Setting education standards for math and science was supposed to be easy. As education scholar Diane Ravitch wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece during the debate over national standards: “Mathematics and science work according to the same principles regardless of the city, state, or nation. The airplane that just flew over my house doesn’t care what country it is in; it works the same way in Austria, Nigeria, and Japan as it does in the United States.”
But California’s recent efforts to set academic standards have turned expectations on their head. The language arts and history/social science standards, which have inspired heated debates elsewhere, emerged from the state standards commission with little controversy. But the quest to arrive at a set of science standards--and math standards before them--has set off a nasty intellectual tussle.
California is certainly not the first state to write science standards; almost 40 have documents that describe what students should know and be able to do in the subject. But California’s feud raises a worrisome issue at a time when education is heavily invested in the idea of standards-based reform: Writing science standards is not as easy as most people thought it would be.
And now, with a decision from the state school board due in days, the conflict has flared up again. Scientific societies from across the country are attempting to dissuade state board members from accepting the science document prepared by the standards commission.
What that document says likely will shape science instruction in California for years to come and probably will influence classrooms nationwide. With 5 million school-age children and 10 percent of the nation’s textbook market, California’s actions can’t be ignored. The state has been moving toward high standards in science education--and never quite getting there--for the past 15 years. The process began in 1983, shortly after Bill Honig was elected state superintendent. It was a particularly unsettled time. A Nation at Risk, with its dire warnings of educational mediocrity, had just been published. International assessments ranked American students low in academic performance. Predictions of a collapsing education system seemed a telling rebuke to the Reagan administration’s “Morning in America” optimism.
A forceful innovator, Honig instituted a number of far-reaching reforms. But his most important innovation focused on shaping what gets taught in the classroom. He created panels of teachers, experts from various academic fields, and members of the business community to rewrite the state’s curriculum frameworks to describe a vision of what all students should know.
Honig’s blueprint was one of the first clear statements of what has since become a touchstone in education. Other policymakers soon latched on to his idea of high and specific expectations as a driver of education reform. And by the end of the 1980s, at a historic education summit in Charlottesville, Va., convened by President Bush, the nation’s governors agreed on the need to set high academic standards for all students.
The frameworks that California constructed under Honig, however, went beyond standards. They were broader and more discursive, encompassing both content and method of instruction. They were meant to determine what and how students should learn, which in turn would shape textbooks, staff development, and especially assessments.
The plan did not fare as well in practice as in theory. One big problem, many observers believe, was the frameworks’ tendency to prescribe pedagogy. In science, for example, successive revisions of the frameworks moved progressively toward experiential learning, overarching themes, and a “less is more” philosophy toward content.
When such progressivism, especially in language arts, seeped into the statewide testing system, the public balked. In 1994, shortly before being re-elected, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson responded to widespread public criticism of the California Learning Assessment System, or CLAS, by killing the test.
California educators and policymakers decided that one reason for CLAS’ failure was a lack of clear, easily measurable content standards. To change that, the legislature in 1995 created the academic standards commission, a group of 21 representatives from the scientific, academic, and parent communities. Wilson appointed 12 people to the commission; the new state superintendent, Delaine Eastin, appointed six and was named a commissioner herself; and the California Assembly and Senate each appointed one member.
From the beginning, the legislature wanted the commission to be as open as possible. “An explicit decision was made that this should be a public process, not one internal to the education community,” says Scott Hill, the executive director of the commission. “It was supposed to be a Madisonian experience, where people with widely different philosophies would come together to fight over what the standards should be.” As a result, the commission did not turn to task forces of educators to write the standards, as most states have done. Instead, it hired consultants to compile drafts, which the commission would then review and revise.
The legislature directed the commission to write standards in four areas: language arts and mathematics first, followed by history/social science and science. Given California’s legendary clash in the 1980s over phonics vs. whole language, everyone geared for a battle over language arts. Surprisingly, mathematics emerged as the flashpoint.
A backlash against the existing math frameworks had been building for several years. Well-organized parent groups in Palo Alto, San Diego, and elsewhere had been protesting the gradual alignment of math instruction with the standards promulgated by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. In the views of those critics, the NCTM standards de-emphasize basic skills like computation and overemphasize discovery-based learning.
The commission’s work on math standards became a lightning rod. Advocates testified at public hearings, packed commission meetings, and aired their arguments in the media. Newspaper articles and opinion pieces descended to the level of pitting “Third World-worshipping, standards-loathing” reformers against “math nazis.” Wracked by dissent, the commission struggled toward consensus. Finally, with its deadline looming, it agreed on a document to forward to the state school board, though one commissioner felt compelled to append a minority report.
At the state board, the situation worsened. Made up entirely of Wilson appointees, the board felt that the proposed standards still slighted the basics. Two of its members edited the document to correct the problem, though opinion is still divided over how much the edits changed the standards. For example, the board changed one 3rd grade standard from “build up the multiplication table from 0 x 0 to 10 x 10 and commit to memory” to “memorize to automaticity the multiplication table for numbers between 1 and 10.” Finally, last December, the board ended the protracted battle and approved the math standards.
Against this backdrop of bitterness and acrimony, the work of the commission’s science committee began.
As the math standards staggered toward completion last fall, the commission put out a request for proposals for consultants to draft the science standards. Two groups of science educators and scientists applied for the job.
One, the Science Coalition, was led by Bonnie Brunkhorst, a professor of science education and geology at California State University-San Bernardino and a former president of the National Science Teachers Association. Members of her group generally favored the progressive-style reforms that have swept science in recent years, which made some of them chary about getting involved in standards-setting. Having watched the uproar over math, they knew the political climate did not favor their ideas. But they decided to try to work from the inside rather than from the outside. “We wanted to make the document as good as possible,” says Art Sussman, the director of the Eisenhower Regional Consortium at WestEd, a federally funded education laboratory in San Francisco, and a leader of the San Bernardino group.
The other group, known as Associated Scientists, was led by Stan Metzenberg, an assistant professor of biology at California State University-Northridge. This group was stocked with advocates of more traditional teaching approaches. Its roster also featured three Nobel Prize winners--Harvard’s Dudley Herschbach, Stanford’s Henry Taube, and Glenn Seaborg.
Though Seaborg and the Associated Scientists offered to write the new standards for free, the commission voted in January to award the contract to the San Bernardino group, pointing to its experience producing standards and its more thorough proposal. The decision immediately was protested, and after considerable media coverage, the commission compromised. It hired both groups and asked them to merge their memberships to produce the drafts. The governor named Seaborg as both a member of the commission and the chairman of the panel that would review the consultants’ work and then prepare it for a vote before the full commission.
Seaborg is an icon of science. Now 86, he is one of the last old-guard scientists who worked on the atomic bomb in World War II. In 1941, he discovered the element plutonium, which contributed to his 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry. During the war, he headed the group that devised the processes used to produce the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In 1974, he discovered another unstable element, atomic number 106, which was recently named seaborgium.
Seaborg also has a longtime interest in education. A member of the national commission that produced A Nation at Risk, Seaborg and Harvard physics professor and historian Gerald Holton generally are credited with writing the report’s most striking passages. And as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chairman of Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, Seaborg often has decried the sorry state of scientific literacy in America.
The decision to merge the two groups quickly ran into trouble. Though outwardly quite similar, the groups had radically different ideas about science education. Seaborg opened a commission meeting in June, for example, by announcing that he wanted to break the high school standards down by grade level, despite a previous agreement that the standards should cover grades 9-12 as a whole. He went on to fault what was then the current draft of the standards for not introducing astronomy in 1st grade, cells in 2nd grade, and atoms in 3rd grade, as is done in the Core Knowledge Sequence derived from the ideas of E.D. Hirsch Jr., a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
“We’ve been trying very hard to make these standards rigorous,” Seaborg said at the meeting, a tie with the periodic table of elements peeking from beneath his three-piece suit. “We want them to be well-coordinated so that in elementary school students are prepared for middle school, and in middle school they are prepared for high school. I believe that there’s a tendency to underestimate what students can learn, and that’s something I’ve been arguing against--people who want to take all of these things out because they say that children can’t understand them.”
The first major issue to emerge in the committee concerned how much content to include, particularly at the elementary level. From the beginning, Seaborg and his allies adhered to a “more is more” philosophy--both in terms of the amount of material covered and its depth at each grade. “I don’t believe you can do harm by introducing material too early,” says Metzenberg, the lead consultant for Associated Scientists. “There’s a possibility that an idea might go over some students’ heads and that they might be frustrated by that. But to say that things are made of objects too small to see and those things are called atoms, I don’t think that hurts a child.”
Mr. Seaborg, and others in the Associated Scientists group, do not reflect the consensus of the larger scientific community, says Ramon Lopez, the director of education for the American Physical Society in College Park, Md. Considering California’s vast influences on textbook and curriculum development nationally, the state board should not endorse a document that many scientists disapprove of, he argues.
“Scientists understand that you learn science by doing science,” says Mr. Lopez, whose group is leading the latest campaign against the proposal. “Simply by the breadth of the content material and the prescriptive level of detail, it is very difficult to imagine that teachers will be able to do much more than have kids memorize things.”
Another point of contention among standards commission members involved the structure of science classes. Early drafts of the document combined the standards for grades 6-8. That way, each school could decide when to teach earth science, life science, and physical science and whether to teach the subjects in an integrated or disciplinary fashion.
Such clustering of standards was criticized by Seaborg and others. The original legislation had called for grade-by-grade standards, though standards documents for other subjects already had ignored that edict. What’s more, standards that span several grades would make it difficult for test-makers to design the companion assessment system.
The committee almost splintered over the issue. Joining Seaborg among the dissenters was Hoover Institution fellow Bill Evers, the commissioner who had written the minority report on the math standards. Together, they threatened to write another minority report that they would present to the state board. “All of our work was colored by that threat,” says Sussman of the Science Coalition. “It weakened the position of [our] group. We knew we could win some battles within the commission that we would lose with the board.” Reluctantly, the advocates of clustered standards agreed to have students study earth science in 6th grade, life science in 7th grade, and physical science in 8th grade.
But several on the science committee remained uncomfortable with such a traditional tack. Mike Aiello, an award-winning biology teacher at San Luis Obispo High School, pointed to the recent poor showing of American students on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study as proof of the need for an integrated approach. “The lesson of TIMSS is that we ought to build on these subjects each year,” he says. “That way, as kids move through the system, they will retain more knowledge, and we won’t have to reteach so much.”
Slowly a compromise began to emerge. The standards would continue to focus on a separate discipline in each of the three grades. But each grade would include strands from the other two disciplines. For example, sections titled “Earth and Life History” and “Physical Principles in Living Systems” were added to the 7th grade standards for life science.
The final major controversy revolved around the high school standards. The first draft included an enormous amount of material. A single example from a single discipline, physics: “Students know that the force on a moving particle (with charge q) in a magnetic field is qvBsin(a) where a is the angle between v and B (v and B are the magnitudes of vectors v and B, respectively), and students use the right-hand rule to find the direction of this force.”
Teachers on the committee said it would be impossible to teach all students all that material. As Aiello puts it, “If you don’t give people something that’s a reasonable stretch, a lot of people will just say, ‘Forget it.’” After lengthy discussion, another compromise was reached. Some of the standards would be marked with asterisks, indicating that those items were optional. Students would be expected to master all the standards without asterisks. In addition, high schools would be expected to offer all the asterisked material for students who planned to go on in science. And in a final twist, the committee recommended that all students master the asterisked standards in at least one scientific discipline.
Seaborg had a problem with the plan. He believed that far too many items remained optional. “The standards would be strengthened by removing the asterisks on some of the 9-12 standards to raise the level of expectations for all students,” he told the other commissioners.
During the standards commission’s two years of work, the media often characterized the disagreements as a split between scientists and science educators. Outsiders also often blamed the commission’s differences on politics. But the lines were not nearly that clear.
Many of the commissioners and consultants caution against dividing the group into two separate camps. “It makes for good arguments,” says WestEd’s Sussman. “But it doesn’t do much to resolve the issues.”
Metzenberg agrees. “There are polar extremes on many of these issues, and both extremes are wrong.”
Still, the commissioners had profound differences on issues that go to the heart of education--instructional style, the appropriate age at which to introduce material, the best way to assess student learning, and the interpretation of research. Their frequent clashes were rooted in fundamental disagreements over what and how children should learn.
On one side, says Bill Evers of the Hoover Institution, are people who emphasize the content of science instruction. On the other are those who focus on inquiry as a means of learning science. “The content-rich group believes that instruction should be mostly the conveying of objective knowledge,” explains Evers, a Seaborg ally on most issues. “That doesn’t necessarily mean rote memorization. But memorization doesn’t strike them as counterproductive. So the lecture method, while it shouldn’t occupy 100 percent of a class, could be used to convey knowledge, and they would be comfortable with that.”
In his formulation, the opposing camp focuses on the process of doing science. Members of this group believe that students master content largely from doing projects in which they can rediscover scientific concepts for themselves, Evers says.
Bonnie Brunkhorst, the lead consultant for the Science Coalition, rejects Evers’ distinctions. “We’re all in favor of students learning content, and it’s irresponsible to say that any one group favors content more than any other,” she says.
The two also disagree over the issue of age-appropriateness.
Brunkhorst insists that introducing certain scientific ideas to students too early is counterproductive. “When we know from generations of experience that most students cannot learn a particular abstract concept when they are 5 years old, it’s not responsible to say that we’re going to teach them that concept anyway. You need to focus attention on what students can learn and then leave open opportunities for them to learn more.”
For his part, Evers says the notion has been overblown. “Young people have open minds. So students are being cheated by not getting a full range of instruction in the younger grades. Instead of talking about what’s age-appropriate,” he argues, “we should be talking about what’s intellectually appropriate.”
Instructional methods and assessments are additional points of difference between the two. Lectures should be just part of the instruction mix, Brunkhorst believes. And assessments should consist of multiple measures, not the straightforward tests of content mastery favored by Evers.
These are not easy issues to resolve. Evers terms the research base favoring inquiry-based learning “a joke.” But he admits that research supporting direct instruction is equally deficient.
Counters Brunkhorst: “For the last 100 years, we have practiced a traditional approach to teaching, and we have a rich base of evidence that this approach has not worked. It might have worked for the Glenn Seaborgs of the world, but we haven’t succeeded in making science usable for the general population. What more evidence do we need than the millions of students who have come through our educational system without learning science?”
There were times during the standards-writing process in which the differences among the commissioners appeared insurmountable. The process seemed on the verge of breaking down.
But it did not. In the month before the commission’s July 1 deadline for turning the standards over to the state school board, members of the science committee held a flurry of telephone conference calls and hurried meetings near airports. They added some content at the elementary school level, smoothed out the disciplinary strands at the middle school level, and agreed on what should carry an asterisk at the high school level.
On the day before the final scheduled meeting of the full commission, the committee decided that the standards were ready to go.
First, though, all the commissioners had to vote on the standards. The tally was 16 in favor, none opposed, and two abstaining. (Three commissioners were not present.) One abstention was from La Tanya Wright, a parent and home schooler who worked on the history/social science standards. Ms. Wright was concerned about the optional items, given that the standards were meant to apply to all students.
Seaborg also abstained. He continued to contend that too many of the high school standards had asterisks. And he insisted that the high school standards should be broken down by grade and discipline, with biology in 9th grade, chemistry in 10th, physics in 11th, and earth science in 12th.
After the commission’s final meeting, the state board told the members that their job was over. Originally, they were to have converted the content standards into performance standards, which would then have been converted into tests. But the governor pressured the commission to relinquish that task to the school board.
Even though their job is completed, the commissioners wonder if their effort will have an impact. Good science classes require well-trained teachers, up-to-date materials, a supportive school system, and time to do the job right. A sheaf of standards sitting on a shelf doesn’t magically produce those things. “This commission can write standards, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to do anything,” Aiello says.
Nor do standards provide the resources many say are needed to improve California’s overall education performance. The state remains in the bottom third of the nation in per-pupil spending, for example. “The educational system is entrusted with achieving high standards but is not given the resources to deal with all the problems it faces,” says Hill, the commission’s executive director.
Still, the commissioners were generally pleased with their work. Even Seaborg praised the standards as “challenging,” despite the reservations that led to his abstention from the final vote.
“It’s been a difficult process,” concludes Hill, “but this is democracy in action.”
