Yesterday, I discovered a new organization, the U.S. Education Delivery Institute (EDi). When I saw the name, I first thought it was part of the U.S. Department of Education, or the United States Postal Service. I was wrong on both counts. The EDi, formed in 2010 is another Washington D.C. non-profit founded by Sir Michael Barber, former head of the U.K. Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit.  The U.K. organization designed by P.M. Tony Blair to manage priorities by “delivering” to and monitoring intended targets.  Delivery was abolished in 2010.

Edi has teamed up with Achieve to “deliver” a workbook telling leaders how to adopt and carry out the Next Generation Science Standards.

What’s Being Delivered?

A workbook.  For state leaders in states who intend to adopt the NGSS.  Now, the workbook is really important because of “several shifts in the way that science is taught.”  All of these shifts are covered in the workbook, which is 114 pages long.

But, wait.  According to the workbook, the fundamental change is in how students will demonstrate proficiency!  The authors of the handbook (no names are included, except the president of Achieve, and he didn’t write this) tell us that  students will engage in scientific practices–developing models, designing solutions, constructing arguments.  It’s as if this has never been done before.  There have been many efforts by science educators to improve science teaching. Achieve cleverly criticizes earlier science education standards (NSES), and programs such as AAAS’s Project 2061, and the STS curriculum movement.  In each of these efforts, teachers use inquiry teaching and learning approaches, and in the case of STS, curricula is related to students’ everyday experiences.

The NGSS standards document is sterile.  The standards are written without context.  In fact, to the writers of the NGSS, the context doesn’t matter because they claim that all students should be held responsible for each standard, regardless of where the students live.  But we know this is not right.  Study after study of the relationship between child poverty and academic performance consistently shows an inverse relationship between these two variables.  How can we simply drop new standards on American schools and expect that all students will have the same chance to learn and love science?

New Verbs.  Another big idea is which verbs are used in the new standards.  That’s right, which verbs.  Remember way back when we started writing “behavioral objectives” verbs were used to describe the kind of action that students would have to show on specific objectives.  The verbs have changed in the NGSS.  In fact, the difference in verbs used in the NGSS tells the story!  NGSS doesn’t like verbs such as distinguish, describe, recognize, identify and demonstrate.  But they do like verbs like develop, design, construct, analyze and interpret (see p.5 NGSS Adoption and Implementation Workbook).

A Chapter Book. A seven chapter workbook written for state implementation leaders.  The titles tell it all.  Designate strategic leadership team; define your aspiration, evaluate past and present performance, determine state’s role and approach to implementation, set targets and trajectories, develop stakeholder engagement strategy, establish routines and solve problems.

Exercises.  There are 27 exercises spread among the seven chapters.  Each exercise is guided by three or four objectives that use verbs such as identify, evaluate, develop, determine, understand, use, record.  These are not the kinds of verbs that the NGSS claims are used in the new standards, e.g. design, construct, etc.

Glossary. There is also a glossary of key terms including Aspiration, Element (not from the Periodic Table of the Elements), Guiding Coalition, Metric, Strategic Leadership Team, Target, Trajectory.

Who’s Delivering the NGSS Workbook?

Two organizations have teamed up to deliver this NGSS document, Achieve and the U.S. Education Delivery Institute.  The organizations are richly funded by American corporations that financially support a long list of standards and assessment-based groups.  Figure 1 shows the overlap of corporations that fund Achieve and EDi.  Gates shows up everywhere, and here they are again. The overlap of companies that fund these education organizations is further evidence that so called state standards are driven by national priorities of firms that want to privatize K-12 schooling.

What’s next?

Do you think that we are on the right track here?  Do you think there is a problem with organizations such as Achieve and EDi receiving their funding from the same group of corporations?