologically literate, just as our scientists and engineers must be humanistically educated. We can have a strong educational system capable of providing such education only if we are prepared as a nation to make a substantial investment over a long period of years. Quick fixes and lopsided or incomplete solutions will not serve the nation or solve the science education problems that have been recognized over the last decade or so. In the sections below, I will address four issues. These are: what needs to be done in order to revamp and maintain our science education capability; the nature of the Federal role in achieving that purpose; a brief analysis of current approaches to the teacher shortage problem; and suggestions concerning the magnitude of the capital investment required and how the resources can be mobilized. |