We Become Strong

We Become Strong, in Fact,
Only When We Are Smart
Remarks by the Honorable Ray Mabus,
Secretary of the Navy : STEM Roll Out – Business Higher Education Forum
Washington, D.C. 10 June, 2013.
Source : US Navy.
I want to thank you all for being here. This issue, this
discussion, ensuring that the next generation of Science, Engineering, Math and
Technology graduates, and experts, and people in our society, there is no more
important subject that you can get together for. I do want to say just a word
about Admiral Klunder. I have asked what his first name was on our way over here,
because I know him by his call sign: Gucci. He has been spectacular as the head
of ONR.
I’ve been to talk with this group once before, and the last
time I was here I talked about the “gathering storm” that is the current state
of STEM education in the United States. We haven’t been at this for a long time
in an organized way, and it is going to take a period of really sustained, and
concentrated, and dedicated effort to make sure that we succeed. But I think
it’s good, and valuable, and informative to go over some of the numbers again,
and you’re going to hear this I’m sure, over and over again. But then to talk
about why Navy, why Navy and Marine Corps, why are we doing this?
Every year in the United States about 3 million people
graduate from high school. Now that’s too few, and it’s only about 70% of those
that start school, but 3 million get a high school diploma, walk across that
stage and get a diploma. Out of those that go to college only about a third
start in a STEM related field. Out of that third, only half will graduate with
those STEM degrees. And out of that half -- I’m doing math in public -- we’re
getting smaller and smaller, a very small number will go on to get a Masters
degree.
The numbers tell us that out of every fifty high school
diplomas, we end up with only four STEM Bachelor’s degrees and one advanced
degree. So for an example, something that is really important to us in the Navy
is acoustics. In 2010, in the whole country we had seven bachelor’s degrees,
nine master’s degrees, and five doctorates. That’s in the whole United States.
Now acoustics may sound like a pretty narrow and specific field, but it’s really
not. Just think about it. In the Navy it’s how we hunt submarines, and it’s how
we keep our submarines safe. We do things with acoustics on, under, and over the
sea.
Georgetown did a study that said 74% of our seniors in High
School scored below “proficient” in math. So, three quarters of people that are
about to graduate can’t even reach the low bar of “proficient.” And the United
States measures “average” in STEM education when compared to the rest of the
world. We all should never accept being average in anything, but particularly in
something as important as STEM. Because of the decline in
public education and STEM education, fewer and fewer of our students are going
into STEM. Now our universities are the envy of the world. But, more and more
the students that are enrolled in our advanced programs come from somewhere else
in the world than the United States. They come from India, they come from China.
I did the commencement at Alcorn State University; that started as a black
University in Mississippi; it’s where a lot of our STEM students go in
Mississippi. It’s where Medgar Evers went to school. When I did the
commencement, of the 30 summa cum laude graduates, over half were from Russia.
In the entire graduating class there were over 100 students from Russia and they
were all in STEM education.
Gucci talked about his family, and I can tell you a little
about mine. My older two daughters went to the same school and they had a great
science teacher in the 5th grade, I mean a great science teacher. Mr. Davis got
them on fire about science. His daughter was a science teacher in the 6th grade,
she kept it going. Then in the 7th grade they got the track coach who just
happened to teach 7th grade science and it went downhill from there. Two great
students, intense about science, technology, and math, they took calculus in
high school and physics. My older daughter has a degree from Harvard in a big
money field: history and literature. My middle daughter will be a senior at NYU
this fall, is also studying a big money field: art history. But, it shows you
how tenuous that connection is and how slim that reed is. It also shows how
important it is for us not just at the university level but starting in middle
school, starting when our students, our children, are getting interested in what
they are going to do in life, to make that connection to science, technology,
engineering and math.
So how come the Navy? Why the Navy and Marine Corps? Why
should we care? Why should we be interested? Because it’s a question that we get
a lot, on this and other subjects. Why don’t you let the Department of Education
handle this? Why don’t you let somebody else do this? Why Navy? Why should you
be putting effort into this, why should you be putting some of your funds into
this. Well, first, every single day our Sailors and Marines who are deployed
worldwide, are the cornerstone of American defense and power and do incredibly
difficult and very technical things. They operate and maintain the world’s most
advanced ballistic and guided missile systems, they operate and repair avionics
on the most advanced aircraft, and they take submarines to the depths of the
oceans. They run nuclear reactors on our subs and carriers and they have a
safety record that is second to none. You cannot ask for more technically
demanding jobs anywhere.
In order to do them, and do them well, they’ve got to
understand what these systems do and why they work, and that requires a strong
foundation in STEM subjects. In the 21st century it is
very clear that our nation’s security is going to depend more on our smarts than
on our strength. We become strong, in fact, only when we are smart.
I’ll give you one example. The newest ship we have, the
Littoral Combat Ship, has a core crew of 50, but it has far more complexity and
technology than the ships we sailed a generation ago that had exponentially more
Sailors. The ship I sailed on four decades ago had 1000 Sailors, a thousand
people. That’s because we had to have a Sailor to turn every valve, flip every
switch, and today we don’t. So what it means is that the generation of future
naval officers and a generation of future Sailors and Marines are going to be
called upon and command incredibly advanced ships, systems, and weapons.
We don’t have any requirement for strong backs and weak
minds. There are no jobs in the military, or frankly in society, for that
anymore.
We have to take a pretty long view about this. We build our
ships to be in the fleet 30, 40, 50 years. We just retired USS ENTERPRISE last
December in Norfolk, after 51 years of service. ENTERPRISE was in the Cuban
Missile Crisis blockade. So the last Captain of the ships we’re building today
has not been born yet. Those ships we are building today are going to be
upgraded, technology changes, and the people who run them whether it be the
Sailors in the engine room or weapons department or the CO’s are going to have
to be flexible and technologically way ahead of the curve. That requires a
strong STEM foundation. At the Naval Academy even if you major in history or
English, and I’m one of those that majored in English, not at the Naval Academy,
at Old Miss, which has a pretty strong English Department, some guy named
Faulkner flunked out. But they take so many courses in STEM, in the sciences,
technology, engineering, and mathematics, that when they graduate it’s a
Bachelor of Science in English or a Bachelor of Science in History. That’s the
sort of background we’ve got to have, not just in the folks coming out of the
Naval Academy, but all across this country, whether they’re going to join the
Navy and Marine Corps or whether they’re going to do the second thing that I’m
worried about and that’s build the stuff that we’re going to use, come up with
the ideas, and be the innovators, the designers of the things that we need and
going to have to have in the future.
Since the Navy sailed our first six frigates 200 years ago,
we have been agile, we have been flexible, and we have been lethal. We’ve
defended America. We have always been the most adaptable of the President’s
options. We push boundaries, new ideas and innovative solutions. Designing and
building next generation of ships and aircraft, of weapons and systems, is
incredibly demanding. It is an edge that we have enjoyed for decades. It is an
edge that we absolutely have to keep. The two edges that we have had, the two
things we have dominated in, are our people and technology. Those two come
together in STEM.
But it isn’t just about the military. Our economy relies and
thrives on innovation. Tom Friedman wrote a book that came out a few months ago
called “That Was Us Once,” it’s a great book. It talks about innovation, it
talks about how we became the world leader that we are today. In a conversation
I had with him, which was interesting and he went on the Sunday talk shows a
couple weeks ago and said the same thing, he said “I’m not worried about people
stealing our cyber secrets that much. I’m worried if they steal our Declaration
of Independence or our Constitution.” He said, if they steal the designs of how
we do things it’s going to take them a while to reverse engineer it and we’re
going to be on to the next thing. The important thing is that we not stop; the
important thing is that we continue to innovate. The important thing is that we
are always on that cutting-edge. Now he did say that he understands why the
military needs to protect cyber secrets, and why our military partners needed to
do that. But in the long run innovation beat it all, and I think he’s right.
Industry, the only continuous thing in industry is change, it
is driven by new ways of doing things, and new ways of building things. Without
enough people with STEM backgrounds, we quit leading the world’s innovation. The
entire world wants their own Silicon Valley, or Route 128 in Boston, but without
STEM and concentration on education we risk losing the ability to keep the
Silicon Valleys in America, to keep the Route 128’s. More and more companies are
looking overseas to find the skills, the engineer s and scientists who will
develop our future technology and advancements. We going to have to do a lot
better with making these home grown.
In the past few years we have made a lot of progress in our
Naval STEM programs. Wes mentioned the “STEM 2 Stern” Initiative: it is now four
years old, and every year we reach more and more students. We’re reaching the
end of Phase I of this program, last year our education and outreach got an
additional to 8000 American students involved, bringing the total involved to
over 100,000 students that we are reaching directly with Navy STEM programs.
Earlier this year I signed out Phase II of our Naval STEM
Strategy. Basically I’ve challenged the STEM organization, and ONR is up to the
challenge, I’m absolutely confident, to get another 40,000 students in by 2015.
We’ve awarded a dozen challenge grants and we had four research teams selected
as award winners for our Digital Tutor Grand Challenge.
Later this year I get to go to Chicago and meet with Mayor
Rahm Immanuel and talk about our Critical Midwest Association of Science and
Service, MASS Program there. We’ve partnered with the City of Chicago, Chicago
Public School s, and City Colleges of Chicago on a five year program to
integrate some of our most su ccessful STEM learning models and work-study
opportunities into 7 Chicago schools. The program will reach 1000 students in
low income, disadvantaged and underrepresented school districts. One of the most
important parts of this program is sort of what STEM is all about, and that is
the metrics and evaluation plan that we will be using to measure success. Over
time this will help us refine the programs and increase their effectiveness and
increase reach.
My job is defined, as the Secretary of the Navy, to recruit,
train, and equip Sailors and Marines of the Navy and Marine Corps. This effort
is all about that but it is about a lot more than that too. We want to educate
our future engineers and naval researchers; but we want to help educate
America’s future scientific leaders, future industry leaders, future educational
leaders. I want to give you just one example of type of student I’m talking
about.
I work in a building that is sort of obsessed with acronyms
and abbreviations. In fact, one of the things that I did when I came into my job
and was being briefed up, I started asking people what the acronym meant or the
abbreviation meant, about half of th em didn’t know. I have 4 P’s: People,
Platforms, Power, and Partnerships. Po wer is energy, how we get it, how we use
it, how we can turn it from a liability into an advantage. One of the things
that we’ve worked on is biofuels. We’ve worked at the direction of the President
with the Departments of Agriculture and Energy and Navy. And on Memorial Day
week end we just announced that we have signed agreements with three private
sector companies, who by 2016 have committed to producing 150 million gallons of
biofuel at less than $4 a gallon. Now that is pretty revolutionary. This was the
result of the President saying: do a nationwide biofuel industry, make it cost
competitive, and private sector has to share the costs. Every one of these
things we’ve done, the private sector has at least a one–to–one match.
I proud of this, but the example I’m going to give you is a
young woman who was in my office a few weeks ago named Sara Volz, from Colorado.
She is 17 years old, and she has done some groundbreaking work, at seventeen,
developing algae that can be used to make biofuels. Now she did this in a high
tech lab...she grew the algae under her bed in her bedroom. My children have
tried that too, although not intentionally and they usually tried in the
refrigerator.
In 2012, when she was 16, she received a $50,000 grant to
research algae and its potential for biofuel. She’s been researching how to
increase that potential through “stress-induced lipid accumulation.” Now, I have
exhausted my knowledge of that. This year, the reason she was here, she won the
Intel Science Talent Search, went to the White House, met the President and
talked about her research.
She’s the exception. But she shouldn’t be. She should not be
the exception. She should be the rule. She said at the White House, she said,
“My school really doesn’t do anything with this.” She reached out to Colorado
State University and the Air Force Academy to do this sort of research. It
should be able to happen at high schools. This sort of cutting edge thinking and
innovation ought to be in high schools, colleges, and universities all around
this country.
But we’ve had a sort of slow decline in basically K through
12 education in this country. My Dad, who was born in 1901, in the same town I
was, Ackerman, Mississippi, a town of 1000 people. He became a civil engineer
because he fell in love with STEM education and the preciseness of it. In high
school, in Ackerman, Mississippi, he took physics and he took chemistry, but by
the time I came along 50 years later we didn’t have any of that. So very few of
my classmates went into the things that my Dad and his classmates did. Just as
that decline has been slow and long, the road back isn’t going to be fast. But
we’ve got to do it. We’ve got to do it every single day and every single year.
This year we’re putting $55 million from the Navy into STEM
programs. Now in a time of budget crunches and crisis, they say “well, why are
you doing this.” There is no more important thing to do. There is no more
crucial thing for America’s future than this. Money alone can’t be the metric.
Our definition of success is if we reach a broader audience, if we have STEM
graduates, if we have those high school students still inspired by and
interested in STEM, then we have succeeded. We are monitoring all our programs,
checking up on the students that we worked with, and we’re working to make sure
they stay on this path and they commit themselves to it in college and beyond.
We’ve got a lot of support, including President Obama who is
very vocal about it. This “1 million new STEM” mission that the President laid
out is an ambitious goal, it’s over the next decade, but it’s very doable but
we’re going to have to do it together. The Navy’s not going to be able to do it
by itself, ONR is not going to be able to do it by itself, industry in America
is not going to be able to do it by itself, the education system is not going to
be able to do it by itself, but together I’m actually pretty confident that we
can do it. That is why ONR has funded the studies that developed the STEM
Undergraduate Model which you’ll be rolling out here today. Together we can
develop the best practices, most effective investments, and focus our ability on
how we do this.
And return to the young woman, Sara Volz. She summed up, at
the White House, everything pretty well. She said, “Science is a philosophy,
it’s questioning the world around you. It’s not just a collection of knowledge.
Every child is born a scientist. We’re all born with this curiosity about the
world and that’s what schools should emphasize.” That’s a pretty wise young
woman. She should not be the exception. She should be the rule. By working
together we can make sure we get done. I go back to what I said at the beginning,
the United States, particularly in education, should never accept, ever, being
average in anything. We lead this world in innovation, we lead this world in the
way we think, we lead the world because of our ideas. It’s going to be required
to maintain the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps as the most
powerful expeditionary fighting force the world has ever known. It is what’s
going to be required to maintain the United States as the leader in this world
of everything.
So from the Navy, Semper Fortis. Forever Courageous.
From the Marine Corps, Semper Fideles. Forever Faithful.
Thank you.
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