Why are we supporting the notion of a single set of science standards which has been done in mathematics and language reading/language art?  We live in a democracy.  One the of founding principles of education is that elected school board members for the more than 15,000 school districts are charged with making decisions for each local school district.  What are we thinking?

For more than 20 years I collaborated with American teachers and our Soviet partners (we started this collaboration in 1981 when the Soviet Union still existed).  During this time we began working with science teachers and professors in several Soviet cities. Working within the Soviet curriculum we worked with Soviet teachers and taught lessons using inquiry, cooperative learning, and later problem basest learning.  The Soviets had a single curriculum, one set of texts, and a centrally controlled education system.  After Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) the Soviet system began to change. One of my colleagues, Mr. Vadim Zhudov, Director of School 710 in Moscow, told me that local schools would now have control over 25% of curriculum at the local level.

And what are we doing?  We’re creating an an education system that is controlled more and more by the Federal government, and less and less by local schools and teachers.  Why would a democratic country fall into this trap?  Do we want a system of education that is modeled after a central command system?

Ready or Not, the New Science Standards are on the way

The Next Generation of Science Standards are under development by Achieve, Inc. and the draft version will be available very soon.  Achieve will identify content and science and engineering practices that all students should learn from K – 12, regardless of where they live.  The science standards will cover the physical sciences, the life sciences, the earth and space sciences, and engineering, technology and applications of science, but in so doing will create a landscape of factoids to be learned by students, and used to develop assessments to measure student achievement.

Grade Band Endpoints: Factoids of Science

Although we haven’t seen any of the science standards, we can tell what they might look like by examining the document A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. The content of science is detailed in the Framework document, and in the context of the Framework, the standards appear as factoids, which taken as a whole define the field of science that all students should know.  There are examples standards in this document.  Here are few excerpts from a section on Weather and Climate focused on the question: What regulates weather and climate?:

• By the end of grade 2, students will know that weather is the combination of sunlight, wind, snow or rain, and temperature in a particular time.
• By the end of grade 5, student will know that weather is the minute-by-minute to day-by-day variation of the atmosphere’s condition on a local scale.
• By the end of grad3 8, students will know that weather and climate are influenced by interactions involving sunlight, the ocean, the atmosphere, ice, landforms, and living things.
• By end of grade 12, students will know that global climate is a dynamic balance on many different time scales among energy from the sun falling on Earth; the energy’s reflection, absorption, storage, and redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and land systems; and the energy’s radiation into space.

Statements such as these exist in Earth and Space Science, Life Science, and Physical Science, as well as Engineering, Technology, and Applications of Science.  The statements will be the basis for standards that will be written over the next year.  This is unfortunate.

But what is even worse is the national assessments that will be developed and used as high-stakes tests.  Hundreds of millions of dollars is being devoted to this effort.  High- stakes tests,  combined with authoritarian standards have created havoc in American schools.

By their very nature, standards are implented as authoritarian documents offering teachers very little flexibility in their use, and essentially remove the professional judgement of teachers in deciding how to make science relevant to their students.  Combined with high-stakes tests, we have a system that is centrally controlled, an odd mixture in a democratic society.

One of the major goals of science teachers is to help students wonder, explore, and be actively involved in inquiry—which is the cornerstone of science.  The science standards, when published, will have the appearance of a digest of science factoids that teachers must confront, and teach.  This tends to sideline inquiry, and problem solving because teachers will be required to cover the ground.  Furthermore, “common” assessments will be based on the digest of factoids, to further discourage teaching science as inquiry.

The Standards vs. Curriculum

According to the Achieve website, the states should “adopt” the standards in whole, without alteration.  States that do this will teach the standards, which will be organized in grade band endpoints (grade 2, grade 5, grade 8 and grade 12), and taught in every class in elementary school through high school, in every district in the state.

Achieve claims that the standards will NOT define a curriculum.  Instead the states and local districts will have the power to guide teachers toward the science curriculum.   This statement doesn’t make any sense.

According to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), “curriculum is the skills and knowledge that students are to learn.”  Indeed, Achieve is developing a “recommended” curriculum, as the ASCD has indicated “almost every discipline-based professional group has promulgated curriculum standards for its field.

To say that the Next Generation of Standards will not define curriculum fails the test of our our understanding of curriculum, and is a bold tactic Achieve is using to expand the Common Core State Standards so that all of the states are using a single set of standards, and therefore implementing a singular curriculum.

Why are we moving toward a single defining set of standards?  Do you think that a single set of science for all students will improve science teaching?