Advocate Summary

Issue:  K-12 Math and Science Education
Advocate:  American Chemical Society – Brian Dougherty
Date of Interview: 7/3/02

Basic Background
Well, science educations, specifically K-12 science education. We kind of have three priority areas, one is federal funding for research and development, another is science education and ACS also gets involved with environmental issues. Science education happens to be the one we are most active on now, given the recent passage of the education law and what Congress is doing. The background is that the federal government funds a lot of education activities, the Department of Education has a large budget but states and local districts have the primary responsibility for education. For math and science teachers we’re seeking to increase support and funding for professional development, the argument is that if we are going to have any hope of continuing to be technologically competitive we’re going to need a stronger domestic pool of technically trained scientists and engineers. It continues to be a big issue is H1B visas; immigrant foreign students, getting the technical jobs in the US and there are a lot of scientists and engineers in the United States that need to be technically trained. So what we say is that we know we want to continue to be a technological leader, we know that industries have a lot of jobs in science and engineering but if you look at our K-12 program it is pretty sad, test scores are down and we do very poorly compared to international partners, whether it is Korea, Germany or Japan, US students, particularly the 12th graders score particularly low. We think it is partly because of the teaching and the science teachers would be the first to admit that, there are probably more science and math teachers teaching quote unquote out of field – that is they don’t have a lot of background, I don’t know about you but when I took science and math, I’m not a scientist, I was a political science major, but my science teach didn’t have any science background, and that’s pretty common in high school. The argument that teaching is critical and knowing how to teach, but only the content can really excite students and get them interested in science. We also know that the scientific field changes so much, so again professional development, that is in-service training for teachers to learn more about the content and the training and new research in the field we think is critical to being more effective in the classroom and ultimately bringing test scores up. Now there are lots of things that impact student achievement, there’s parents, the textbooks, the curriculum, the school system but research has show that the quality of the teachers is paramount. So we say that Congress and states all recognize the importance of teacher training and quality teaching and everyone recognizes the need for science and engineering, everyone talks about science and technology, the president and Congress but when you get to technology training for K-12 teachers, where the need is just as great as any other subject – if not greater there should be a specific federal program to tackle that. Now, under the No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush and Congress, did a block grant, block grants are essentially a way to, rather than have the Department of Education involved in ten different areas and tell the states and localities how to spend that money, let’s just take 5 200 million dollar programs roll them into one billion dollar program and give more flexibility to the states. Probably a good idea generally, the Department of Education isn’t famous for its management but what is getting lost in there is the program for math and science teachers. There has been a program, called the Eisenhower Professional Development Program that has been folded into a larger block grant. So we think the effect will be, when we talk to the math and science teachers that are members of our organization, they think the effect will be that there won’t be any specific targeted funding at the state and local level for math and science. If the federal government isn’t encouraging states to take up this area, if history is any guide, what will happen is that states and localities, no one is opposed to math and science – they think it’s important, it’s just that the folks, the administrators in the school systems typically don’t have science or engineering background, they typically look at math and science issues as a little complicated and the tendency is to shy away from it and focus more on reading and kind of the immediate needs, they’re not worried about the technical workforce of the nation and the competitiveness of the US, as much as improving test scores and reading and the like. So what has happened is that with that block grant, at the same time Congress block granted 3 billion dollars for teacher development they have also set up a different program for math and science partnerships, which is a good thing. The problem is while 450 million dollars by Congress, the appropriations committee only appropriated 12.5 million. So here you have a situation where our members are looking at the federal government and saying and seeing 3 billion for professional development but they don’t think there going to be able to compete as effectively as these other subjects. And then they see another 450 million in the program, which is great, it improves math and science education, it’s longer term training, it’s a partnership that gets businesses involved, universities involved. Congress essentially reformed math and science education in some way with this new program – they authorized 450 million dollars, but when push came to shove the House and Senate authorized so much money for so many programs that the appropriations committees didn’t have all the money to dole out, so choices had to be made. This was technically a new program but only 12 million was appropriated. So that was the issue, going to Congress and letting them know that this isn’t some add on program, that this is a critical issue and trying to increase, our goal this year is to increase that 12.5 million to 100 million. So it’s essentially a straight funding issue because we think there are more things than funding, the quality of the program the content, that was essentially already done by Congress in a good way it’s just that they didn’t have the money to back it up.

Prior Activity on the Issue 
None mentioned.

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
ACS is not the only group concerned about this, we’re concerned about members because all of our members are chemistry teachers, well there are physics teachers and math teachers and biology teachers and folks in engineering that are concerned about this problem, so we took the lead in putting together a coalition of science and engineering organizations, including the American Physical Society representing the, we have about 160 thousand chemists, they have about 40 thousand physicists, we’re working with the National Science Teacher’s Association, we’re working with engineering societies like the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, they have 120 thousand members. So the first thing we did was we all agreed on a one page statement by the coalition, and there is a whole list of names, which essentially states our case, we have twenty-five science and engineering societies all saying 100 million dollar, well the really request is 450 million, which is consistent with what Congress authorized – that’s our goal, but we know that that’s unachievable, our target is really 100 million dollars. So we have a one page coalition statement in addition to our own ACS statement. The other challenge was to get the business community involved, Congress will respond to the science and engineering community – their associations, to the extent that their constituents are involved, but we don’t have a political action committee we don’t get involved in partisan politics. We are what is known as a 501 c3 organization which is essentially a charitable education organization. All of the groups we were working with on the science and engineering side even the National Science Teachers Association are 501 c3 organizations, we cannot contribute to candidates, get involved in elections. What we can do, I always tell our members Congress responds to three things vocal constituents, timely and persuasive information and campaign contributions, and I tell them we can’t get involved in number three but we can get involved in one and two, that is doing what we do in Washington, we have 14 people in this office working on a number of issues, but two of them are working full time on this issue, math and science education K through 12. We also get our members involved in the program as well, but what Congress responds to is constituents but they also respond to folks that have political action committees and then voting people in their districts, I mean we represent individual members, 160 thousand chemists and the Mechanical Engineer Association represents 120 mechanical engineers, well they’re all working for companies or universities or government and the companies that they are working for are clearly concerned about science education. A good example is Texas Instruments, the most selfish thing for them to do is to go to Congress and fight for issues that effect their bottom line, which they do but to their credit they’ve also made it a priority to get involved on longer term issues, our K- 12 students, they know that’s the future workforce, so a lot of electronic companies – through the Electronic Association, Texas Instruments, there was a whole list of business interests, IBM, Intel, all very concerned about this issue, so the first goal was to put together a coalition of science and engineering societies and then we wanted to reach out to the business community and they essentially have their own sort of ad hoc coalition. So while we have separate statements and separate lobbying strategies we stay very close in contact and our message is the same. So we know who the players are this year – the House and Senate Appropriations committees, we know what we need to bring to the table and that is not just the science and engineering communities but also the business community. Other player that we haven’t brought into the fold, not that we’ve tried that hard, but other potential players could have been the university community, but they’re not as big a player on education as they are on research, the governors of states are another potential vehicle to influence Congress and the state education program. But essentially we’re convinced that there is a strong enough push, collectively we may have 800,000 to a million members, if just 5 percent of those folks are writing to their member of congress, that’s going to have a big impact. And the business community can take the approach we’ve got a lot of employees and perhaps companies in your district, that alone really should be enough to get 100 million dollars if we do things right in terms of the advocacy.

The first thing is position statements, that’s kind of ground zero, we happen to have a whole entire process of working with our committees and working with our board of experts on education policy develop the one, two, three page position statements. Once the position statement is developed and the business community does the same thing essentially, then we have a number of tools at our disposal.  The most important, I guess they’re all important, but having staff go up to the appropriations staff, individually and as a group, if we can get lobbyists from other science and engineering societies, if we put together a three or four person team representing the engineering and science teachers, and have a one hour meeting before the visit with the staff person just to decide that everyone has the same language, that’s an effective way to get our message across, so staff meetings are important. Again whether it is individual or in a group, the other thing we do is hold briefings, not with a specific message on science education, or a 100 million dollars for this particular program but just to create awareness of this issue. You could argue that if members of congress are at least thinking about science and technology education, through briefing on the Hill and the staff are learning about the issue, they’re going to be much more interested. Most members of congress don’t think about science and technology most staff don’t think about science and technology and I worked on the Hill and I don’t have a science background, but I didn’t think about science and technology because Congress responds to short term issues, they respond to issues that they are hearing from their constituents about, they respond to simple issues and science and technology issues are long term, they’re complicated and it really takes a lot to get the attention of a member of congress or staff. So we have briefings on the Hill both, through our Science in the Congress program – which once a month we get a hundred people on Capitol Hill, bring in outside speakers on the subject and discuss the policy or the science of the issue, it may be cloning, it may be the space station, but we make sure we have a couple of those on education. We also put advertisements in Roll Call the congressional newspaper or the Congressional Quarterly. We’re working on one now, essentially a one page ad that ran in Roll Call last year, outlining the case and say all these associations endorse this statement, so advertising is important. The staff visits are important. You can also bring your senior members in, blue chip lobbying, your CEO, you can do what you can as a staff person but clearly a member of Congress is going to want to hear IBM’s chief technology officer before their Washington lobbyist. If you bring in your senior members, either university or industry to meet with their member of congress then you have a constituent in Washington sharing that message. Sometimes it’s one on one meetings, sometimes it’s through providing Congressional testimony. That’s what we call our governing structure meeting with Congress and they have those meetings on the Hill and also with the agencies and the White House. But the two most valuable lobbying tools we have is our legislative action network and other associations have similar networks, we have 7000 of our members, not very many compared to our 160,000 total, but 7000 members are essentially dedicated to looking at action alerts when we send them out. Five or six times a year we will send out an action alert to 7000 of our members saying Congress is about to vote on this math and science education bill, here’s the background, here’s the ASC position, here’s the key players, please go to our website, type in our zip code, read more about the issue, and if you support our position then send an email to your member of congress. And we give them a draft letter that we hope they will modify, some of them do, some of them don’t it’s a lot easier just to send what we give them. So the goal there is quantity, I’ve worked on the Hill long enough to know that if one month you’re getting two letters on math and science education and the next month you’re getting 12 letters well that’s something you’re going to check out and hopefully it will get to the member of congress. Members of congress don’t read those letters but if staff is getting them hopefully it gets on the radar screen. And I get asked how many letters need to have to go into a congressional office before it gets their attention, well it depends on the member, Diane Feinstein represents 30 million people and some members only represent 100,000. What we do know is that all those members of congress do listen to constituents. We go back and forth all the time whether it’s better to send them a hand written letter or an email, well while a hand written letter is only a little bit better, email is a lot quicker and you can get more emails, and it’s easier for our members, we make it easy for them so it’s a trade off but the mail tends to be – most offices we talk to – as effective as snail mail correspondence. What I hear happens is the office manager prints off all of the emails and then they say “oh, science education, there’s a lot on science education” so it’s almost treated like it’s a printed letter. So that’s grassroots, getting your wide membership involved in the process, getting them to weight in. The other technique we use is grasstops lobbying, rather than focusing on the number of letters - getting 50,000 members to write in, finding the key VIPs in congressional districts. For this math and science partnership initiative we know there are 12 or 13 key players in the House and Senate that ultimately are going to decide. Out of the 535 members of congress if we did nothing but focus on 12 or 13 people that’s probably all we’d need to do. So we look into those congressional districts, take someone like Senator Kit Bond from Missouri certainly interested in science education, probably doesn’t think all that much about K-12, he doesn’t have all of the facts, but if we find some folks in St. Louis, ACS members or perhaps in partnership with another organization. That’s a little harder to do to find them back in the districts, not only do you have to get the members in Washington but also in the districts. It is one of the most effective ways to lobby get two or three seasoned constituents that have standing in the community, with Kit Bond it would be if we can get the chief technical officer at Montsanto, who happens to be a chemical engineer, someone with standing from industry, and a major employer in the district, and then someone from the Washington University in St. Louis – the chair of the chemical engineering department or the dean of science. And if you can get an industry and university team to go in there and talk to Kit Bond, from two different perspectives. An industry person they may be viewed as having a particular axe to grind. The beauty of the science education issue is that we’re not going to the member for something that’s good for industry or for the university – it’s going to go to the school districts. And we don’t know if it’s going to be effective but we do know that there has to be funding for this issue. So those are the tools, depending on who you talk to some people use them more effectively than others or combining them with campaign contributions with political action committees. If you are already contributing to a member let’s face it candidates know who their big donors are and while they may not vote your way initially at least you get an audience with them, that’s really the point of having political action committees. Some members always be influenced by large donors more than others, with Enron and we hear about these cases all the time, these potential scandals where a corporation is giving too much and a member is responding too much to that.  But for the most part congress needs money to get reelected, clearly they are going to be looking at the organizations that support them, so the money in the system can be corrupting but it’s a fact of life. A member of congress is deciding and using his or her judgment and listening to these folks and making their own decisions. So short of contributions to candidates we use all the other tools and provide the information. 

One of the tools that we employ is that we try to get members of Congress to sign letters to the appropriations committee. If we are writing a letter to Chairman Regula that basically says “as you work to mark up the 2003 Labor HHS Appropriations Bill we think that the math and science partnership program is particularly important and should be funded at 200 million or at least at the strongest funding possible”, signed and what we try to do is get a balanced group of legislators both republicans and democrats and hopefully the folks that are on the key committees will vote in favor. So we worked with Chairman Boehlert chair of the science committee which has partial jurisdiction over this, and Chairman (John A.) Boehner (R-OH) on the House education committee, we worked with their staff, it hasn’t been all ACS p but Texas Instruments and business groups, we all shared part of it, so they both signed a letter to Chairman Regula, as chairs of the respective committees to please give preference to this program. The Congressional Black Caucus said we’re in support of K-12 education, so they wrote a separate letter to Regula. The Democratic Leadership Council essentially a group of centrist Democrats, fiscally conservative and social liberal, Cal Dooley (D-CA) and the leaders of that group said this is consistent with our message let’s write our own letter to the appropriations committee, and there were a couple letters in the Senate as well, the Senate High Tech task force, chaired by George Allen (R) of Virginia there was one other letter in the Senate, but I don’t remember from who. 

Science education really impacts all states, but some issues we work on effect more than others, and since California is a very research development you could get the California delegation to support than you. It is just another subset of support but in the end Chairman Regula is going to be considering who has he heard from on this issue, who has he heard testimony from, received visits from he’s going to be looking to his colleagues on this issue, and if I’ve got 75 members or a 100 House members all signing a letter, we want 100 million dollars for this program if he puts in 20 million dollars then when the bill comes to the floor he’s likely to get an amendment. The last thing an appropriations committee chairman wants is amendments coming from a lot of members that aren’t satisfied which really effects his ability to get a bill through. So the argument may or may not work but if you hav 150 House members that all are signing this letter, Chairman Regula is going to respond to that. In addition to hearing from interest groups and your colleagues you do want to hear from your constituents. In addition to ACS and Texas Instruments visiting him, he’s got 200 letters from constituents, and that’s essentially all we can do to get him to vote our way – to put money in this bill. 

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
Right now we are at a stage where we’ve done a lot of that but we still need to do more staff visits, we still need to get more letters from our members and we’re getting close to the point where decisions are going to be made by the House and Senate.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
But even if you look at those three entities of the administration the real battle is with the House and Senate appropriations committees, specifically the subcommittee of Labor HHS, the chair of the subcommittee on the House side is (Ralph) Regula (R-OH) and on the Senate side it is Tom Harkin (D) of Iowa. Now when we talk to these folks they will say of course we support math and science education it’s just that give them enough information on what’s happening in their state and nationwide, and let them know that this is not a separate program. So that the audience, now the authorizing committee is the Education Committees in the House and Senate and the Science Committee in the House, so they’ve essentially done their job on this issue. And they have been involved to some extent as well, because the best way to influence a member of Congress is through one of their colleagues. So when Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) for instance, the chair of the Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee talks to his colleague Tom Harkin on the appropriations committee and says “listen, Tom, we authorized 450 million dollars for this program this is important to folks in Massachusetts” than that’s going to have as much impact as anything else. So while we are working with the appropriations committee, clearly we want to work with the authorizing committee as well. 

If you pull out a director of congress the members of the subcommittee on HHS, Senator Patty Murray (D) of Washington is very interested in science and technology related issues because of the state and Seattle, Senator Harkin, Congressman Regula, Congressman (Sherwood )Boehlert (R) of New York chair of the Science committee, and Congressman John Boehner (R) of Ohio chair of the Education committee. Congressman Wicker because he’s on that subcommittee. And there’s a number of others I’d have to get out a list. The are both are targets and our champions, it depends on how much we’ve already educated them or how much they already know, they don’t just relay on the science and business community they have their own staff. And sometimes their staff is extremely good, so if we’ve done a good job and they have good staff they become champions of science education. Congressman Vernon Ehlers (R) of Michigan a physicist and Congressman Rush Holt (D) from New Jersey another physicist clearly in support of science, they will be champions in the House on this issue, Congressman Boehlert has been a champion on the Science committee and there are others.  

Targets of Direct Lobbying
If you pull out a director of congress the members of the subcommittee on HHS, Senator Patty Murray (D) of Washington is very interested in science and technology related issues because of the state and Seattle, Senator Harkin, Congressman Regula, Congressman (Sherwood )Boehlert (R) of New York chair of the Science committee, and Congressman John Boehner (R) of Ohio chair of the Education committee. Congressman Wicker because he’s on that subcommittee. And there’s a number of others I’d have to get out a list. The are both are targets and our champions, it depends on how much we’ve already educated them or how much they already know, they don’t just relay on the science and business community they have their own staff. And sometimes their staff is extremely good, so if we’ve done a good job and they have good staff they become champions of science education. Congressman Vernon Ehlers (R) of Michigan a physicist and Congressman Rush Holt (D) from New Jersey another physicist clearly in support of science, they will be champions in the House on this issue, Congressman Boehlert has been a champion on the Science committee and there are others.  
 
Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None specifically mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
ACS is not the only group concerned about this, we’re concerned about members because all of our members are chemistry teachers, well there are physics teachers and math teachers and biology teachers and folks in engineering that are concerned about this problem, so we took the lead in putting together a coalition of science and engineering organizations, including the American Physical Society representing the, we have about 150 thousand chemists, they have about 40 thousand physicists, we’re working with the National Science Teacher’s Association, we’re working with engineering societies like the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, they have 120 thousand members. 

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
Well inside government, within the administration certainly the Office of Management and Budget, that’s really the first crack at all of this. The White House, the Office of Management and Budget makes the final decision on how much of the agency’s budget they propose and they actually get. The Office of Science and Technology Policy has also been involved but mainly within the administration it has been the department of education. But even if you look at those three entities of the administration the real battle is with the House and Senate appropriations committees, specifically the subcommittee of Labor HHS, the chair of the subcommittee on the House side is (Ralph) Regula (R-OH) and on the Senate side it is Tom Harkin (D) of Iowa.

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
Essentially it has to do with, if we don’t improve the student achievement in math and science we are going to become a second rate nation eventually. The reason our military is so great and our economy is so effective has a lot to do with technology. Economists will tell you that two thirds of the productivity growth over the last 30 years has come directly from science related advances. No one ever sees it or talks about it but that is how jobs are created. So we will say our economic growth, productivity, job creation, international competitiveness all depend on science and technology, now we’re seeing the benefits, we are a superpower but if we don’t look down the road ten, twenty years to the next crop of scientists and engineers, not to say that math and science are more important than other subjects, I have a five year old daughter and I want her to have a great reading teach and a great history teacher but if we don’t give some special attention to math and science, our high school students and elementary school students will continue to score poorly and eventually the universities will have a harder time training these students and we’ll lose our technological edge. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
None mentioned.

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
Because we can’t get into partisan politics, we try not to take different approaches that would play into partisan differences. Clearly we take different messages that have to deal with different, for instance take Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) is the top republican on the Senate Education Committee, we look at test scores in New Hampshire, we look at teachers teaching out of field in New Hampshire, now it may be that New Hampshire’s test scores on the international tests, maybe the test scores dropped from four years ago in math and science – that’s information we will bring to Senator Gregg, maybe we visit Senator Feinstein and it’s not the test scores that dropped, but there is a huge need for teachers, a supply problem, and they have a lot of emergency certification of teachers in math and science, we’ll be able to show that there are less and less math and science teachers that have had training in math and science. So we’ll use different sets of information. The information isn’t that good but one of the effective things is the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, projects employment in occupational categories, and if you go to their site, you can go and say scientists and engineers in Connecticut, what is the current amount based on polls and what is the projected amount in ten years. And California and Connecticut are technology rich states and they have some dramatic growth, and you can take that to congress and say you’re going to need 12 thousand scientists and engineers – where are they going to come from.  We had a lot of members of universities that train foreign graduates, that’s part of the strength of our system, that foreign scientists and engineers from all over the world taking courses and pursuing degrees here. We get asked whether we should increase the ceiling for the number of foreign scientists and engineers we are bringing in, the so called H1B – part of the immigration law, it caps the number of folks that companies are allowed to bring in under special visas, sometimes the best place to go is Nepal or Bangladesh, and that’s fine up to a point. But when we hear the debate should we lift the cap from 20 thousand to 50 thousand we say that is a short term solution to a long term problem, you shouldn’t get foreign workers, you need to train your domestic pool. 

Nature of the Opposition
If the federal government isn’t encouraging states to take up this area, if history is any guide, what will happen is that states and localities, no one is opposed to math and science – they think it’s important, it’s just that the folks, the administrators in the school systems typically don’t have science or engineering background, they typically look at math and science issues as a little complicated and the tendency is to shy away from it and focus more on reading and kind of the immediate needs, they’re not worried about the technical workforce of the nation and the competitiveness of the US, as much as improving test scores and reading and the like.

[Impediments]
Getting a member of congress’s attention is one, clearly there are fiscal restraints as well. We no longer have a budget surplus we are in the red now, the economy tanked a little bit because of Sept. 11th  the tax cut at least short term, there’s less money for appropriators so we have a different fiscal climate. Two years ago it would have been a lot easier to argue for a 100 million dollars program, comparatively small. The appropriators are going to spend 770 billion dollars this year alone, and that’s just on the annually funded programs, entitlement is another trillion and a half or so. But in a climate where funds are tight you have an issue that doesn’t resonate as well, picture Chairman Regula in a meeting where he has folks coming in with health care issues, prescription drugs, abortion, social security, gun control, and these are the programs that these folks are overseeing, special education is in HHS and that’s in bad shape, so there are a lot of shorter term issues that are much more heartfelt, when Michael J. Fox comes in front of Regua’s subcommittee to testify for more NIH funding for biomedical research, which we support by the way, that is going to resonate more with him then a science teacher from St. Louis. So fiscal constraints, gaining the attention, mobilizing our scientists and engineers. Scientists and engineers tend no to be as active politically as a group, if you’re a scientist you’re trained to analyze an issue, discover the problem, there’s a certain methodology you approach to get there, politics is nothing like that, it’s messy. When we talk to our Nobel laureates they say it’s messy and dirty and they don’t want to have anything to do with it, so getting our own members involved in the process is a challenge as well. We have to tell them if you don’t tell Senator Bond what you think, how do you expect he’s going to represent your interests unless you’re willing to share it. Even if it’s just to compete with the other groups, we tell them, we know the business groups are out there lobbying, we know the education groups and the environmental community, that’s why the science and engineering community needs to express it’s voice, if for no other reason then to be sure that our information gets factored in. You can’t be above it all. Senator Simpson used to say “Take part or be taken apart” and that is a little strong but that’s what happens. Unless you are getting your information in there you’re going to be short changed somehow and educating our members is part of that. 

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
Not applicable. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
Not applicable. 

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
Not applicable. 

Described as a Partisan Issue
No.

Venue(s) of Activity
House and Senate Appropriations Committees
House Science Committee
House Education and the Workforce
Senate Health Education Labor and pensions

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
The 2003 HHS appropriations bill will be voted on in September

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
Working to increase funding for K-12 math and science teacher training

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I graduated from Villanova, started out in finance, thought about law school but decided no I wanted to move to Washington and get a job on Capitol Hill. So it took 6 months to find a job I started at the bottom, unpaid then paid intern, then 16 thousand a year to open mail, so I put in my time and then worked a year for a member of congress from Pennsylvania and then a job came open at the Association of American Engineering Societies, I had been working on some science issues on the Hill, so I worked three years there, then a job came open at the American Society of Engineers, and then I’ve been here for a little over three years. I just became director in February. 

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We don’t hire contract lobbyists some associations do, we don’t have separate budgets for lobbyists or consultants or research, we do it all in-house. The good thing is that a lot of it is compiling information that is already out there, from think tanks or firms. We even have an in-house graphics department to help us with advertisements and such. For specific science education teaching, teachers teaching out of field, state test scores, that applies to specific states, and then there is a lot of information more generally on how important science and technology are to the economy. There are studies that have been done, we have a list of quotes fro prominent scientists, policy makers, CEOs, that’s not really research but then I guess it is, you’ve got one page where you get the chair of IBM and the president of the National Education Association, when do IBM and NEA ever agree on anything – never but, you get quotes say “we support math and science education” so that type of research, we disseminate and get it out there, that is part of the tools. We don’t really have to commission research projects, the research has already been done. The same research that we use to navigate more funding for research and development for universities can be traced back to the same economic studies on the impact of science and technology on the economy, we never have specific data on how many jobs are created by science and technology but the impact the productivity and economic growth, so that macro-economic data we’ll take along. If you bring in more than three or four graphs or charts no ones going to read them, we try to keep to two things, if you have five total you essentially pick the two or three that will work in that congressional meeting.

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Five or Six

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
ACS has 500 or 600 employees in Washington, we are a 501 c3 organization, our main job is to educate the public including policy makers, but essentially advance the chemical enterprise and its practitioners being the chemists and chemical engineers that are members, as well as the business and the education community and the government to some extent. So the bulk of our effort is we collect 100 dollars a year in dues from our members, so if you are a chemist working at some company or university you belong to ACS, you pay your 100 dollars essentially to get the weekly magazine which is good, and you get discounts on our national meetings, twice a year we have 15,000 people pile into the city to have session after session of the latest developments in chemistry, we have education programs we get involved in certifying curriculums in certain subjects, but our publications and our national meetings are really the bread and butter of the organization, so of the 600 people we’ve got 14 people doing legislative affairs, so a fairly small part, but when you are a c3 organization – tax exempt- our members can take a tax exemption for paying their membership due. Organizations like American Electronics Association is a c6 – trade organization – and they operate differently they can spend more money on government advocacy and lobbying. So government relations is a relatively small part of what we do here. We were actually charted by Congress to advise the government on the chemical enterprise, we’re 125 years old, so we’ve been around for a while, we don’t know exactly why we were chartered – just don’t have the institutional memory, in ‘41 or ‘42 it think – during WWII to get information on chemical weapons. 

In this office we have three or four people not doing any lobbying at all but just worrying about briefings on the Hill, publications, just trying to educate law makers about the importance. And you could argue that if you’re not doing that none of your lobbyists are going to be successful because members will just get a glazed over look. We have two congressional fellows here, working in a congressional office, trying to give them an experience and to hopefully get more science in congressional offices even if it’s just a few offices at a time. So I’d imagine 30 percent of our effort just educating policy makers. The definition of lobbying is when you’re communicating with a government official whether in a congressional office or an executive branch official and you’re “reflecting” a view on a specific piece of legislation then you’re lobbying. You can talk to members of congress all day long about the importance of science and technically that’s not lobbying. I bet 30 or 40 percent is all about the information and then maybe half of our efforts are about advocacy, and then what’s left is spent on responding to our board, we put symposiums together just to educate our members, we have a newsletter for our members to keep them up on what’s happening but part of our mission is to keep our members informed of what’s going on on the Hill whether we do something about it or not. Of the 16 people, unfortunately for me, there are only 5 or 6 spending their time on advocacy, I’m not complaining I just wish we had more. 

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Individuals – Chemists

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
160,000

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
125 years old

Miscellaneous