Superman and STEM With the buzz surrounding Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for Superman film and the recent launch of President Obama's Change the Equation initiative, education once again comes to the forefront of the national agenda. Just one year after the administration unveiled the Educate to Innovate campaign, this new flurry of attention is a great opportunity to gauge the progress our country is making to close the learning gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects and to examine how we can move the education agenda forward. Read Full Article

Teaching for America When I came to Washington in 1988, the cold war was ending and the hot beat was national security and the State Department. If I were a cub reporter today, I’d still want to be covering the epicenter of national security — but that would be the Education Department. President Obama got this one exactly right when he said that whoever “out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.” The bad news is that for years now we’ve been getting out-educated. The good news is that cities, states and the federal government are all fighting back. But have no illusions. We’re in a hole. Read Full Article

Obama: Our best scientists are helping the economy "It's absolutely essential to our future," Obama said. Read Full Article

Duncan: Education System Must 'Reward Excellence' "We're simply not producing the citizens, the workers, that you guys need," Duncan said. "We have not had enough passion, enough push from the business community, and your collective voice is extraordinarily powerful." Read Full Article

A Conversation With The New NSF Director Subra Suresh, former dean of engineering at MIT, was sworn in last month as director of the National Science Foundation, which doles out billions of dollars for basic research each year. Suresh talks about his priorities and how the NSF's budget is likely to fare with the new Congress. Read Full Article

Your Child Left Behind Imagine for a moment that a rich, innovative company is looking to draft the best and brightest high-school grads from across the globe without regard to geography. Let’s say this company’s recruiter has a round-the-world plane ticket and just a few weeks to scout for talent. Where should he go? Read Full Article

Drawing our best math and science minds into the classroom A cornerstone of this was the National Defense Education Act, designed to radically expand America's cadre of high-level scientists and engineers. In 1961, I was the first person in the United States to complete a doctorate under its auspices, one of about 300 PhDs in mathematics earned here that year. Read Full Article

Intel's Andy Grove on manufacturing in America Intel's manufacturing strategy was underscored by a recent announcement to invest as much as $8 billion in new factories and facilities in the U.S. That's in addition to the roughly $34 billion it has already invested in its U.S. factories, including investment in a joint flash chip manufacturing venture with Micron Technology. Read Full Article

Arne Duncan: Education can be bipartisan Despite waking up to a political landscape now dominated by Republicans, Duncan – one of a handful of Obama administration cabinet members who actively campaigned for several Democrats – believes that education reform can be the great bipartisan issue, uniting the two feuding parties. Read Full Article

How to Make an Engineering Culture But the silver-haired, 63-year-old billionaire has more than the Dyson products on his mind lately. Mr. Dyson is an adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron on how to accelerate Britain’s development of new technology and build up its manufacturing and export prowess. Read Full Article