Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums THINKING BIG About Gifted Education Proposal: NASA Academy of the Physical Sciences

Clay, it is called political expediency. And, yes, it is a bit ugly.

However, there is a beauty to it, too. It is the difference between the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. One would think that the smaller states would especially champion the "NASA Academy of the Physical Sciences" idea, because those states would certainly receive a greater benefit in the beginning on a per capita basis.

The proposal states:
http://nasa-academy-of-the-physical-sciences.blogspot.com/2009/11/overview.html

States with more than three public universities will select the three universities that: 1) have the largest population base within an established to-and-from daily commute using public mass transit, and 2) do federally funded research on topics associated with gifted learning. All site universities should propose and do research that will improve the NAPS academies over time while also maximizing the benefits that can be had by other schools. Grant money from both federal and private sources will support select research over time.

Three states have fewer than three public universities each: Delaware (two), Rhode Island (two), and Wyoming (one). The four NAPS academies not established in those three states will be assigned to California, thereby giving California a total of seven NAPS academies.

If any states choose not to participate in this initiative, those states will permanently forfeit their entitled NAPS academies to other states that desire more NAPS academies. The U.S. Secretary of Education will permanently reassign to other states any NAPS academies that are forfeited.

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Why live with the "three NAPS per state" model?

I offer the following two excerpts from the proposal as my reasons:

http://nasa-academy-of-the-physical-sciences.blogspot.com/2009/11/overview.html

This Obama Initiative will provide a special opportunity for 5,100 of the most gifted sophomores being educated in America�s public high schools every year. Including the juniors and seniors who continue in a NAPS until graduation, no more than 15,300 students will every year be the direct recipients of this opportunity, but millions of other high school students will every year receive indirect benefits that will improve their math and science education as a consequence of this initiative.

Each state will every year spend 85% of its average per high school student per year expenditure for each of its NASA Scholars to fund its in-state NAPS academies, and the U.S. government will add $4,000 per student per year funding to each of the 150 NAPS academies nationwide for a total federal funding of $61.2 million per year. The states will be obligated to collect their 15% per student per year expenditure savings into a Science Education Fund that will be exhausted every year through the issuing of major grants to upgrade public high school science classrooms with new computer technology, new laboratory equipment, and/or general facility improvements. The grants will range in size from $20,000 to $50,000 each, and will be awarded by a three-person review committee comprised of one science professor from each of the three public research universities where the in-state NAPS academies are sited. If a state expends $8,500 per high school student per year, its SEF will collect and then spend out $390,150 per year, which could result in 19 grants of $20,534 each.

After the awarding of SEF grants every year, the state governors will consider the merits of all unfunded grant requests for their individual state, and will forward all deserving requests to in-state private industry leaders for their consideration and possible patronage. Special corporate tax credits will be given to companies that fund SEF grant requests. If the SEF grant review committee recommends improvements to particular requests along with encouragement to request a grant the following year (for example, if the request was for equipment that is being made obsolete by new technology), those recommendations will remain attached to the unfunded requests that are forwarded to industry leaders. ...

http://nasa-academy-of-the-physical...11/first-model-university-of-oregon.html

NAPS will put an enormous academic and emotional strain on its NASA Scholars, especially during the junior year. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that each and every scholar can relate in a genuine supportive way with his/her classmate scholars especially, but also with scholars from the other two grade levels and with the �high school� teachers. Because emotional maturity is not always on a par with intellectual maturity, gifted adolescents in the transition to adulthood need friends who can understand them. Gifted adolescents are adolescents at risk who are sometimes very vulnerable to social challenges, and they tend to know this about themselves. But, in usual settings, they are alone with their fears. NAPS academies will have the opportunity to create a safe haven in which truly extraordinary young people can experience what it feels like to be ordinary, at least during the while when they are among peer classmates; the importance of this cannot be overstated: a NAPS site will either succeed or fail in its primary purpose by whether or not it can succeed in making its scholars feel ordinary. ...

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Simply, every state deserves a chance to benefit from the whole program, including the Science Education Fund grants that would be created. Furthermore, I cannot stress enough the importance of this excerpt from above:

"All site universities should propose and do research that will improve the NAPS academies over time while also maximizing the benefits that can be had by other schools. Grant money from both federal and private sources will support select research over time."

The research findings at the different universities could discover remarkable differences from state to state, even though all 150 NAPS sites nationwide would have exactly the same curriculum. I have lived in small town Nebraska and in small city Oregon, and I have visited in major cities on both coasts and in the Midwest. It would not surprise me if remarkable differences in learning were discovered from place to place, but I cannot even imagine what they might be. The three sites in Oregon would likely be Eugene (University of Oregon), Corvallis (Oregon State University), and Portland (Portland State University) � and those are three very different settings in very different community environments. But, again, the NAPS curriculum would be exactly the same at each site.

Finally, the young geniuses in America need to be found, wherever they are, and they need to be treated with the dignity they deserve. NAPS should not be a California, Texas, and New York thing. Rather, it should be nationwide with a plain equality from state to state. Certainly, if NAPS is successful, I think it might eventually have an active site at every public research university in the United States. That is a big dream, but why not?

Steven A. Sylwester