Kentucky’s science standards are under review
But, will there be much change?
Kentucky’s current academic standards for science for our public schools are currently under review, with advisory panels and review committees of teachers currently beginning work to consider changes.
The current standards are basically a reprint of the controversial Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Kentucky adopted these NGSS standards in a controversial manner in 2013 when the legislature’s Administrative Regulation Review Subcommittee voted to find the implementing regulation deficient only to have then governor Steve Beshear override that vote, installing the NGSS, anyway (and turning the 1989 Rose Court Case that brought us KERA on its ear as the court said that the legislature was where the buck stopped on education).
In any event, it is now eight years later, and one question worth asking is how did those NGSS-based standards work out for our students.
To explore that question, I took a look at the ACT college entrance test’s science area scoring for Kentucky, examining the percentage of students in each graduating high school class that met or exceeded the ACT’s Benchmark Score for science that indicates adequate preparation for a freshman course in biology (but not necessarily for some other more demanding work such as physics).
Here is what I assembled from several different ACT Profile Reports for Kentucky, which are annually issued (I don’t think these are still on line, but ACT, Inc. can probably still provide on request).
The graph starts with the 2013 data, the year NGSS was adopted in Kentucky.
As you can see, there hasn’t been much change. In fact, comparing the 2019 and 2020 results to earlier years around 2013 and 2014 indicates there essentially hasn’t been any lasting change at all worth noting.
That brings me to the subject of how the review of the Kentucky Academic Standards for Science is being conducted.
The review is totally shoehorned around the existing standards as a working framework. Just today, teachers on the Advisory Panels were told to start looking at the existing standards and comments from the public (which were also collected in a rather rigidized way that worked on the existing standards without really offering a chance to propose something notably different). The Advisory Panel teachers were told they could do one of only three things with the existing standards. Those three choices were to “Keep,” “Adjust” or “Discard.”
There was no option to do a complete rewrite. There was no option to move to a different framework, perhaps using top-rated pre-NGSS standards from another state as a starting point.
So, my basic concern is that we have brought together some pretty experienced teachers just to hobble them into only making modest changes, at best, to the existing NGSS status quo.
That’s not the way to move the curve in the graph above.
I hope some folks in the science standards review process (maybe the teachers on the committees) will wake up to the way they are being constrained from exercising the flexibility they need to really fix the NGSS issues (My favorite example: there is no requirement to discuss anything about electric circuits. NGSS made a conscious, but outright stupid, choice to exclude this area!
Because, as was mentioned today in a meeting of another committee, the School Finance Task Force, there are estimates that by 2030 almost every job is going to require a good handle on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. And, to stress the point, the graph above shows the NGSS-based Kentucky Science Standards are not getting our kids there.