District

• In the 2017-2018 school year, approximately 100,000 teacher jobs in STEM – or science, technology, engineering and mathematics – went unfilled at the high school level.
• At the middle school level, there were about 150,000 unfilled STEM educator jobs.
• As a professor of education policy – and also as a former state secretary of education in Virginia – I have examined the STEM teacher shortage from multiple vantage points.
• We think endowed chairs have the potential to retain and attract more STEM educators at the K-12 level, but it requires a willingness to rethink the ways that schools employ STEM educators.

What’s behind the gap?

• There are fewer college students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in education that ever before.
• Between 1959-1976, bachelor’s degrees in education were the most popular college major in the United States, and they accounted for about 20% of all degrees.
• In 2021, K-12 teachers’ weekly salary was only $1,348 – about $660 less than the $2,009 earned weekly by other college graduates.

Prior efforts to close the gap

• The Senate and House passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and Eisenhower signed it into law on Sept. 2, 1958.
• This set in motion a national STEM education agenda for American colleges and K-12 schools for decades to come.
• Fifty-three years later, President Barack Obama utilized his 2011 State of the Union address to advance the national STEM agenda.
• But the goal of the 100,000 STEM teacher campaign was to narrow the gap, not end it.

The endowed chair as a potential solution

• Traditionally, an endowed chair is a prestigious faculty position funded through annual spending from a university’s endowment fund.
• The benefit of an endowed chair is that it will be paid for decades to come by the interest on investment.
• An endowed chair could also provide funding for teachers and students to have access to state-of-the-art learning technology.
• An endowed STEM chair salary may never outpace what educators could earn if they entered the private market.

• “As this case makes clear, when retailers publish consumer reviews online, they cannot suppress negative reviews to paint a deceptive picture of the consumer experience.
• Hey Dude violated the FTC Act by suppressing negative consumer reviews of its merchandise, according to the complaint.
• According to the FTC, Hey Dude started publishing all consumer reviews only after finding out it was under investigation by the Commission.
• First, the proposed court order will bar Hey Dude from future violations of the Mail Order Rule.

• In August 2023, Russia’s Luna-25 probe crashed into the Moon’s surface, while India’s Chandrayann-3 mission successfully landed in the southern polar region, making India the fourth country to land on the Moon.
• I’m a professor of astronomy who has written a book about the future of space travel, articles about our future off-Earth, conflict in space, space congestion and the ethics of space exploration.

Space is getting crowded

• People think of space as vast and empty, but the near-Earth environment is starting to get crowded.
• Near-Earth orbit is even more congested than the space between Earth and the Moon.
• “It’s going to be like an interstate highway, at rush hour in a snowstorm, with everyone driving much too fast,” space launch expert Johnathan McDowell told Space.com.

The problem of space junk

• Humans have left a lot of junk on the Moon, including spacecraft remains like rocket boosters from over 50 crashed landings, nearly 100 bags of human waste and miscellaneous objects like a feather, golf balls and boots.
• Since no one owns the Moon, no one is responsible for keeping it clean and tidy.
• Tiny pieces of junk might not seem like a big issue, but that debris is moving at 15,000 mph (24,140 kph), 10 times faster than a bullet.

Nobody is in charge up there

• But the treaty is mute about companies and individuals, and it says nothing about how space resources can and can’t be used.
• The United Nations Moon Agreement of 1979 held that the Moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of humanity.
• The author and his research collaborators argued that U.S. environmental regulations should apply to the licensing of space launches.
• NASA has created and signed the Artemis Accords, broad but nonbinding principles for cooperating peacefully in space.
• Private companies are not party to the accords either, and some space entrepreneurs have deep pockets and big ambitions.

• As he joins the Gran Turismo (GT) academy, Jann goes through exactly the sorts of setbacks and near-misses you might expect.
• But so long as toys and video games continue make big money, this trend of movie tie-ins like Gran Turismo is only going to continue.
• The Barbie movie’s success speaks to its strong writing, A-list stars and handling of wider themes.
• Gran Turismo lacks the substance and depth that have made its doll-themed counterpart so popular.