Valarie Hogan, Fellow

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On February 19, 2013, the Equity and Excellence Commission, a federal advisory committee, released a report detailing the inequity in the American K-12 educational system and asking the Department of Education to take action. The Equity and Excellence Commission is made up of thought leaders in education such as Russlynn Ali, Michael Rebell, and Randi Weingarten, among many distinguished others. The Commission was responsible for advising the Secretary of Education on the disparities in educational opportunities that give rise to the achievement gap.

And provide advice, they did. The Commission did not pull any punches in its report, For Each and Every Child: A Strategy for Education Equity and Excellence. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human ights lauded the release of the report, stating that “this report confirms what those of us in the civil and human rights community have long known: that our nation’s system of financing and delivering public education is badly broken and in need of a dramatic overhaul.”

NASA launched the MissionSTEM website to assist NASA grantees in meeting their compliance obligations under the federal civil rights laws and to find ways to “creatively address issues such as attracting and retaining diverse students in STEM,” as NASA’s Administrator, Charles F. Bolden, Jr. stated in a video introducing the new website. In his video remarks and corresponding blog post, Mr. Bolden references the “Moon Speech” given by President Kennedy at Rice University in 1962 (video/text), in which the President announced plans to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade – even when many of the things that were necessary to make that happen had not even been invented yet.

The President acknowledged that the rapid pace of change in our world created new and more challenges – “new ignorance, new problems, new dangers.” However, he proclaimed that “the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward.”