When President Bush’s fiscal-year 2005 budget proposal arrived on Capitol Hill in early 2004, US Representative Vernon Ehlers, a Michigan Republican, wasn’t happy. Ehlers, a physicist who for years has been one of Capitol Hill’s champions of science education, looked at the proposed funding for NSF’s share of the fledgling Math and Science Partnership program and saw an unexpected shift in administration policy.
Instead of proposing $200 million for the MSP program at NSF, as it had in each of the preceding two years, the administration wanted to cut funding to $80 million while dramatically boosting funding for the Department of Education’s version of the MSP program from $12.5 million to $269 million. The proposal to shrink NSF’s role in a program that was intended to take advantage of the strengths of both NSF and Education to improve K–12 math and science education troubled many members of Congress. Ehlers and...
