Why in a democracy do we promote consumption and not inquiry in science teaching?  Why are we so possessed to have teachers cover the ground and not helping students uncover their connection to the world around them?

The second public draft of The Next Generation Science Standards will be released this December by Achieve, the organization that wrote the Common Core State Standards.  I wish I could link you to the first draft of the science standards, but Achieve pulled them off their website on June 1, 2012 after posting them for about three weeks.

The NGSS were based on the National Research Council’s project, A Framework for Science Education, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.  The document was written by nearly 20 experts, not one of whom is a K-12 teacher.  The only professional educator was Stephen Pruitt, who while on the committee was chief of staff for the Office of the State Superintendent of Schools in the Georgia Department of Education.  He did teach science for 12 years in Georgia.  However, now he is Vice President, Content, Research and Development for Achieve, the company writing the science standards.

The “Framework” document was used by Achieve’s science writing teams who developed the first draft of the new standards.  The rationale for the development of the science standards is achievement-based.  One way to look at the standards is that they use backwards engineering to define the field of science that teachers should cover in their science courses.  A teacher writing on Anthony Cody’s blog explained the notion of backward engineered standards.  Backward engineering means starting with an assessment, and then working backwards from it to write standards.  She explains that “the goal of the Next Generation Science Standards is create a document that can market both teaching and assessment products to a captive education system, not offer a framework for good teaching of science.”

A good standard is one that can be easily accessed using multiple choice questions, or short answers that require consumption of science goals.  When you check the new standards they are aligned vertically by content area creating endless lists of stuff to be taught and learned.  I spent several days reading the new science standards, participated in Achieve’s public review process, and wrote several posts on the process.  The science standards are organized around core ideas in each science discipline, which meant, unfortunately, that there was almost no attempt to create relationships among the content areas.  We still have the same content areas that the Committee of Ten created in the 1890s!

There are more than 400 standards in the science document.  Although they are divided into grade level bands, which does reduce  the number of standards per grade level.  When you look at a specific content area, as I did (earth science), there is still a long list of content to be taught.  And remember, the standards will be measured using high stakes tests, which will soon be totally computerized by 2014.

We have reported on this blog that the very nature of standards-based education sets up an authoritarian framework that values the consumption, recall, and repetition of information.  Using the backward engineering model, teaching will be based on the content lists because each one of them will be assessed using a multiple choice format.  Teaching to the standards is no different than teaching to the test.

Yet, science educators, especially if you attend major conferences on science teaching and research, have had a love affair with engaging students in inquiry.  Asking students to formulate investigations, ask questions, searching for answers, and  uncovering content that excites them are some of the kinds of thinking that science teachers advocate.  When we put the teaching of science into the hands of experts as we did with the National Research Council, we end up with an outline of the content that they know and think kids should know, even without real experience with teachers or with students.

Inquiry, independent thinking, and creative thought are buried in standards-based documents. Henry Giroux in an article about democracy and education,  raises the concern that public education is under assault by conservative forces that cut schooling to a process of producing students who can perform on tests, not think differently or question  things as they are.  He puts it this way:

In this conservative right-wing reform culture, the role of public education, if we are to believe the Heritage Foundation and the likes of Bill Gates-type billionaires, is to produce students who laud conformity, believe job training is more important than education, and view public values as irrelevant. Students in this view are no longer educated for democratic citizenship. On the contrary, they are now being trained to fulfill the need for human capital [1]. What is lost in this approach to schooling is what Noam Chomsky calls “creating creative and independent thought and inquiry, challenging perceived beliefs, exploring new horizons and forgetting external constraints.”[2]