SCHOOLS' SCIENCE STANDARDS HAVE HARDLY EVOLVED AT ALL

Date: Saturday, December 17, 2005

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: 7 As, 12 Bs, 9 Cs, 7Ds, 15 Fs. 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 -- whenever practical, science learners should find things out for themselves -- 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 a noting of 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."

As he says, 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.