The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education: Transforming Education for a New Era

The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education (21PSTEM) stands as an independent, nonprofit research and action organization dedicated to identifying and implementing ways to transform education to empower learners and improve lives.

The Challenge of Education Reform

An aerospace engineer once wrote that of the two, teaching was harder than rocket science. If this is true, then reforming education is harder than landing on the moon. Still, as most any scientist, engineer, artist or performer will tell you, there is much to be learned from failure, and education reform is no exception.

A Deep Well of Experience

The staff at 21PSTEM have witnessed many initially highly touted reform practices and policies fail, making them a very learned bunch. Their deep and varied experience in schools and education reform efforts spans 20-50 years and has allowed them to learn from these failures and apply new approaches to improve instruction and the systems that support it.

Celebrating Successes

If the diverse staff at 21PSTEM has studied educational failure from all angles, they have also witnessed and facilitated plenty of education’s successes through a variety of research and development projects. Not just the success that comes from a test score, but success that comes: when a child grows intellectually, emotionally and morally; when a teacher masters a challenging practice; or a whole system adopts and sustains a reform. You know it when you see it. There is immense satisfaction to be had in empowering learners and improving lives. They take “quality education for all” personally and work to make sure that everyone has it.

A Multifaceted Approach

21PSTEM analyzes an educational problem from all angles, studying what has been tried and conceiving what has not been done or what can be done better. They challenge conventional assumptions about curriculum organization, learning environments, instructional methods, grading practices, professional development, and teacher and administrative leadership and evaluation.

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Research and Development

One dimension of 21PSTEM is as a research organization - a think tank funded by merit-reviewed federal and foundation grants producing cutting edge ideas applicable to research and practice. But they are also a “doing” organization, developing and implementing large-scale, innovative education projects with a superb group of doers.

The Power of Partnership

However, they do not do it alone. Their middle name is “Partnership.” They have worked on projects with nearly 40 different universities, non-profit, and for-profit partners, as well as dozens of individual consultants. To do this, 21PSTEM’s organization structure is designed to be “flat” and agile so that it can respond quickly to opportunities by assembling the right mix of partners for the project at hand. 21PSTEM has all of the accounting and fiscal management policies in place to operate large scale projects with multiple sub-grantees. Even so, they welcome the opportunities to work with individual schools and teachers to transform education for their students.

Transforming Education: Key Strategies

21PSTEM works both nationally and internationally with governments, institutions of higher education, school districts and other education entities to transform education, empower learners, and improve lives by advancing literacy and achievement in purpose-driven science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM.)

Recent Projects and Initiatives

Mathematics Empowerment Through Standards Based Grading (ME-SBG)

Learn about 21PSTEM's newest grant to empower students to take control of their learning. Representatives are attending the upcoming Full Scale Symposium in New Orleans to talk about ME-SBG, their latest project about empowering students to take charge of their education in mathematics.

New Era- New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education

The critically acclaimed book on educational transformation, titled New Era- New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education, explores the unprecedented realities and educational challenges associated with entering a new era filled with catastrophic climate change, advanced artificial intelligence, massive demographic shifts, and worldwide digital disinformation campaigns. Drawing on 40 years of educational reform experience, including 13 years in Egypt, the authors outline how to fundamentally redesign curriculum, assessment, and teacher education systems so that they are more relevant to the times and meaningful to the students. Repurposing public education begins with a collective decision about the kind of country we want to live in.

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AI and Mathematical Mentoring

Along with Drexel University, 21PSTEM recently received new seed funding from the Gates Foundation to work with practicing teachers to train AI on mathematical mentoring data.

Standards-Based Grading Research

Their Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness article is now in print, exploring Standards-Based Grading, its impact on students, and how it can improve student performance across the country.

Purpose Driven Education

PHENND group held an engaging and exceptional June 4th Institute on Purpose Driven Education for today's young people.

USAID Contract in Egypt

An AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (USAID) CONTRACT PROVIDES 21PSTEM WITH THE OPPORTUNITY TO PIONEER AN 18-STEP DESIGN PROCESS TO CREATE A FULLY INTEGRATED ADVANCED STEM HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM FOR THE EGYPTIAN MINISTRY OF EDUCATION. THE CURRICULUM IS BACKWARD DESIGNED FROM ELEVEN GRAND CHALLENGES AND UTILIZES RELATED SEMESTER CAPSTONE PROJECTS. TWENTY-ONE MODEL STEM HIGH SCHOOLS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED.

National Science Foundation (NSF)

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (NSF) DIRECTORATE FOR STEM EDUCATION WORKS TO DEVELOP A WELL-INFORMED CITIZENRY AND A DIVERSE AND CAPABLE WORKFORCE OF SCIENTISTS. TECHNICIANS, MATHEMATICIANS AND EDUCATORS.

Key Metrics

18 UNIVERSITIES
3727 TEACHERS
62 SCHOOL DISTRICTS
364 SCHOOLS
$60+ MILLION IN FUNDING

The Genesis of 21PSTEM

21PSTEM began in 2006, mid-way through a five-year $12.5 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to La Salle University, the largest in its history, to establish the Math, Science Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (MSPGP), an unprecedented partnership of 45 Philadelphia area school districts and 13 colleges and universities.

The Math, Science Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (MSPGP)

The MSPGP had three ambitious goals: improve students’ achievement in math and science; increase the quantity and quality of STEM teachers; and research how to do the first two. In engineering terms, the MSPGP was a big design research experiment. The MSPGP leadership team consisted of five people: three from the college level - a mathematician, a geologist and a science educator - together with a cognitive psychologist and a school district superintendent. More than 100 college faculty were involved, and several thousands of teachers, and tens of thousands of students. They were learning a great deal about how to enhance student engagement and learning. As a design experiment, new ideas and promising avenues for innovation had emerged.

Becoming 21PSTEM

In September, 2007, the MSPGP leadership team incorporated The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education. 21PSTEM was intended to be an agile, neutral broker or “connector” to bring institutions and human resources together to form robust partnerships to undertake projects no one institution could easily do on their own. In June 2008, to their surprise, they were awarded the grant and 21PSTEM was launched. This was their Big Bang moment.

The Cognitive Science Center (Cog Sci Center)

The Cog Sci Center was a large and audacious undertaking. The goal was to have a team of scientists apply cognitive science principles to modify three science units from two different science curriculum programs in 60 middle schools, provide professional development to teachers from 120 middle schools and then compare the results of these interventions to student outcomes in 60 business-as-usual middle schools. Using a randomized control trial design (RCT), 180 schools, 740 teachers and thousands of students were involved across five districts in Arizona and two in Pennsylvania.

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