Standing outside a classroom during a summer training conference in Maryland, a visitor is enveloped by the noise of enthusiastic middle school teachers and U.S. Department of Defense engineers on break. They're building partnerships to make math and science come alive in schools near civilian defense research labs across the country. The sound is music to the ears of DoD officials. The gathering, or another like it, may be seen one day as having played a small but key role in producing a breakthrough in developing America's 21st century workforce. Sessions such as this are being funded all or in part by the new National Defense Education Program (NDEP).

"The objective of the NDEP is to bring more scientists and engineers — young people who will become the best technical talent in the world — into the national security enterprise by supporting local educational initiatives," says Dr. William S. Rees Jr., Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Laboratories and Basic Sciences). "We don't own the problem of American education in science and technology, but we have to be part of the solution. The technological superiority that our country enjoys today is something we inherited from those who invested in research and education in the 1960s and 1970s and it is something we now owe our children and our children's children."

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