Mass. STEM approach an R.I. model?

FROM THE STEM: Curtis Johnson of EMC visits the Douglas Intermediate School in Douglas, Mass., to speak about his work. He volunteered through DIGITS, a Massachusetts education program. / COURTESY DIGITS
FROM THE STEM: Curtis Johnson of EMC visits the Douglas Intermediate School in Douglas, Mass., to speak about his work. He volunteered through DIGITS, a Massachusetts education program. / COURTESY DIGITS

The result of an educational system that prepares students to excel in science, technology, engineering, arts and math is a capable workforce.
Rhode Island groups are on a quest to reach that end line and are looking for clues in neighboring Massachusetts, which has been developing similar programming for more than a decade.
“Our goal is to solve some of the economic problems we’re having in Rhode Island, and the key to that is education, specifically more defined career paths,” said Middletown Town Council President Chris Semonelli, who is also a Newport County Mentoring Co-op Group volunteer. “We don’t want to [just] talk about the problem anymore.”
Semonelli is one of the organizers of the first STEAM Summit Rhode Island, scheduled for April 3 at Salve Regina University. The summit is expected to host Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University STEAM proponents, as well as science, technology, engineering and math coordinators from Massachusetts.
Rhode Island’s STEAM approach, including the arts in the equation, is an outgrowth of STEM, says Semonelli. So the goal of the statewide summit is to get decision-makers who can effect change in the room to hear what’s been done in Massachusetts, what’s being done with STEAM here, and how to build a student pipeline that feeds the state’s workforce, he said.
“The thing that’s very powerful in Massachusetts is [that] a lot of their initiatives are part of their public education system,” he said. “We need that, too.”
Since 2002, Rhode Island has developed a state Science & Technology Plan and a K-16 Council, but neither is focused explicitly on STEM. In 2009, the state also invested in a STEM center at Rhode Island College.
“The STEM Center is trying to serve as [a] hub,” said Carol Giuriceo, the center’s executive director. “The state does fund individual projects, but we’re moving toward much stronger alignment of programs and what everybody’s doing.”
In 2011, when John Maeda was president of the Rhode Island School of Design and leading the way with STEAM, Rhode Island artists, designers, scientists, educators, business leaders and policymakers came together to advocate for the role of art and design in fostering innovation. While related programming is in use in schools across the state, it is not coordinated in a formalized, cohesive way, said Peter McLaren, science and technology specialist with the R.I. Department of Education.
At the upcoming summit, the three legs of the effort – government, education and business – have an opportunity to come together and start working on solutions, said McLaren.
“I look to the Massachusetts model, where they’re actually making some inroads,” he said. “They have a defined policy and a funding source. There is a consistent group of people that are part of [their STEM Advisory Council] that transcend [the authority of] a governor.”
In Massachusetts, David Cedrone, associate commissioner for economic and workforce development at the Department of Higher Education, says STEM is the focus, but that doesn’t mean the arts are excluded.
“We think in terms of innovation,” he said.
Yet, even though his state’s unemployment rate is roughly 2 percentage points less than Rhode Island’s rate of 9.3 percent, he is on a quest to quantify outcomes and establish whether STEM classes and after-school programs are in fact producing students who are ready and able to enter the workforce.
“We are beginning to be able to track students graduating from our higher education programs and their job placement after college. … There are so many moving parts it’s hard to isolate this program or that initiative yielding a specific result,” he said.
So while the Bay State may not offer all the answers, he said, it has been developing STEM programming since 2003 and has some statewide initiatives in place that Rhode Island does not.
Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick and lawmakers pushed through an economic-development bill more than a decade ago that put the focus on STEM education, Cedrone said. The Department of Higher Education managed the initiative and a STEM Advisory Council helped manage about $1.5 million annually in state funds as regional networks began to launch school projects and programs, Cedrone said.
A statewide plan set goals and was later revised. An annual summit, now 10 years old, continues to support statewide conversations with an audience that now numbers more than 1,600. Rhode Island has no statewide plan or annual state funding source.
In Rhode Island, groups as disparate as RIDE, the Tech Collective, and the Rhode Island STEM Center at Rhode Island College are eager to hear more from Cedrone and other Massachusetts STEM proponents, as well as RISD, about how STEM as well as STEAM education can better prepare students for college and/or work.
What is in place in Rhode Island from RIDE’s point of view are the Common Core standards for math, science and English Language Arts, as well as Next Generation Science standards, said RIDE Commissioner Deborah A. Gist and McLaren.
“From what I do know about the work they did in Massachusetts, it was a statewide effort led by folks at the highest levels of government, and education was a component of that overall effort,” said Gist.
“What the STEAM Summit is doing is bringing together those groups. … The difference between STEM and STEAM is semantics in a lot of ways but … Rhode Island is the birthplace of STEAM as a concept,” she said.
Statewide articulation agreements between high schools and colleges are another area in which Massachusetts has made strides, said Chris Shannon, director of youth programs for the South Shore Workforce Investment Board in Quincy, Mass. She is also expected to speak at the April 3 summit.
Articulation agreements are contracts between two accredited institutions – a high school and a college – through which a student can meet certain criteria and is awarded college credit for college-level academic work performed in a high school setting. So far, Massachusetts has seven such contracts, Shannon said.
Rhode Island has some articulation agreements between districts and schools, but does not have a statewide curriculum or statewide articulation agreements, McLaren said.
The summit will hopefully begin the process of creating the “connective tissue” between Rhode Island’s various programs “so we can build a workforce pipeline,” said Kathie Shields, executive director of the Tech Collective. •

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