North Carolina’s state science standards, just adopted in 2023, are 50 pages of useless, fuzzy jargon. For example, North Carolina’s high school chemistry state standards direct students to “Use models to explain how the scientific understanding of atomic structure has evolved.” The standard is hopelessly vague — it provides no concrete details to help science teachers teach the subject. It also makes no sense. How do you “use models” to explain the history of physics?
These 2023 standards are worse than the 2009 science standards that they replaced. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute reviewed North Carolina’s 2009 science standards in its The State of State Science Standards 2012 report and gave them a D grade.
Fordham, accurately, wrote then:
The North Carolina science standards cannot overcome several serious flaws. Chief among them is a general lack of detail that compromises the standards’ utility as an educational framework. Even when specific content is present, it often is poorly developed, confusing, or misleading. … And with so few details, the occasional gross errors and confusing statements stand out all the more starkly.
North Carolina’s education bureaucrats did not listen to Fordham when they wrote the 2023 standards. The Crosswalks between the 2009 and 2023 standards reveal that mostly what they did was paste on the counter-productive “inquiry-based learning” jargon of the National Research Council’s A Framework for K-12 Science Education and Achieve’s Next Generation Science Standards, which wastes students’ time by telling them to ask “questions” without providing the answers. North Carolina simply copy-pasted in these education-school jargon phrases throughout the 2023 science standards:
Analyze and interpret data … Use models … Use mathematics and computational thinking … Engage in argument from evidence … Construct an explanation … Construct an argument … Carry out investigations … Obtain, evaluate and communicate information … Ask questions.
North Carolina’s bureaucrats did not even aspire to the NGSS’s level of rigor — which Fordham gave a C. They simply added the NGSS’s empty jargon to their own vague, contentless standards. North Carolina will be lucky if Fordham even gives its 2023 standards a D.
Thanks to the championship of John Droz, North Carolina’s standards do at least mention the scientific method:
“The scientific method provides a common framework for introducing the traditional experimental design and hypothesis-testing.”
However, North Carolina’s standards also include “Earth and Human Activity,” an entire strand of soft-focus environmental activism disguised as science. The high school Earth/Environmental Science standards, for example, include “Construct an argument to evaluate a range of solutions to mitigate impacts of human activities on Earth’s systems” —subordinating learning about the natural world to radical activism. The Crosswalk informs the reader that this item was added to the 2023 standards “based on NRC Framework and stakeholder feedback.”
Then there’s everything the North Carolina standards don’t have. They don’t have any history of science, which helps both teachers and students learn how we came to know what we know about the natural world. They don’t have any technology and engineering, so students can learn about the practical application of science and understand the current state of applied science. They don’t provide any instruction in scientific epistemology, so that students can learn the difference between a theory, a hypothesis, and a fact. They don’t require any detailed mathematical calculation, which students need if they are truly to be ready for college and career.
The standards’ lack of content, moreover, doesn’t just make them useless for teachers in the classroom. It means they can’t be used to create reliable assessments, at the state or local level. Nor do they provide proper guidance to textbook companies seeking to create science textbooks for North Carolina public schools.
There’s a better model out there, if North Carolina citizens want proper science instruction for their children — content-rich standards, with history of science, technology and engineering, scientific epistemology, and detailed integration with mathematical calculation. The National Association of Scholars and Freedom in Education have just created The Franklin Standards: Model K-12 State Science Standards, which have been endorsed by organizations including the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and the John Locke Foundation.
Here’s what North Carolina’s standards tell sixth graders: “Use models to compare the directional transfer of heat energy of matter through convection, radiation, and conduction.”
Here’s part of what the Franklin Standards says:
2.1 Heat moves from warmer objects to cooler ones, until both objects reach the same temperature.
2.2 Heat flows from a warm region to a cooler region through matter by conduction and through space by radiation. In a liquid or gas, currents transfer heat by convection.
2.3 The rate of heat flow depends on the temperature difference, the manner of heat flow (conduction, convection, radiation), and the thermal conductivity of the materials.
The Franklin Standards gives science teachers the information they need to do their jobs. North Carolina’s current science standards don’t.
North Carolina should use the Franklin Standards as the model for their own state science standards. North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction evidently can’t be trusted with the job, so policymakers should set up an independent committee to do the work. North Carolina can have excellent science instruction in its public K-12 schools — but only if it tosses out its current standards and makes sure the current standard-makers have nothing to do with crafting the replacement.
North Carolina’s science instruction can’t be good as long as its science standards are half D-grade content and half education school jargon.