Unpopular Opinion: The NGSS are a MESS

I was recently organizing some of my old electronic files, and I ran across an old quarterly chemistry email blast that I was in charge of writing and sending to the other chemistry teachers in my school network. It was Spring 2013 and I had a blurb about the newly-finalized Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) with some links for more information. Even though our state (Pennsylvania) had not adopted them, I was still so excited! Wow, have my thoughts changed over the last 7 years. But first, some background on why I was initially so enthusiastic…

My first teaching job was in Arkansas back in 2005. I taught 11th grade chemistry, 9th grade physical science, and remedial math. Our schools test scores were low, and a state takeover was looming, so a lot of outside experts were coming in to train us. They repeated over and over and over how important it was to teach the standards, write the standard on the board, copy and paste the standards into our lesson plan, etc, etc. The Arkansas science standards had just been updated that year (2005) and they were pretty clear and understandable. There was a set of standards for chemistry, and set of standards for physical science (which I didn’t appreciate at the time…I didn’t foresee the coming of the dreaded “integrated” science standards). I do remember maybe 1 or 2 grammatical or content errors; I smugly added [sic] after putting these standards in my lesson plans and on my board. But overall I had nothing to complain about. Of course, there were a few things in them I thought should be left out, and there were things left out that I thought should be in, but that’s a natural part of the standardizing process, and I believe in the importance of all students within a subject learning pretty much the same stuff. Plus, the standards were reasonable enough that there was spare time to add extra stuff into my curriculum based on student interest and things that are important to our school community in particular.

Then in 2007 I moved to Pennsylvania, home of some of the most confusing, messy state science standards ever. Ugh. So, their high school science standards were separated by subject (biology, chemistry, physics), but the standards for each subject were separated into 10th grade expectations and 12th grade expectations, which was confusing for me because chemistry (my subject) was taught in 11th grade. Even worse, each subject also listed 10th grade and 12th grade expectations for the other subjects. So, chemistry standards were listed in the 10th grade chemistry and 12th grade chemistry sections, as well as in the 10th and 12th grade biology and physics sections. Yeah. So, I get that this was probably an attempt to get on board with the “integrated science” trend that was (and maybe still is?) all the rage, but my thoughts on “integrated science” are another blog post for another time. In any case, I was really confused and had a really hard time figuring out what on earth I was supposed to teach in my chemistry classes, and I had a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a couple of years of teaching experience already under my belt. Can you imagine how confused a new teacher would be, especially one without a degree in the subject they are teaching?

Then, in 2010 Pennsylvania released “Keystone Assessment Anchors and Eligible Content” for high school biology and high school chemistry. These were somewhat of an improvement. The document for chemistry has 3 columns: the Anchor Descriptor, the Eligible Content, and the Enhanced Standard. I don’t really know what these things mean, especially “Enhanced Standard” because that column literally only has numbers in it. The definition of “Enhanced Standard” given at the beginning of the document is “a code representing one or more Enhanced Standards that correlate to the Eligible Content statement. Some Eligible Content statements include annotations that indicate certain clarifications about the scope of an eligible content.” Huh?

At least the other 2 columns, Anchor Descriptors and the Eligible Content, contain sentences that are pretty clear, so even though I don’t know the difference between these 2 columns, I can at least get a sense of what I’m supposed to teach. I’m going to call these the “standards” from now on, even though they’re not in the “standards” column. Overall, these Pennsylvania Chemistry Keystone Standards are very reasonable and make sense, but are VERY pared down. Topics that every chemistry teacher teaches, like measurement, density, acids and bases aren’t even mentioned. In talking to my Biology colleagues, the same seems to be true for the Biology Keystone Standards (although they sound like they are even more pared down than the chemistry ones, to the point where they are missing too much content). However, in general I’m all for depth over breadth, and the Chemistry Keystone Standards strike the depth/breadth balance fairly well, and they leave enough space for me to add in extra topics for my students, just like I did in Arkansas.

The problem is, these rather clear Pennsylvania Keystone Standards were only made for biology (generally taught in 9th or 10th grade) and chemistry (generally taught in 10th or 11th grade). There are no physics standards (generally taught after chemistry), but I guess that’s because in a lot of high schools physics is not a required course. The biggest issue for me is that, while I now have clarity on what I should be teaching in chemistry, I still have no clarity on what is being taught in K-8 science in Pennsylvania. While some may say that standards are not important because teachers should instead be focusing on “relevant” topics that are related to the “real world” or students’ everyday lives, I find this to be an insultingly narrow definition of “relevant.” If something is “relevant” to my students, it’s because it builds on something they already know. Sometimes, the things they already know were learned outside of school; sometimes the things they already know were learned in school. As such, it is really important for me to have an easy way of getting a general sense of what science stuff they learned previously. In fact, some of the foundational chemistry topics that are missing from the Chemistry Keystone Standards (like measurement and density), I think are missing because they are supposedly being learned in earlier grades. Knowing if, when, and to what extent these topics were learned is crucial to my success as a teacher.

I figured there had to be some document somewhere that laid out the K-8 PA Science Standards, so I set out to find it. After a lot of googling, clicking around, and scrolling, the closest thing I could find was the “Academic Standards for Science and Technology” and “Academic Standards for Environment and Ecology” which are posted on the PA Standards Aligned System (SAS) website. Why they break science into these two categories, I don’t know. These links will send you old 2002 documents similar to what I described earlier, where every topic is broken in to columns for 4th grade, 7th grade, 10th, grade, and 12th grade, making it impossible to get a clear idea of what was learned and when. And, as a side note, since these documents go all the way to 12th grade, I guess I’m supposed to be teaching some of these things in 11th grade chemistry, in addition to the PA Chemistry Keystone Standards??

One day sometime in 2012, when I was randomly doing some google searches in an attempt to figure out why my state science standards were so bad, I ran across this published review of the science standards in each state . I finally felt some vindication. Arkansas’s state science standards were given a grade of B, and were praised for their “well-organized and generally sound set of science standards, with thorough and excellent treatment of most—though not all—disciplines.” They said the Arkansas chemistry standards are “particularly strong; all of our content criteria—and much more—are thoroughly covered by the Arkansas standards” and “the 2005 chemistry revision committee should be congratulated for producing such a comprehensive document.”

On the other hand, the Pennsylvania State Science Standards, not surprisingly, received a D. It states, in summary:

“The Pennsylvania science standards are generally poor. If a bright spot exists, it’s in the early grades, where the coverage does occasionally earn reasonable marks for rigor. In high school, however, the material generally descends into flabbiness and disorder. By no means could these standards serve as the foundation for a sound science curriculum or students in the Keystone State.”

So, in short, I think it’s pretty clear that the PENNSYLVANIA STATE SCIENCE STANDARDS ARE MESSED UP. Which is why I was so, so, so looking forward to the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)…

When the NGSS were being developed, back in 2012 and 2013, I remember seeing a tagline on some NGSS website that said something like “let’s get it right this time.” Considering the mess in Pennsylvania, this really resonated with me and I got really excited. While individual states are in charge of their own K-12 education standards, the NGSS were something designed to be nationwide that states could choose to adopt, similar to the Common Core for math and literacy. I followed the NGSS development process from afar, and I think there were a couple of drafts that were open to public feedback, which I submitted. Pennsylvania wasn’t, back at that time, considering adopting the NGSS (although PA has just recently started taking steps towards it). Nonetheless, I knew these standards would have an effect on science education nationwide, even if every state didn’t adopt them, which is why I was closely following the process.

I think it was maybe sometime during the draft-feedback cycles that I noticed they started adding these awkward “clarification statements” and “assessment boundaries” after the performance standards, probably in response to feedback from people who (understandably, in my opinion) found this section of the standards confusing and vague. When the finalized version was released, I was nonetheless still optimistic and excited about them, because really anything would be an improvement on the Pennsylvania science standards. However, my hopes faded a bit more when I dug into the section that applied to my course (chemistry). Well, there’s not actually a section labeled “chemistry” but there’s a high school section and I can kind of figure out which parts of that should be a part of a chemistry course. Overall, I found the chemistry part of the NGSS to be confusing, vague and just generally disappointing. (The specifics of what I found to be vague, confusing, or just incorrect, are a whole other blogpost for another time – here I’m just trying to keep the focus on NGSS in general.) In any case, despite my reservations about the chemistry part, I held out hope that maybe teachers of other sciences were finding the NGSS more promising and more useful.

I want to emphasize, though, that I did, and still do, definitely agree with the overall aim of what the NGSS are trying to do. I want all students across the country to have access to meaningful, conceptually-rich science curriculum that is more or less the same across states (with some reasonable flexibility), rather than each individual state having to design, develop and execute its own K-12 science standards from scratch. Each state doing it’s “own thing” becomes particularly problematic when states just don’t spend enough resources on the development of their standards, leading to the total mess that we see with the current Pennsylvania state science standards. So signing on with some high-quality national standards was, and still is, a good idea in my view. But are the NGSS really all that high-quality?

Before I get into my criticisms, I also want to say that I totally agree with not only the aims of NGSS, but also what what I would call the “spirit” of the NGSS, which is that we want students to learn scientific reasoning and understand scientific phenomena in a way that leads to meaningful conceptual understanding, rather than memorizing terms and doing mindless mathematical calculations. This is something I think the vast majority science teachers (me included) have always wanted for their students. Math and vocab words (and yes, memorizing some stuff, too) is a part of the process of learning science and becoming a scientist, but it’s not the end goal. However, the reason many students aren’t achieving conceptual understanding in science is not because teachers think that mindless memorization is the goal; it’s because teaching for true conceptual understanding is REALLY DIFFICULT and there are not a lot of concrete resources to help teachers do that. Unfortunately, the NGSS seems to just be 103 pages of telling teachers “teach in a conceptually meaningful way,” without providing any clear pathway towards actually doing it.

Part of this lack of concreteness in the NGSS is (in my opinion) due to an over-emphasis on science skills (like “asking questions” and “planning investigations”) with very little clear outline of what science content knowledge should be learned alongside these skills. It reminds me of a very formative experience I had in my 4th grade “talented and gifted” class – the famous toothpick bridge project. We were divided into groups, given materials, and told to work together and “think like engineers” to make a bridge that was strong and could hold more weight than the other groups’ bridges. However, we were not taught any engineering basics about good bridge design. Even just some basic engineering vocabulary would have been helpful; then we would have known some terms look up in our school library’s card catalog to do our own research. I know students should be learning how to research and solve their own problems, but they need at least a basic understanding of the content first. We had never learned anything about engineering. Now, did this project provide us with an opportunity to work on our communication and cooperation skills? Absolutely. Did working with all those toothpicks improve our hands-on dexterity? Yes. But the “learning experience” still felt really empty to me, and I’m worried that the NGSS will lead to a lot more learning experiences like this going on in a lot more classrooms across the US.

Another reason why the NGSS, in my opinion, are not going to lead to us actually achieving its very laudable aims, is that the standards are just generally confusing. Somehow they manage to be both really wordy and really vague. Just looking at them makes my head hurt. In fact, the 103-page NGSS document is so confusing, they had to also publish an additional 5-page document that teaches you how to read the 103-page document. The fact that something like this is even necessary speaks to what I, over the years, have come to believe is a lack of quality and clarity in the NGSS.

In their defense, I think the authors of the NGSS had expected that, after the standards were released, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, etc., would do their thing and some up with an NGSS-aligned curriculum that they could market and school districts would purchase. That way, teachers would have more than just the confusing 103-page NGSS document telling them the importance of conceptual understanding and scientific inquiry, they would have concrete resources for actually bringing the standards to life in their classroom. After all, the NGSS are standards, which are supposed to be broad, not a curriculum, which is more detailed. I remember reading a few things over the years about publishers slapping the NGSS logo on their curricular products, claiming they were aligned when they actually weren’t, but I never heard about any purchasable curriculum that was actually aligned to the NGSS. So I decided to investigate. I took a look on EdReports, an independent nonprofit that rates how well instructional materials are aligned to standards. (Now, keep in mind, EdReports is not assessing the quality of the standards; they are just assessing curriculum material alignment with the standards.) In the 7 years since the NGSS were released, only 1 curriculum, Amplify Science, achieved the designation “meets expectations” for their 6th-8th grade curriculum. Only 2 other curricula were designated “partially meets expectations.” Everything else was rated “does not meet expectations” (some pretty popular ones, like FOSS Next Generation, are in this category). If the vast majority of publishing corporations with a strong profit motive can’t even come up with a marketable curriculum aligned to the science standards that 40 out of 50 US states are using, then I don’t know how all these individual school districts are supposed to do it without allotting tons of time, money, and resources (that they probably don’t even have) towards the development of an NGSS-aligned science curriculum.

Now, like I said before, I think the spirit of what the NGSS are trying to ultimately achieve is spot-on, but the way they are written is just too confusing, impractical, and does not provide any of the necessary frameworks and structures needed to achieve their goal of deep science understanding for all students. As my own personal reservations about the NGSS were developing, and I started doing some googling, I found a final evaluation of NGSS done by the same organization that had rated and reviewed all the state science standards. According to their analysis, the NGSS earned a grade of C. Here are some excerpts from their analysis that really speak to my frustration with the NGSS:

-“Standards should, as much as possible, clarify and prioritize what content and skills are essential at each grade level. By leaving so much to the whims of publishers, curriculum developers, and teachers…we cannot be confident that all students in the schools and districts governed by the NGSS will learn what they need to be ready for college and careers.” (This analysis really spoke to me, because the NGSS are SO long and wordy – 103 pages – and yet actually reading them leaves you feeling like there’s just not much there. I think the fact that they are very long and appear so detailed and informational really fools some people.)

-There is a “failure to include essential math content that is critical to science learning. As our physics and chemistry reviewers explain: ‘In reality, there is virtually no reference to mathematics, even at the high school level, where it is essential to the learning of physics and chemistry. Rather, the standards seem to assiduously dodge the mathematical demands inherent in the subjects covered.‘”

-“…the content of NGSS itself fails to ensure that that all students will be equipped with sufficient content to make real the option of taking more advanced courses in the core STEM disciplines. This is particularly egregious in physics and chemistry.”

-“…by omitting essential content, yet signaling (via course maps) that NGSS does provide the basis for high school physics and chemistry courses, the authors have offered the country watered-down versions of heretofore more demanding courses in key STEM subjects. There is a real risk, then, that students in states that adopt the NGSS, or those that use the course maps to define learning in high school physics and chemistry courses, will graduate having taken courses that carry an impressive label but don’t supply the requisite scientific content that the country urgently needs today.”

-“Good science consists of doing as well as knowing, of practices as well as content and concept, and well-taught K–12 science has long understood and incorporated this truth. But doing it well requires a careful balance that seems somehow to have eluded the NGSS authors. Instead, they conferred primacy on practices and paid too little attention to the knowledge base that makes those practices both feasible and worthwhile.”

-“Unfortunately, the NGSS suffer from the belief—widespread among educators—that practices are more important than content. Consequently, every standard in NGSS articulates a practice first, even when doing so obscures the content that students should learn. And, while there are stand-alone standards that list practices and skills that students must master, there are no stand-alone expectations that list—in clear, teacher-friendly language—the content that students should learn.” (I’d like to add a side note here to demonstrate just how content-poor these standards are. During these COVID quarantimes, you may be interested to know that the word “virus” does not appear anywhere in all 103 pages of the NGSS.)

Now, a few of these criticisms focus on high school chemistry and physics in particular, which is maybe why I have a more negative view of the NGSS than your average science teacher. However, I think there is enough here to make anyone justifiably wary of the NGSS. And if you want to see what type of national science standards could be possible, just look to our friends across the pond: here are the UK middle school science standards (about 2,000 words) which are so refreshingly clear and crisp. Oh how I long for something like this, so I could easily figure out what science skills and content my students learned in middle school. Compare that to the headache-inducing confusing mess that is the NGSS middle school science standards (about 19,000 words)! And, as a side note, the word “virus” does appear in the UK high school science standards. Oh the clarity!

I would be remiss if I failed to mention Appendix D of the NGSS. This is not part of the main 103-page document, but it’s one of several appendices. This one addresses issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and has the title “All Standards, All Students.” Since this pretty much sums up the whole reason why I became a science teacher, I read through this appendix more closely than the others. While the goals that this appendix is promoting are pretty much the most important thing in the world (to me at least), and the teaching approaches and ideals that it conveys are good things for teachers to know and aim for, it again fails to provide anything actionably clear or concrete. It explains how the inquiry-focused methods of learning outlined in the NGSS are methods work for everyone, but they work particularly well for marginalized groups. It emphasizes that the “cross-cutting concepts” (which are things like “systems and system models”) will help ensure students make connections across science courses, and even across other disciplines, and this will lead to a deeper engagement in science particularly for historically underserved groups. When I read stuff like this, I find myself wondering, is this actually going to create meaning and relevance for students? If students make and analyze a model of the solar system, it will be more meaningful because they also once made and analyzed a model of a cell? If the class then had a discussion about all the systems they have modeled in science, that’s definitely not the worst thing in the world, but how much is it really moving the needle in these students’ science learning? And honestly, is it really that engaging? Yes, models and systems play a role in all science subjects, and yes, that’s an important (albeit somewhat easy and surface-level) connection for students to make. It’s really not the deep, thought-provoking connection that the NGSS authors seem to present it as. I’ve never once looked at my 11th grade chemistry students and thought “wow, I really wish they came to me with a better understanding of how systems and models play a role in all the science disciplines.” (My thoughts are usually along the likes of “wow, I wish they came to me knowing that when I say gas, as in solid, liquid, gas, I don’t mean gasoline.”)

So, in short, Appendix D which focuses on equity, did have some good stuff but overall left me feeling empty. The main crux of this Appendix seemed to be that everything in the NGSS will improve science learning for all students, but it will work especially well for historically underserved groups. Since this is pretty much the goal of my life’s work, I had really had been hoping the NGSS would help me realize this vision, but I have come to believe that it just won’t. Not only will the NGSS not make things better and more equitable; I think there’s a serious risk that they’re going to make things worse. The best way I can think of to illustrate why, is to take you back to the toothpick bridge…

So, there’s more to that story. The part I didn’t tell you is that there was a girl in our group whose uncle was an engineer. She went home and called her uncle to ask for advice about how to build the best toothpick bridge. He said “use lots of triangles and trapezoids in your design.” She shared that information with our group, we did just that, and when it came time to test which group’s bridge could withstand the most weight, WE WON! Now, on the surface, you may think “Wow what a great project; the students really learned how to ask questions and find answers!” or “Wow, those students were really able to connect this project with the shapes they learned about in math – great integration across different subjects!” (Yes unfortunately a lot of “cross-curricular” stuff really is that shallow.) But I want you to think about the kids in the other groups, the ones who didn’t have an engineer in their family. What about them? If they had just tried harder at “thinking like an engineer,” could they have had a chance at winning?

Scientists are able to “think like scientists” and engineers are able to “think like engineers” because they have a ton of content knowledge about science and engineering. The “skills” they have don’t exist in a vacuum; there’s no such thing as “scientific thinking” without science knowledge. Now I get that the goal of the NGSS is to ensure that all students see themselves as practicing scientists, and I 100% agree with that goal, but there really needs to be a parallel focus on building up students’ science content knowledge. When students are assigned science projects and experiments but are not provided with an equal opportunity to learn applicable science content, the students who can learn the content at home (or have someone at home to help them learn the content) will get ahead, do better on their project, and feel more confident in science as a result, and the students who can’t learn the content at home will fall behind and feel discouraged. So I think the reason why my fourth-grade self felt kind of empty after that project wasn’t just because I felt like I didn’t learn much. It was mainly because I was coming to realize that some students had home advantages, and some students had home disadvantages, and the school wasn’t always evening things out and making things more fair; our school was sometimes making the inequities worse. I felt this exact same emptiness after every science fair I ever participated in (and this is coming from someone who went on to major in chemistry in college). If you’re interested in a more in-depth analysis of the types of problems that can arise when kids are tasked with “thinking like a scientist”, read this article by D. T. Willingham.

Now I don’t think the NGSS are a lost cause; I do believe they can be re-written in a more understandable, useful, meaningful way that will actually ensure that teachers and students are able to fully realize the goal of a meaningful, conceptually-rich science education for ALL. The main things that need to be changed are a more clear presentation of the content to be learned (look at the UK standards as an example), and a toning-down of the too-heavy emphasis on generic science skills and concepts like “systems and models” and “patterns” that are presented in the NGSS as if they’re so deep, engaging, and meaningful but really aren’t.

Do we need national K-12 science standards? Yes, absolutely, because there’s simply not enough science education expertise out there for each individual state to come up with their own quality science standards. But are the NGSS going to get us where we need to be? No. The main pushback I hear from NGSS supporters when I share my criticisms is that these standards are just meant to be a foundation or framework for more clear, detailed curricula that individual school districts will write. Umm, who’s going to do all that curriculum writing? My school district has 1 curriculum director in charge of all subjects from 6th grade to 12th grade. Is he supposed write the science curriculum? My former school district did have a “science curriculum specialist” whose credentials included a major in Urban Studies and 2 years of experience teaching middle school math. Is this who we want to be in charge of writing an NGSS-aligned curriculum? Now of course, there are well-resourced school districts with qualified “science curriculum directors” who maybe actually have the extensive content knowledge and resources needed to turn this NGSS mess into a clear, coherent curriculum. (Or, if maybe these wealthy districts don’t have a science curriculum director, at least they have teachers with strong content knowledge, tons of teaching experience, and low-stress working conditions who will be able to make solid, conceptually-meaningful learning happen in their classroom no matter what the standards say.) But what about our under-resourced school districts, the districts with students that NGSS so emphatically purports to be helping? Well, I guess these poor districts could just purchase the curriculum from that one publisher that actually aligned with NGSS. But you’ll have to forgive me for not believing that a for-profit publishing corporation with a monopoly on NGSS-aligned curricula will, in an act of magnanimity, decide to sell their stuff at a reasonable price.

So, now that Pennsylvania is on track to adopt the NGSS, (something I only discovered though the course of doing research for this blog post…no one tells teachers anything!) I started thinking, maybe I should move back to Arkansas and teach there? Remember those clear, helpful Arkansas science standards? Well, I went online to look into it, and….Arkansas adopted the NGSS…sigh…