LINDA SEEBACH: Little improvement in state science standards
Scripps Howard News Service
Published 2:18 pm PST Friday, December 16, 2005

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(SH) - The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has updated its survey of state science standards now that the deadline set by the federal No Child Left Behind law is nearing. The outcome: lots of churning, but little net improvement since 2000.
The results: Seven A's, 12 B's, nine C's, seven D's, 15 F's. That includes the District of Columbia, but not Iowa, which does not have state standards. The complete report is available at www.edexcellence.net online.

Conflict over the teaching of evolution in schools has been prominent in the news lately, and the grades do reflect states' approach to the treatment of biological evolution. In fact, the reviewing team, led by biologist Paul R. Gross, was sufficiently disturbed by political pressure to weaken teaching about evolution that they added a specific criterion on that topic. And for Kansas, they even added a distinctive ranking: "Not even failing."

But as there are 23 criteria altogether, that is not a primary factor, and I won't belabor it here.

Also, it may not need belaboring. "Certainly some states do an awful job addressing evolution, but for the most part these states also do an awful job addressing the rest of science," Gross said in a press release announcing the report.

It figures.

The review team identified several common problems. One is that standards are often too long and too hard to navigate.

"One gets the impression," the report says, "that they have grown by accretion rather than by plan. They seem to have been written by large committees whose members could not communicate with one another."

They suggest hiring a "good, independent professional editor, one who knows science and loves the English language." A fine idea, but easier suggested than accomplished. The making of state standards is a highly political process, and if the editor's professional judgment clashes with political reality, there's no doubt which will prevail.

Another problem is thin disciplinary content. "States' zealous embrace of 'inquiry-based learning' has squeezed real science content (astronomy, biology, chemistry, ecology, physics, etc.) out of the curriculum to make room for 'process.' Of course, without content, there is little for science students to process."

The reviewers also found that the science knowledge of the people writing the standards appears to be adequate for K-8, but "falters thereafter."

A third problem is what the reviewers call "Do-It-Yourself Learning." Many states, they say, "take a very good idea - (ital in original) whenever practical, science learners should find things out for themselves (endital) - and take it to an absurd level, declaring that all knowledge should be 'discovered' by the student rather than passed along by the teacher."

As they point out, there are many areas of science - atomic structure, plate tectonics, population genetics - in which this is highly impractical.

There's an extended discussion about the philosophical issues underlying constructivist pedagogy, and noting the lack of any reliable evidence that it works better than the traditional model. Gross, among his other accomplishments, is co-author, with Norman Levitt, of "Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science" (1994), which delineates the baleful influence of postmodernist theories on scientific progress.

Their fourth category is called "Good Ideas, Gone Bad" - that is, "catchwords that arise from initially good ideas about how science can be taught and learned, but that have gone through a process of degradation."

One such is "hands-on learning," which comes from the good idea, "Don't limit the study of natural science to memorization." Of course, nobody ever said you should; that's a caricature, as Gross rightly points out. The charge that traditional science is just memorization of facts is false; but the opposing view, that "science can be learned 'hands-on' without memorization of facts is also false." Yet it is implicit in several states' standards, such as Washington's: "Learning in science depends on actively doing science ..."

Another is the good idea that individuals' backgrounds should not bar them from learning or doing science. But that good idea does not justify the implication that "every individual is, or can be, a scientist"; that "each and every culture has done or now does good science"; or, in the extreme form of cultural relativism, that "scientists of one culture have no right to judge the scientific claims of another culture."

It simply isn't true, historically, that "all cultures everywhere contribute equally to science." Would the world be a better place if it were true? As with other forms of imaginary equality, surely that would depend on whether we averaged up or down.

The report closes with a discussion of the teaching of evolution in schools, with the relatively good news that it isn't very good, but it is not getting much worse, either. (Kansas got an F-minus in the 2000 report, too, though that was for a different eruption of creationism.)

One very good question: Since a number of states have good standards, and have had them for some time, why do states planning on revising theirs insist on starting from scratch and botching the job? It wouldn't be better to have a national standard - what if the federal government picked a bad one? - but choosing from existing good ones ought to have happened at least a few times. Apparently, it didn't.

Contact Linda Seebach at Rocky Mountain News, http://rockymountainnews.com.

Press Release - December 7, 2005

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Contact:
Jennifer Leischer, Communications Manager
202-223-5452
jleischer@edexcellence.net

For Immediate Release:
Most K-12 state science standards dont make the grade
Scientists' review finds expectations lax in 21 states; evolution only part of the story


Washington, D.C. Nearly half of the fifty states received grades of "D" or "F" in a new review of statewide academic standards for primary-secondary school science, according to the distinguished scientists who conducted that appraisal.

"At a time of increasing anxiety about our children's readiness in math and science, U.S. science education is under assault, with 'discovery learning' attacking on one flank and the Discovery Institute on the other," said Chester E. Finn, Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which sponsored and published the study. "The National Academies, Thomas Friedman, and others have called on Americans to 'get serious' about science, but few state standards can fairly be described as serious. We all know that great standards don't guarantee a good education for a state's students, but weak standards make it much less likely."

The State of State Science Standards 2005the first comprehensive study of science academic standards conducted since 2000appraised the quality of each state's K-12 science standards as they are rushing to meet the No Child Left Behind Act's mandate for testing in this critical subject. The results are mixed. (See Table 1 below.)

Fifteen states flunked, and another seven earned "D" grades. Nine states and the District of Columbia merited only a mediocre "C." One-quarter of low-scoring states dropped by two letter grades since Fordham last reviewed science standards in 2000. The remaining nineteen states earned grades of "A" or "B," and of these, eight (or almost half) showed marked improvement over the past five years. The states earning "A" marks in the new evaluation include California, Virginia, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Indiana, New York, and New Mexico.

Every state received a letter grade based on how well its standards met a set of rigorous criteria, including:
Do the standards contain clear and fair expectations by grade level for students?
Are the standards organized in a sensible way, both showing logical progression from grade to grade and easily navigated so teachers, parents, and the public can understand?
Is there an appropriate amount of science content, and if so, do the standards outline the best approach to share that content?
Are the expectations outlined specific enough, yet set high aims that will equip students with the science skills they need for college?
Are the standards appropriately serious, or do they incorporate pseudo-scientific fads or politics?
Dr. Paul Gross, former head of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole and former provost of the University of Virginia, led the review. He was joined by Ursula Goodenough, Professor of Biology at Washington University; Susan Haack, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami; Lawrence S. Lerner, Professor Emeritus in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at California State University, Long Beach (and author of previous Fordham science standards reviews); Martha Schwartz, a Ph.D. in geophysics and a member of California's Assessment Review Panel in science; and Richard Schwartz, a secondary science teacher for 34 years who holds a bachelor's degree in chemistry and a master's in environmental science.

The report was funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

The reviewers found that low-scoring state standards shared common problems, including:
Excessive length and difficulty of navigation, even for science experts.
Missing facts and concepts that are integral to physics, chemistry, and biology.
An obsession with "discovery learning" where children are left to uncover scientific concepts without guidance or discussion of the underlying core of scientific knowledge.
"We must do a better job of teaching students real science content and skills to assure that there will be a next generation of scientific leadershipand that everyone else is scientifically literate as well," said lead author Paul R. Gross. "The first step is to set clear expectations for what schoolchildren should learn, linked to reliable assessments that tell us whether they are learning it. The future of science and technology is dim in states that set murky expectations for their K-12 students."

Evolution
As in 2000, 12 states do a shameful job handling evolution. Some states have improved their requirements, while others have moved in the opposite direction.

"Certainly some states do an awful job addressing evolution, but for the most part these states also do an awful job addressing the rest of science," said Dr. Gross. "The good news is that, despite the well-funded and politically-motivated attack on the teaching of evolution, most states have held firm and continue to instruct students in the fundamentals of evolutionary biology."

State-by-state reviews:
The State of State Science Standards 2005

Shades of Clarence Darrow: Evolution is on Trial Again

The Attack on How Evolution is Taught in Our Nation's Schools is Not Transparent

E-Accountability ALERT: How Do You Prove Intelligent Design?