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Introduction

Throughout the history of the United States, many of the nation’s most conspicuous accomplishments have rested on achievements within the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Great New Deal funded several public works projects to improve the infrastructure of the country, including highways, dams, schools, airports, and parks. Black-and-white photos of the Hoover Dam, the Lincoln Tunnel, and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge capture the sheer magnitude of these iconic projects and conjure admiration for human precision and ingenuity. The early computers of the 1970s offer similarly awe-inspiring images—the size and complexity of these machines can evoke appreciation for technical knowledge and skill. From the race to the moon to the advent of the internet, the history of the United States is inextricably bound to the recognized achievements of the STEM disciplines.

For this reason, it is unsurprising that these disciplines are particularly valued within U.S. society. The promise of the STEM disciplines lives in the American imagination as one of the nation’s most reliable economic engines, as a pathway toward both individual and collective prosperity, as a contributor to quality of life available in the United States (e.g., comforts due to technological advances, medical breakthroughs), and as a mechanism for forging deeper understandings of how our world works. STEM education, therefore, is often presented as the primary way for generations to access the promise of that prosperity. STEM education is now a well-documented political and social priority.

Looking beyond the veneer of accomplishment, though, a more complicated story about the history and future of STEM becomes apparent. For example, many of the highway projects that emerged in part from the Great New Deal, although impressively engineered, were deliberately constructed through Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, undermining the health and development of these burgeoning neighborhoods. As a result of these decisions, real estate in these communities (which remain host to predominantly Black and Brown families) retains less value, retains more heat due to lack of green space, and is subject to significant levels of vehicle pollution. As another example, the awe-inspiring Hoover Dam, credited with making life in the western part of the United States suitable for white Americans, devastated the Navajo economy and continues to create generational water instability for Navajos. Today, the Hoover Dam, which creates electricity for 1.3 million people and provides water to 25 million people, is now at risk of being obsolete due to dramatic shifts in the climate. In yet another example, while the growth of the computing industry has fueled monumental changes in the global economy, women and historically marginalized groups are grossly underrepresented in these fields despite playing important roles as early computers and critical team members of NASA in other decades. The magnificence of these scientific, engineering, technological, and mathematical feats can obscure that they are also fundamentally projects with risks and incalculable costs to humans and planet alike.

Despite the importance of the STEM disciplines in the landscape of U.S. political, economic, and social priorities, different communities have had starkly different experiences within these fields. As highlighted above, the achievements of STEM in and of themselves have not always been universally good for everyone: U.S. history is replete with examples of how progress in STEM has relied on (and in many cases, exploited) the labor and resources of marginalized groups and communities. Further, the achievements of STEM innovation have led to benefits and harms both domestically and globally, as reflected of the role of STEM in militarism. Often, something that is considered a success in STEM for one community has had deleterious effects on another.

The inequities described above are made even more visible when considering that STEM education, often understood as the on ramp into the STEM disciplines in the United States, is a deeply inequitable enterprise. Opportunities to learn STEM education are unevenly distributed, and the experiences an individual has in STEM education are likely to vary tremendously based on their race, class, gender, and a myriad of other factors. Many groups have been systematically locked out of participation in STEM education and the STEM workforce, and/or have seen their contributions ignored or unrecognized. For a large swath of the U.S. population, personal or financial success in STEM is neither a reality nor a possibility. Inequity

in STEM education, then, has deep consequences for both the STEM disciplines themselves, as well as for individual and collective wellbeing.

For all these inequities, though, STEM education also has unique promise. Working toward equity in STEM education can support an abundance of positive, desirable outcomes: more equitable STEM education opens up STEM to more voices, and can create a more capable, robust STEM enterprise that is better equipped to help solve intractable social challenges. This report seeks to balance the great promise and possibility of the future of STEM education against the problematic backdrop of U.S. history and the inequity of today’s STEM education. As this report will describe, the STEM disciplines serve a critical purpose in building a shared understanding of humans as part of a larger world, and STEM education offers access to that understanding. This report will illuminate the complexity and interconnectedness of the knotty problem of inequity in preK–12 STEM education, highlighting how issues of equity in education matter for equity in STEM, and charting a course forward.

INTERPRETING AND ADDRESSING THE COMMITTEE’S CHARGE

In response to a request from a variety of stakeholders for leadership and guidance on advancing equity in STEM education, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine through its Board on Science Education convened an expert committee to gather information and explore the range of issues associated with equity in STEM education, and potential steps toward more equitable STEM education experiences for students (see Box 1-1). The 16-member expert committee included individuals with expertise in preK–12 education policy, STEM education, education leadership, teaching and learning, assessment and measurement, and diversity and equity in STEM.

A committee at the National Academies must first understand the parameters of its statement of task. Accordingly, this committee has made a series of judgments related to the scope of its work. The statement of task calls on the committee to examine the evidence related to educational equity and STEM education at all levels of the preK–12 education system, which implies a focus on the formal education system in the United States. However, the committee recognizes that STEM education occurs in many places, not merely in the context of schools and classrooms. Moreover, we recognize that learning happens everywhere that people are: in classrooms, at the kitchen table, in museums, in casual interactions with friends. So, while the committee focuses its analyses and subsequent recommendations principally on learning in schools, we recognize that the boundaries separating what happens inside of schools and what happens outside of schools

are porous, and therefore, we consider a breadth of learning environments throughout this report.

Second, the committee grappled with the enormity behind the statement of task’s direction that the report should discuss “how systemic inequity in STEM education can be addressed at all levels of the preK–12 system.” In its initial discussions about the study charge, the committee expressed concerns that “addressing” systemic equity could be construed as a call for fixing, or solving, the problem. Throughout this report, the committee attends to the long and pernicious histories undergirding inequity in education in the United States and recognizes that there is no one constellation of moves that can be made to “fix” systemic inequity. At the same time, the committee recognizes the urgency in helping actors in the preK–12 system as they try to enact and support more equitable STEM education. As the committee describes various ways to address systemic equity, we focus our

analyses on what actors—both individuals and groups—can do and the decisions they can make in their interactions with all levels of the preK–12 system in pursuit of different equity aims. Beyond our discussion of actors, we also discuss how decisions and changes at one level of the system can have cascading effects that create larger, system-wide change.

Along those same lines, the committee is directed in the statement of task to surface practical examples of policy and programming designed to support various equity aims. In responding to this part of the task, the committee has made a series of professional judgments related to determining the value of including a case or example. Throughout the report, we have attempted to include these cases as is appropriate with descriptions and rationale for how we are interpreting their use. As this report will describe in detail, no single approach “works” in all contexts, and so throughout this document we have attempted to extrapolate the important components or elements of the cases at hand.

The committee also recognizes that “equity” is in and of itself a term so encompassing that without clear boundaries, it has the potential to lose its meaning. Although we attempt to define and operationalize the term for our use in this report (see later in this chapter), we also recognize that whenever we use the term “equity,” we are inherently raising the questions “equity for whom, where, and in what communities?” The issues surrounding equity, specific to gender, may be quite different than those specific to race, and as we describe in Chapter 4 of this report, those issues often intersect with one another in complicated ways. This committee recognizes that it has been unable to elucidate every equity issue facing U.S. STEM education: although we have attempted to capture examples and literature from multiple facets of the research landscape, we recognize that our arguments are focused largely on race and culture.

Similarly, although we were tasked with addressing the preK–12 system in its entirety, we found the literature base in the preK landscape challenging to integrate into our analyses. Because the preK system is largely separated from the K–12 system in the United States, the research base in STEM education is often oriented to different equity challenges than what we discuss in this report. This limitation prevented us from exploring the preK space as thoroughly as we were instructed in our statement of task. In a rapidly changing landscape, it proved impossible for the committee to take up every relevant emerging issue related to equity. Therefore, several pertinent topic areas are not covered in depth, including the emergence of AI technologies, as well as the details of different state policy strategies around advancing equity.

The Committee’s Approach to Gathering and Assessing Evidence

In order to complete its task, the committee met eight times over an 18-month period—five times virtually and three times in a hybrid virtual/in-person setting. In addition, subgroups of the committee met throughout this period on an as-needed basis. After reviewing the expertise within the committee itself, the committee invited testimony from a number of outside experts. The committee also conducted four regional expert consultation (REC) events at regions around the country to offer lived experience to complement and contextualize scholarly findings. For details about who provided testimony to the committee and the topics covered, see Appendix A. For a detailed description of REC events, see Appendix B.

In addition to hearing from outside experts and soliciting public input, the committee sought additional input on scholarly areas in which we deemed further expertise was necessary. The committee commissioned two papers to help synthesize existing evidence in the field and frame our recommendations. These papers focused on (a) the law and legal issues in the United States as they relate to equity and STEM education and (b) the role of STEM education in democracy. These papers and their findings are treated as scholarly material by the committee, and incorporated into this review as such. See Appendix C for a list of commissioned papers.

The committee engaged with a broad array of evidentiary sources. We utilized types of evidence traditionally featured in National Academies consensus studies as delineated in the National Research Council’s (2002) report Scientific Research in Education. Typical sources include published peer-reviewed literature and presentations, government documents, white papers and working papers, books, and book chapters. These sources, identified by committee members and National Academies staff, cited in commissioned papers, and referenced in invited oral testimonies encompass a variety of research traditions utilizing an array of methodologies.

Throughout the report, evidence cited includes qualitative case studies (e.g., exploratory, descriptive, and comparison/confirmatory as detailed in Stake, 1995, and Yin, 2003), field studies (e.g., classical, descriptive, interpretive, and critical ethnographies), surveys, quasi-experimental studies, and randomized control trials. To inform the inclusion of evidence in the report, the committee considered criteria for high-quality and rigorous research generally adopted by researchers in education and related disciplines (National Research Council, 2002). Where vignettes are used throughout the report, they are selected for their ability to serve as illustrative, “real-life” examples of concepts described in the literature. The vast majority of these illustrations are based upon evidence resulting from some type of external review; in rare exceptions, support is cited as “under review” indicating

the work has not yet completed an external evaluation by peers, a method commonly used in research.

Special Note on Regional Expert Consultations

One unique charge given to the committee was to plan and execute regional field consultations to hear firsthand the experiences and challenges the field is facing when trying to make STEM education more equitable. The committee recognizes that trying to bring different community stakeholders (including school district teachers, students, parents, administrators, out-of-school program providers and educators, community organizations, etc.) to an in-person conversation in Washington, DC, or Irvine, California, is inherently inequitable and unattainable for various reasons. These regional expert consultations are a new approach for the National Academies, and the committee and staff grappled with how to conduct these visits well, while respectfully capturing the full breadth and depth of the experiences of different communities. After visiting and hearing the different experiences from the four regional expert consultations, the committee considered the information gathered at these events to help us contextualize the scholarly literature, as well as committee members’ personal expertise. A more thorough description of the regional expert consultations can be found in Appendix B.

UNDERSTANDING EQUITY

In order to make sense of and provide focus for our analyses, the committee articulated a set of foundational ideas to ground the arguments put forward in the report. By articulating these shared understandings, the committee was able to build a foundation upon which to frame our thinking throughout the report as well as scaffold our interpretations of the evidence. In this section, we describe our efforts to develop a shared understanding of the definition of equity. Following that discussion, we preview how different goals for equity inform decision making through Five Frames for Equity, which will serve as this report’s dominant theoretical grounding.

What Do We Mean by Equity?

One of the first and major challenges for this committee was developing a shared understanding of what we mean by the term equity. The committee consulted multiple definitions of equity in establishing its perspective on how the term would be used throughout this report. Prior to the release of this report, the National Academies released Advancing Antiracism,

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEMM Organizations: Beyond Broadening Participation (2023). That report offers the following definition:

This definition’s emphasis on fairness and justice resonated with our committee, although we offer a slightly different angle: as indicated above, we argue that there is no singular, monolithic goal for equity in which similar outcomes are pursued and experienced by everyone. Instead, we view outcomes, conditions, and processes as being determined equitable (or not) by individuals drawing on their lived experiences—again, a situation wherein different definitions of, goals for, and means toward equity might simultaneously be at work.

The 2022 National Academies’ report Science and Engineering in Preschool Through Elementary Grades: The Brilliance of Children and the Strengths of Educators was another important document for us. That report’s committee notes that the definition of the term “equity” is not straightforward—a view we embrace—and uses the term “to address ways—through changing policies and practices—to remove barriers to participation in science and engineering and increase achievement, representation, and identification […] Equity thus strives for comparable levels of attainment and/or participation” (pp. 2, 23). Brilliance and Strengths then describes a spectrum of four different approaches to achieving equity, each with their own strengths and pitfalls: “(1) increasing opportunity and access to high-quality science and engineering learning and instruction; (2) emphasizing increased achievement, representation, and identification with science and engineering; (3) expanding what constitutes science and engineering; and (4) seeing science and engineering as part of justice movements” (p. 23). Importantly, Brilliance and Strengths also notes that although different actors in the system will necessarily be starting this work from different places on this spectrum, actually achieving equity within systems requires all four of these approaches.

This current study builds on this important understanding of equity as embodied in action by describing how equity might be actively pursued through a set of five “equity frames” (discussed in more detail below as the five “Frames for Making Decisions for Equity”) that describe different conceptions of equity used by actors to guide and focus priority setting and

decision making. Thus, we also include in our definition an understanding of what actions can be taken (and what decisions can be made) to affirmatively pursue different equity goals. We note that there are multiple ways that someone might argue for and pursue those equitable ends: where one person might understand the goal of equity to be equal access to opportunities, another person might understand the goal of equity as helping students learn about how STEM can support justice.

Thus, the committee’s understanding of equity encompasses more than “the ways [. . .] to remove barriers to participation [. . .] and increase achievement” (NASEM, 2022a) and seeks to nuance the idea of equity as being an “outcome from fair conditions” (NASEM, 2023). By operationalizing equity in this way, we hope to show readers how equity can be both a process and a result. Here, we understand process to mean the method and practice of working toward one or more of the goals defined in the Five Frames for Equity (described below). The result of equity, then, is witnessed in the lived experience of individuals and communities: it can be seen, experienced, and measured. Whether or not a result is perceived as equitable, then, hinges on what the stated equity goal is in the first place. As we noted above, there is no one constellation of moves that can be made to “fix” systemic inequity, but evidence of equity can be found both in how actors proceed toward desired ends, and in the ends themselves.

In all cases, though, the committee agrees that moving toward equity involves addressing and disrupting inequities. For example, if a high school principal has committed to ensuring equal access to advanced STEM coursework, it is not enough to just increase access for some groups. Indeed, achieving the stated goal requires identifying and addressing the root cause of the inequity in the first place (in this case, is it tracking policies? Inequitably distributed opportunities to learn? A combination of multiple factors?) and remaining vigilant about policies and practice that would maintain existing power structures and inequities.

At the end of this report, we synthesize what we know about equity throughout STEM education in order to envision what an equitable future could look like. In attending to how various actors in the system each define equity, determine goals, and establish the means to reach those goals, we have not only delineated the five frames for making decisions for equity, but have also offered vignettes of practical experiences and described the interplay of structural and individual perspectives.

Frames for Making Decisions for Equity

As noted earlier this chapter, this report explores how equity in STEM education can be understood through the lens of decision making. That is, we understand the patterns of inequity we see in education systems as the

consequence of past decisions. Those past decisions influence our sense of possible decisions we can make today regarding how to address inequities in STEM education. Further, the decisions we make today will have consequences for the future. Decisions that are consequential for STEM education are made by an array of actors that includes but is not limited to students, caregivers in families, teachers, administrators, and politicians. Approaching the work of equity through this lens helps us to see actors at every level of the system, from students to teachers to principals to superintendents, as potential decision makers whose actions matter and can, in fact, produce different kinds of equitable outcomes.

We note that there may be any number of different ideas for what equity “looks like” in practice: as we state above, different actors may have different kinds of goals or outcomes for equity, and there are multiple ways that someone might argue for and pursue those equitable ends. Building on the previous National Academies’ report Brilliance and Strengths, we agreed on five distinct “equity frames”—different conceptions of equity that characterize the different aims that actors have for equity work and so guide decision making. Below, we summarize each of these five frames for making decisions for equity, while a more robust discussion of these frames in the context of decision making can be found in Chapter 6.

Five Frames for Making Decisions for Equity

Frame 1: Reducing Gaps Between Groups. This frame focuses on the goal of reducing gaps in outcomes between different groups based on race, gender identity, social class, or some other factor (e.g., immigration status). Those gaps might be related to interest in STEM, achievement in STEM, or representation within the STEM workforce. The approaches in this frame tend to emphasize interventions, typically implemented in schools or within ecosystems, evaluated in terms of their ability to reduce such gaps, and they often target students from different communities (e.g., Latinx).

Frame 2: Expanding Opportunity and Access. This frame focuses on the goal of expanding opportunity and access to students from groups that have historically been marginalized in STEM. The focus is typically on the social and material resources necessary to learn—access to well-prepared educators, a network of adult and peer supporters for learning, and high-quality curricular experiences. The approaches to increasing access and opportunity vary but tend to focus on changing conditions for access through policy

changes within institutions or to use strategies for brokering opportunities across institutions.

Frame 3: Embracing Heterogeneity in STEM Learning Environments. This frame focuses on the goal of engaging with the concerns, lived experiences, and identities of those students who have been and continue to be harmed in schools, including as part of their STEM classrooms. It involves “embracing heterogeneity” by rejecting the notion that students should learn only “settled” disciplinary knowledge and practices; it also refuses the active exclusion and denigration of different ways of thinking, feeling, and being of young people within STEM classrooms. Proposed solutions include creating new learning environments in schools and out-of-school spaces that connect different institutions, disrupting how STEM fields are presented, and designing learning around students’ diverse sensemaking repertoires.

Frame 4: Learning and Using STEM to Promote Justice. This frame focuses on the goal of pursuing STEM not as an end for its own sake but seeing STEM as a resource within movements for social and socioecological justice. A key problem to be addressed from the standpoint of this frame is that historically, STEM fields have operated as instruments in larger agendas of nationalism and colonialism, and their role as a tool for liberation has lessened, both in practice and within education. In addition, the problem of “interest” in STEM is recast as a problem of engaging young people in STEM learning in ways that allow them to use STEM knowledge to engage directly in actions that work toward remedying injustices experienced in their communities, or that contribute to larger justice projects.

Frame 5: Envisioning Sustainable Futures Through STEM. The goal of this frame is to cultivate equitable, just, and thriving social and ecological futures that attend to and support both ecological and human wellbeing. This frame acknowledges a role for STEM education in promoting justice (Frame 4) through embracing heterogeneity in STEM (Frame 3), and it aims to bring about sustainable futures that call upon knowledges and wisdom from traditions that dominant STEM actors have sought to erase or suppress while also imagining new educational arrangements in STEM. Frame 5 is distinct from Frame 4 in that it is focused squarely on creating livable futures, which may involve imagining a radically different STEM education than exists in schools today.

STEM EDUCATION

In laying the groundwork for this study—especially in light of the definitional contingency of equity, as discussed above—the committee recognized the need to establish shared theoretical understandings around two critical concerns: (a) why STEM education is important (i.e., the purpose(s) it serves) and (b) why it matters that STEM education is equitable. In this section, we explain what we mean by STEM and STEM education and what we understand the purposes of STEM education to be, and then describe how we believe STEM education matters for equity.

What Do We Mean by STEM and STEM Education?

The use of the acronym STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is prevalent in the economic, educational, political, and social sectors of society in the United States. Yet, syntheses of the literature suggest that no single consensus exists around a concise definition of the concept of STEM. Indeed, history shows that STEM education is, in fact, a policy idea that took shape around the beginning of the millennium by lumping together the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education under a single federal funding initiative (McComas & Burgin, 2020), without consistent attention to real and important differences among the four disciplines. Two decades later, the phrase is ubiquitous—common enough that newspapers and afterschool programs can use the phrase without explanation.

STEM is used in multiple ways: some use it to denote the four disciplines separately while acknowledging methodological and epistemological similarities across all four; others use STEM to point to integration across disciplines. Each of the four STEM disciplines has a unique history, and each of the disciplines has its own trajectory within education (Rudolph, 2023; Takeuchi et al., 2020). Each of these disciplines also has its own community of researchers who focus specifically on education—i.e., research in science education is generally distinct from research in engineering education—and are taught separately in secondary and postsecondary schools.¹ Outside of education, each of the disciplines in STEM draws on distinctive (if overlapping) epistemological systems, cultures, and means of socialization. There is a growing field of scholarship focused on integration of the disciplines in

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¹ Technology education is a special case because, although many practitioners would claim it as their field, that field is perceived differently by different stakeholders. In the United States, “technology education” can refer to a distinct area of vocational education, a resource field within elementary education, and an amorphous collection of school-associated maker spaces. Outside of the United States, the picture is even more diverse and contradictory (Jones et al., 2013).

education, though there is limited shared understanding of what that integration looks like in practice. For the purposes of this report, the committee is largely concerned with the individual disciplines and the larger political and cultural phenomenon of STEM.

Purposes of STEM Education

As the committee embarked on building a shared conceptual background, we recognized the importance of first identifying the purposes of STEM education, so that we might work from common ground when developing and articulating a set of strategies for making STEM education equitable. That is, before the committee felt that we could take up questions of equity in STEM, it was necessary to first know why STEM education is important, and what STEM education is designed to achieve. In this section, we describe the result of that first step: four purposes of STEM education that ground this report and will be referenced in subsequent chapters.

We articulate these four purposes of STEM education not in order of importance, but as a demonstration that the longstanding and important aims of STEM education can also be expanded and opened to new purposes designed to meet the challenges of the current moment. By describing the four purposes of STEM education in this way, we seek to describe goals for STEM education that shape understandings of what an equitable STEM education should look like today and into the future.

1) STEM education is for social and economic development of society and individuals.

Of the four core purposes of STEM education identified by the committee, the first is the purpose most clearly articulated in the actions of policymakers throughout U.S. history. As we have described above, the consequential role of STEM in society has led to transformed social, political and economic systems and opportunities. A significant argument for the purpose of STEM education is to support the workforce needs of our evolving society (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2010).

The purposes of STEM education are often motivated by the argument that our society needs an evolving workforce to support ongoing social and economic development (NASEM, 2021). Thus, the workforce demands—meaning STEM-related knowledge and skills necessary—often structure what learning outcomes, pathways, and opportunities are prioritized, codified, and resourced. There has been a significant increase in the presence of computer science and engineering opportunities in educational systems—both in schools and in informal contexts—over the last decade

or more. These increases are directly tied to market needs and predictions (Code Advocacy Coalition et al., 2022; DeZarn et al., 2023; Vakil, 2018).

In addition, there are added benefits and opportunities through STEM education for individuals that intersect with historically structured and growing economic inequality. Many STEM-related jobs reflect increased financial security and opportunity—STEM jobs are often characterized as providing solid middle-class lifestyles reflective of current social and economic systems (Noonan, 2017). The need for equity in STEM education is often motivated by the argument that there should be equitable opportunity and access to these professional trajectories over the life course. As we will describe in the following chapter, there are predictable demographic patterns of underrepresentation across STEM fields, the STEM-related workforce, and STEM educational achievement. Failure to achieve equity in STEM education has been and will continue to exacerbate—if not accelerate—the socioeconomic inequality in our society. Many of our current educational efforts work to disrupt these persistent forms of inequality and the systemic harm that comes from intergenerational economic disadvantage. Indeed, policymakers, educators, and scholars have worked to create new opportunities for equitable participation in STEM endeavors, recognizing that accomplishing equitable participation in STEM endeavors would have seismic societal impacts and impacts on STEM disciplines.

2) STEM education supports the development of the STEM disciplines toward discovery and contributing to the social good.

A second purpose for STEM education the committee found evidence for is that the STEM disciplines support discoveries that help underpin the social good, and therefore society benefits in fundamental ways from individuals and communities who do this work. This may be the longest standing purpose of STEM education, and it is directly tied to the purposes of STEM disciplines themselves—human beings’ need for, interest in, and capacity to engage in discovery and knowledge development. Human interest in understanding the universe is and has been central to the purposes of STEM: STEM knowledge has been and continues to be developing across the many cultural communities and ways of knowing across the globe. STEM knowledges are not singular; rather they reflect the accumulation of insights from a range of knowledge systems and disciplinary perspectives (Knorr-Cetina, 1999).

The range of STEM knowledges have made important contributions to a variety of social forms of life. Arguments for the social aims and benefits of STEM innovation have often been a motivation and justification for deep investments both in time and resources in our STEM education

infrastructure and for STEM education. Often equitable opportunity and representation motivates the purposes of equity within STEM education. Failure to achieve equity in STEM education in this case both denies individuals’ rights to pursue knowledge of the universe, as well as the capacities and talents of many peoples to contribute to the social good. Further, the social good itself suffers because the insights, perspectives, and contributions from a diversity of people have been inhibited.

3) STEM education contributes to solving core planetary challenges, sustainability, and needed adaptations for the 21st century.

Related to supporting the development of the social good, a third purpose for STEM education involves ensuring capacity for addressing current and future challenges. History demonstrates that STEM education is often leveraged in pursuit of addressing perceived future challenges. Similar to the ways STEM education has been leveraged in the past, the committee acknowledges one of the primary problems of today: changing climates and human impacts on ecosystems are creating challenges that are reaching critical conditions. Experts across a wide range of fields are documenting the already-significant shifts in ecosystems and projecting a wide range of future impacts and consequences facing all forms of life on the planet—human and non-human.

Scholars across fields have demonstrated that climate change and social inequality are deeply intertwined (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022), and scholars now argue that current failures to transform our systems are in part linked to our challenges with addressing historically persistent social inequalities (Green & Healy, 2022; Harlan et al., 2015). Indeed, those peoples and places projected to be most impacted by climate change are often those most impacted by current forms of social inequality, with an acute risk for Indigenous populations (Levy & Patz, 2015).

While STEM disciplinary pursuits have often been of benefit to human communities, STEM education is also motivated by supporting new generations in contributing to solving planetary challenges, sustainability, and supporting adaptations needed for ecological and human wellbeing (Suiseeya et al., 2022). Issues of equity are critically important here, as STEM education plays a central role in contributing to human health and wellbeing. This includes accurate understandings of current realities and truth in the historical dynamics that have created current conditions. Indeed, the role of the social sciences and education more specifically are increasingly being recognized as necessary components of long-term climate adaptation, which we expand on in the fourth purpose of STEM education (Lutz et al., 2014).

4) STEM education contributes to the cultivation of just, sustainable, and thriving human communities.

Lastly, the committee identified a fourth purpose for STEM education: it contributes to the cultivation of just, sustainable, and thriving human communities. We acknowledge that this cannot happen in STEM education without also engaging with the three previously articulated purposes. But we want to highlight as distinct the components of STEM education necessary to emphasize for just, sustainable, and thriving human communities. Central to this purpose of STEM education are (a) meeting the core development and intellectual needs of learners and (b) supporting growing and evolving civic demands, skills, and knowledge that future generations will need.

There are a range of social science fields linking core developmental and intellectual needs with STEM education. Cognitive science and anthropology have studied the ways in which people from across the world have always made sense of STEM-related phenomena and done so in ways that address their own needs (Atran, 1998; Bang et al., 2007; Gopnik et al., 2004). Inequity in STEM education, then, deprives some people of this fundamental human need to make sense of the world in ways that address pressing concerns in local contexts.

A final reason to consider the cultivation of just, sustainable, and thriving human communities as a primary purpose of STEM education is seen through the lens of civic engagement. Research in environmental science and sustainability decision making demonstrates that individuals’ knowledge and values with respect to the natural world shape their behaviors and decision making (Colloff et al., 2017). Further, there has been an accumulation of research that demonstrates that increased knowledge alone is insufficient for sustainable decision making. Rather, a complex interplay between knowledge, values, and perceived and socially constructed decisional parameters together shape behavior.

Why the Purposes of STEM Matter for Equity

Throughout the report, we offer many examples of equity work in STEM through accounts of decision making on the part of educators, policy makers, families, and district leaders; historical and contemporary examples of change making and equitable design; and through vignettes that illuminate how inequities are reproduced, disrupted, and transformed within teaching and learning interactions. In all these examples, these components—conceptions of equity, and what it means and how to work toward it—interact to shape the conditions, processes, and outcomes of learning in consequential ways.

In the absence of clear articulation of the multiple purposes of STEM education, decision making around equity is likely to be based by default on dominant assumptions about the goals of learning. Chapter 6 illuminates how more conventional frames for decision making in equity (e.g., closing achievement gaps, expanding access) tend to leave the purposes of STEM education unexamined, whereas frames that attend to multiple ways of knowing about the world, justice, sustainability, and transformative learning work to examine and redefine educational purposes in ongoing ways.

Further, a growing body of evidence shows that students become more or less attuned to and aligned with these purposes of learning within STEM education—through their experience of STEM education itself. Narrow views of what STEM is and can be for routinely marginalize the questions, ideas, and identities of girls and students of color, with well-documented consequences for their experiences and persistence in STEM (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019; Peppler et. al., 2022; Sengupta-Irving & Vossoughi, 2019; Vakil, 2018). Research increasingly shows how thoughtfully examining the histories, values, and purposes of STEM with students deepens the rigor and relevance of learning; connects STEM education with students’ families, communities, and whole personhoods in ways that increase interest and engagement; and productively troubles disciplinary silos, for example between science, history, and civics education (Morales-Doyle, 2017).

The committee wishes to issue a caution, though. Although we assert here that achieving equity in STEM will require a reexamination of the purposes of STEM education, we also acknowledge that adopting new purposes for STEM education alone is not a sufficient condition for ensuring an equitable future. Indeed, a thorough review of historical evidence in science education shows that purposes have shifted across space and time whereas inequities and the statuses of groups relative to each other have not. Throughout U.S. history, including the current moment, researchers, policymakers, educators, and other stakeholders have debated the purposes of education and STEM education directly or indirectly in defining and meeting social, political, and economic aims; however, substantial bodies of work across disciplines (e.g., science education, sociology, political science, history) do not show that these debates, or the actions that ensue, have had a durable impact on greater equity for particular communities. Indeed, as Chapter 2 describes, inequity has been a central component of the U.S. education system since before the nation’s founding. For this reason, truly achieving equity will require more than just a more expansive understanding of what STEM education can and should do: it will require deep reconfigurations of the system as it currently exists.

Despite this caution, though, the committee believes that there is potential in bringing together our understanding of the purposes and values of STEM knowledge production with our understanding of how to make

decisions around educational equity. The core planetary challenges of ecological sustainability and social equity necessitate deep interrogation of when and how our models of education and STEM have contributed to current crises, and how they can be transformed to support wellbeing. By integrating these two conceptual background ideas so that readers can see how the above five frames for making decisions for equity rely on multiple, expansive understandings of the purpose of STEM education (and vice versa), the committee seeks to lay the groundwork for how this report will orient readers toward a more equitable future and help to the development and realization of a vision for equitable STEM education.

SALIENT CONTEXTUAL ISSUES: WHY NOW?

The creation of this report occurred against the backdrop of multiple critical contextual issues that have invariably influenced the committee’s thinking. First, the committee authored this report in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, and while the nation continued its struggle against systemic racism and police violence. Following a season of political organizing throughout the country, school districts suddenly found themselves having more conversations surrounding systems of white supremacy culture and examining how systems of anti-Black racism are infused in education (NASEM, 2021; Ross & Givens, 2023). Schools have also been forced to contend with the increasing number of gun-related murders, particularly at community sites of learning and worship, many of which are racially motivated. In 2022, for the first time, the United States recognized its complicated history with education and Indigenous peoples and specifically the scale of violence in boarding schools. Simultaneously, in 2019, COVID-19 forced educators and school systems around the globe to revisit the purpose and means of an education. In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic forced families into isolation and, aside from the devastating impact on the loss of life, it created tension, turmoil, and anxiety for educators and parents.

At the same time, widespread mis- and disinformation has become an ongoing challenge for students and teachers that can cause significant harm. Conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19, the 2020 presidential election, and other “hot topic” issues have led to heated discussions in and out of classrooms about what is factual and what is not, especially as it has become more evident that students are particularly susceptible to receiving and believing misinformation (Wenner Moyer, 2022). In 2016, it was found that almost all high school students who participated in a national survey evaluating digital sources online could not tell the difference between a real news story and sponsored content (Breakstone et al., 2019). Further,

artificial intelligence (AI) tools, imbued with human biases from those who invented them, are creating new challenges for educational institutions and teachers as people begin using programs like ChatGPT to write articles, essays, and reports. This further complicates peoples’ abilities to separate fact from fiction.

Separately, another looming concern this report must take into account is the mental health of students. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were already concerns about the overall wellbeing of students particularly when considering five behavioral and mental health disorders that have a significant impact among adolescents—suicide, depression, anxiety, substance use disorder, and disordered eating (NASEM, 2019). Following the acute lockdown portion of the pandemic, mental health professionals report an increase in the number of patients seeking treatment for mental illness as well as an increased severity of reported concerns across the United States (NASEM, 2022b).

Tackling one of these issues can be difficult and draining and to contend with all of them at the same time feels impossible, but this is the reality of schools in the United States. Indeed, this reality continues to evolve: even over the course of writing this report, the committee observed distinct political and cultural shifts in how equity issues in education are discussed and addressed in different regions around the country. Further, in preparing this report, the committee considered a number of other contextual factors not mentioned here. As noted earlier in this chapter, because of the breadth of this study’s charge, the committee attempted to hew as closely as possible to our statement of task. We recognize, however, that there are likely to be a myriad other political, social, and cultural factors that have implications for how actors understand the challenges of addressing equity in STEM education. We acknowledge that actors in the education system cannot afford to ignore these shifting contextual factors as they make decisions: as the landscape changes, so too must actors adjust their thinking and actions in response.

Now more than ever, decision makers have to think about the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, how racial justice can be taught in schools without potentially breaking a law, continuous misinformation being spread that could potentially cause harm, discriminating between what has been created by humans versus AI, and determining ways to help improve the mental health of students. These issues must be on the forefront collectively when thinking about equity in preK–12 education because to focus on one issue more than the other will cause one group of students to not receive the care and attention they need to thrive in this messy educational system.

THE COMMITTEE’S SHARED VALUES AND POSITIONALITY

In order to be transparent with the readers of this report, the committee believes it is necessary to describe its shared values. As we will describe throughout this report, STEM and STEM education in the United States have been intricately tied to nation building, citizenship, notions of intelligence and ability, and at the very core, competing visions of the world. We acknowledge that STEM and STEM education cannot be disentangled from the worlds in which they are embedded, and for this reason we acknowledge that these values play an integral role in how we as a committee understand evidence. In this section, we acknowledge that our shared values guide our interpretation and synthesis of existing research, as well as our aspirations for further scholarship and practice. We acknowledge that all readers will not (and need not) share these values or aspirations.

From this point of departure, we outline the six values that guide this study:

1. We value STEM education as one part of the struggle for more just futures.
2. We value the humanity and dignity of all human beings as central to disciplinary learning.
3. We value the critical importance of care for all life on earth as a central part of disciplinary learning.
4. We believe that no one group is more or less important than the other, and that the size of a group is not related to its importance.
5. We value the multiplicity of viewpoints that arise from intersectional relationships to power.
6. We recognize the role of history in how we understand our present, but we commit to not allowing it to limit our ability to imagine a different future.

1) We value STEM education as one part of the struggle for more just futures.

As a committee, we all come to STEM education from multiple perspectives, but we all share a respect and appreciation for the power and potential of the STEM disciplines. We believe that STEM education can be an invaluable tool toward social justice, and we share a commitment to building that future together.

2) We value the humanity and dignity of all human beings as central to disciplinary learning.

Because of our focus on preK–12 STEM education, this value demands that we pay particular attention to children, childhood, and youth (see Chapter 5). Also, in order to center the humanity and dignity of human beings, we acknowledge the need to extend our analysis to the wellbeing of children and youth that includes but also transcends the classroom. We believe disciplinary learning can be a site for nurturing human relations and the thriving of the communities in which they live.

3) We value the critical importance of care for all life on earth as a central part of disciplinary learning.

We live in a world in which we are all interrelated as people. We also exist in relation to lands, waters, stars, animals, plants, and other beings with whom we share the planet and universe. We believe that this acknowledgment of interdependency is rooted in care—that is, cultivating relations of reciprocity and collective wellbeing. Care gives rise to our understanding of sustainability and what it means to live sustainably on the planet.

4) We value the multiplicity of viewpoints that arise from intersectional relationships to power.

Comparing forms of oppression or weighing one over the other ultimately concretizes existing power structures. It is essential to address the specificity of the experiences, aspirations, and histories of particular groups, while simultaneously considering how certain groups of people experience systems of oppression and opportunities for resistance and possibility through the intersection of multiple forms of power. Within the context of the United States, it also demands acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty and recognizing that we are a nation of many nations. As part of valuing a multiplicity of viewpoints, we deploy multiple strategies for communication of critical ideas throughout this report and call upon multiple ways of knowing about the world in order to build our shared understanding of both the problems of inequity in STEM education and its potential solutions.

5) We believe that no one group is more or less important than the other, and that the size of a group is not related to its importance.

Approaches to equity that merely focus on the number of people affected ultimately undermine authentic efforts toward equity. For example,

the erasure of Indigenous peoples in STEM education obscures the history of this nation’s settler colonial foundations and undermines contemporary, ongoing, and vigorous efforts for Indigenous sovereignty. The exclusion of LGBTQIA+ people—in particular nonbinary and trans communities—from STEM equity not only affects the experiences and concerns of these groups and diminishes the diversity of perspectives that make STEM more robust, but also reproduces false and damaging binaries of gender.

6) We recognize the role of history in how we understand our present, but we commit to not allowing it to limit our ability to imagine a different future.

We share a commitment to understanding the role that history has played in shaping our current reality, which has helped us shape our understanding of equity through the lens of decision making. Because of this commitment, we examine and confront the historical and contemporary role of STEM and STEM education in nation building through conquest, extraction, exclusion, and exploitation. We believe that naming and redressing enslavement, attempts to eliminate Indigenous culture and communities, colonialism, sexism, and imperialism in shaping our educational institutions, and STEM in particular, is essential. Grounded in our understanding of the past and the present, we intentionally formulate and imagine possible futures.

In addition to establishing our shared values, the committee also acknowledges our individual and collective positionalities as critical factors guiding the creation of this report. First, we want to acknowledge that we come to this committee from a multiplicity of identities: in contrast to the majority of consensus committees at the National Academies, the majority of our committee members are people of color. We have training and expertise in an array of disciplines; in addition to academics, this committee also includes current and former educators and district administrators. We are multigenerational, comprising scholars ranging from early moments in our careers to retirement. Moreover, we each bring with us a set of commitments to the communities that sustain us, and we each have a different relationship to the kind of professional and personal risk that a report like this—one that often breaks with dominant narratives about power and equity—presents. Similarly, while some of us are trained formally in the STEM disciplines, many of us have arrived at STEM through our shared commitment to education. And, as we realized early on in our committee work, we hold very different understandings of the value of STEM education, the nature of “the problem,” and strategies for how to address it. Because of these distinctions, the discourses, histories, and policies discussed in this report have been both lived and studied in remarkably different ways.

Despite this, we have written this report collectively. We acknowledge that our personal histories and relationships to power are important as we consider evidence, engage in debate, and make choices about how to address this statement of task. Unsurprisingly, we have had tensions—indeed, vehement disagreements—and through this we have worked to find enough common ground to produce this report. We believe that engaging in these tensions is critical to the work of creating equity for STEM education, and we have collectively come to reject the false choices (e.g., “either-or” “all or none” thinking) that are imposed on us by institutionalized racism and capitalism. The committee is committed to finding and promoting a form of equity that serves all of us. This report is not the report that any of us, individually, would have written on their own, and we believe that the result is the better for our collaboration.

ABOUT THIS REPORT

In addition to the charge emphasized in the committee’s statement of task, the committee has several goals for the report. First, the committee hopes the report will serve as a pedagogical tool to be used in public dialogue, practice, and research, all while addressing the myriad misconceptions surrounding issues of equity in STEM education. Additionally, we hope this report will serve as a resource for parties committed to and engaged in equity work; we hope it helps them see themselves as actors in a complex system and helps drive their decisions. Lastly, we hope that the report will be used to empower a broader pool of people to do significant and impactful work in equity in STEM education.

Who Are the Learners and Communities the Committee Is Centering?

As noted above, the committee is tasked with describing the state of inequity in STEM education, as well as pointing to areas of “promising practice” throughout the preK–12 system. Because the literature documenting the state of inequity is necessarily concerned with the experiences of those groups of individuals historically disadvantaged by STEM education, the committee attempts to center those groups throughout this report. In considering communities historically marginalized in STEM education, the committee focused its attention largely on issues of race and ethnicity, class, sex, gender, region, disability, and linguistic background.

At the same time, the committee acknowledges that there are innumerable forms of marginalization and identity, and we know that while we cannot train our attention in every direction, the relative size of a group is

not indicative of its import or value (for more on this, please see the committee’s statement of values, later in this chapter).

Lastly, the committee acknowledges that this report is authored in the wake of renewed national attention to issues of racial justice. Indeed, many of this report’s sponsors indicated at the committee’s first public meeting that issues of race in STEM education are of particular importance. Given the committee’s expertise and scholarship in this area, much of this report’s analyses focus on how different racial and cultural groups experience STEM education and how the STEM disciplines are racialized. The committee does not intend this focus to signify that issues of race are more important than others; indeed, the committee’s expertise is leveraged here to demonstrate how race is just one example of how systemic inequity functions to advantage some groups and oppress others. In this way, this report attempts to center those learners and communities who have been historically marginalized in STEM education (Box 1-2).

Audiences

The report will be useful for many audiences. Policymakers throughout the preK–12 STEM education system can use the findings and recommendations to devise, implement, and evaluate policy so that it can support equity goals. Researchers, advocacy groups, and funding organizations interested in STEM education equity can use the evidentiary base of the report’s findings and recommendations in their academic, advocacy, and financial endeavors, respectively. Practitioners (e.g., state and district personnel, teachers, professional development experts including teacher educators, out-of-school educators) working at different levels and in diverse areas of the STEM education enterprise can utilize the illustrative examples to impel initiatives and inform decisions.

Organization

This report is organized into two parts: Part 1 (Chapters 1–5) describes both the past and current landscape for STEM education. Chapter 2 discusses the history of the U.S. education system and how that system has perpetuated inequities across time against many communities. Chapter 3 examines how education policy is made at the federal, state, and local levels. Chapter 4 looks at the current data available to ascertain who and what kind of STEM education students are receiving in this modern era. Chapter 5 focuses on children and youth and how multiple forms of equity can be pursued to complement their STEM learning experiences.

Part 2 (Chapters 6–12) describes how the challenges we have laid out in Part 1 can be considered in learning, teaching, curriculum, and student

pathways. Chapter 6 discusses how actors throughout the education system can use decision-making frames to approach equity in STEM education. Chapter 7 discusses different learning theories and how newer insights about learning can lead to more equitable learning opportunities for students. Chapter 8 explores what equity-oriented teaching can look like and how various instructional models can be utilized to support this type of teaching. Chapter 9 considers how it may be possible to develop teaching practices toward equity. Chapter 10 looks at how curriculum materials can be adapted and used toward more equitable learning opportunities in STEM. Chapter 11 examines how diverse pathways students can take can lead to more equitable STEM learning. We conclude the report with Chapter 12, which has a set of recommendations and a research agenda designed to establish a more equitable system for STEM education.

REFERENCES