Unlike the Common Core, we at Fordham have never been big fans of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and thus have urged states not to adopt them. But what about efforts to revise them?
Massachusetts did just that with new Science and Technology/Engineering learning standards last spring—adding to, editing, and removing certain NGSS content, while still allowing educators in the state to benefit from existing NGSS-aligned curriculum and instructional resources. A white paper released by the Pioneer Institute earlier this month examines whether those new standards contain rigorous and appropriate content, and how they stack up against NGSS and the state’s earlier 2006 science standards.
Academic standards are learning goals that define what students should know and be able to do by a given grade. They’re intended to drive what gets taught in classrooms. As authors Paul R. Gross (who also authored our NGSS review) and Ze’ev Wurman stress, standards should clearly identify “specific student knowledge or skills—that is, a performance requirement.” Unfortunately, the study finds that Massachusetts’ new science standards fall short of this goal and share several major issues and flaws with the NGSS Standards from which they were adapted. For one, several important science topics are completely omitted, including basic biological development, beginning genetics, and cell biology (the parts of a cell and their functions). Worse, say the reviewers, content that is included is often less coherent and more confusing than that covered in the state’s 2006 standards. (For example, the authors note that the term “modeling” is used over three hundred times in Massachusetts’ new standards, yet “what is intended by this word varies widely and in particular standards is frequently ambiguous.”) In other instances, standards are simply inaccurate or accompanied by overly complex or irrelevant “clarification statements” that are a regression from the state’s simpler, clearer science standards of yore.
Unfortunately, neither change in Bay State science standards was an improvement over what came before, and policymakers would have been better off sitting on their hands for the last decade. This is especially worrisome for students in Massachusetts, who have historically scored among the highest in the nation on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science assessments.
SOURCE: Paul R. Gross and Ze’ev Wurman, “‘What Goes Up Must Come Down’: New, Lower K-12 Science Standards for Massachusetts,” Pioneer Institute (December 2016).
