Traditional science education in America is in its death throes, and precious few are seeking to halt its demise. One notable exception is physicist John Droz, a member of the CO2 Coalition, an all-volunteer group of 10,000 individuals dedicated to strengthening the understanding of the role of science and the scientific process in addressing complex public policy issues such as climate change.

The coalition believes science produces “empirical, measurable, objective facts and provides a means for testing hypotheses that can be replicated and potentially disproven.” In a nutshell, this describes the “scientific method,” a centuries-old approach to investigating the material world for the purpose of forming hypotheses and testing them with experiments to determine scientific reality and acquire knowledge. They write:

• Rooted in Isaac Newton’s work, which included creation of the calculus, the Scientific Method has long underpinned examination of the physical world and technological advancement. [It] requires that questions be asked, observations made, and hypotheses formulated, tested, and proven or rejected. Conclusions are always subject to challenges with new evidence and insights.

Last year, Droz went to bat for reinstatement of the scientific method to science education in North Carolina when he discovered it had been scrapped in his home state “for the promotion of a faddish theory of entirely unscientific inquiry.” After reviewing the state’s K-12 science standards, he filed a complaint with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. The state responded that they had received “some 14,000 inputs on the Science Standards,” and that Droz “was the only one bringing up the issue.”

But two members of the 18-member North Carolina Board of Education agreed with Droz, and the scientific method was restored to K-12 science education in July 2023. Droz acknowledged that the support of the board members was key to “correcting the deficiency in the state standards.”

He further believes that the lack of emphasis on critical thinking needs to be addressed by the state board, and is optimistic that this will be done as well. “It should be clear that there is an intimate connection between critical thinking analysis and the universal problem-solving procedure of the scientific method,” he said.

Next Generation Science Standards

What prompted the abandonment of the age-old scientific method in North Carolina’s science standards, and is the same situation occurring in other states? The catalyst was the release in 2013 of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and “A Framework for K-12 Science Education” which immediately preceded them. State boards of education began implementing the NGSS and by 2019, 20 states and the District of Columbia had adopted them in their entirety, with another 24 adopting standards influenced by the Framework.

A plethora of establishment organizations jumped on the bandwagon to support the standards, but a few skeptics took the time to properly analyze them. The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, for example, a network of Christian theologians, natural scientists, economists, and other scholars warned last year that “a serious threat has come to the education of America’s children in the form of the NGSS and the Framework.”

Cornwall cited the group Citizens for Objective Public Education (COPE), which performed an extensive review and analysis of the documents and found three major issues along religious lines alone:

1. The NGSS address religious questions but fail to do so objectively. Many people wouldn’t recognize this because they think of secularism as non-religious.
2. The specific religion promoted by the science standards is Secular Humanism. The Humanist Manifestoes define “Religious Humanism” as “an organized set of atheistic beliefs that (1) deny the supernatural, (2) claim that life arises via unguided evolutionary processes rather than as a creation made for a purpose, and (3) claim that life should be guided by naturalistic/materialistic science and reason rather than traditional theistic religious beliefs.” The science standards affirm each of these positions.
3. Key to every aspect of the science standards is their insistence that all scientific questions must be addressed and resolved solely in terms of Methodological Naturalism, “the idea that science is not permitted to explain the cause of events within the natural world with anything other than a materialistic explanation through the use of ‘material’ or ‘natural’ causes (that is a cause resulting from the unguided interactions of matter, energy and the forces).” Such a methodological principle excludes appeal to God or any other intelligence as the explanation for anything found in nature.

COPE provided comments on the Framework and NGSS in three documents dated June 1, 2012, January 29, 2013, and April 21, 2013. The organization believes the Common-Core aligned Framework “promotes a formula favoring an atheistic worldview, and that state standards in general tend to be ‘dumbed down’ so that most students can meet them.”

NAS exposes the NGSS

In April 2021, the prestigious National Association of Scholars (NAS) released a 98-page report titled Climbing Down: How the Next Generation Science Standards Diminish Scientific Literacy, which “presents an extensive critique, including exactly what is contained in the NGSS (and what is not), and how they adversely affect K-12 science education wherever they are implemented.”

The report’s authors are appropriately credentialed, including Professor of Nursing Jennifer Helms, former NASA education and outreach teacher James Nations, and NAS’s director of research, David Randall. The authors charge that the NGSS abandon “thoughtful analysis, sorting through evidence, systematic analysis, the discovery of truth, and building arguments based on findings.”

Furthermore, they “severely neglect content instruction, politicize much of the content that remains, largely in the service of a diversity and equity political agenda, and abandon instruction of the scientific method, an omission which should alarm anyone concerned with the quality of K-12 science education and the future of science in general.”

In its October 31, 2023 weekly newsletter Countercurrent, NAS observed:

• The NGSS are an educational travesty which will do nothing but further cripple American science achievement at a time when we need it most. Even worse, there is no lack of quality science standards in the U.S.—many states simply abandoned them for the subpar NGSS, in large part to save face and properly pursue a DEI agenda in their schools. These states must reverse course and provide proper science education to their students....

What’s in the standards?

Climbing Down is more broadly focused to include K-12 education because, as the authors write:

• K-12 education has become extraordinarily nationalized in the last generation ... These educational standards, promoted most notably by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the federal government, have sought to evade America’s traditional and constitutional delegation of public education to the states and localities—delegated precisely so as to avoid a centralized straitjacket on American education. The federal government’s financial incentives, combined with the bureaucratic evasion that these are only standards, not curricula, have created a de facto national curriculum, which limits school curriculum choice ever more tightly.

NAS acknowledges itself as “a vigorously pro-science organization. We recognize that systematic and disciplined inquiry into nature has shaped the modern world, mostly for the better. The aspiration to extend man’s understanding of biology, chemistry, physics, and the other natural sciences is both worthy and fruitful. And because we uphold that view, we are alarmed when we see forces at work within the institutions of science that check or compromise legitimate inquiry.”

NAS’s report cites the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Final Evaluation of the Next Generation Science Standards, which was critical of the NGSS despite Fordham’s support of the Gates Foundation and Common Core. After comparing the NGSS with 55 other sets of science standards, including those from all 50 states and Washington, DC, plus four non-state sets of standards, the best grade Fordham could give them was a C, along with a numeric score of 5 out of 10. NAS noted: “Even Fordham, the foremost organization in the country that rates state science standards, could not overlook the serious errors and inadequacies within the NGSS.”

At the outset, the report’s authors establish that the standards fail to meet even the basic prerequisites for a K-12 educational standard nor do they provide a science education adequate for taking introductory science courses in college.

Among the many problems with the NGSS is teaching to the test, a common flaw of all Common Core standards. But for true science education, writes NAS, “this poses a significant problem, because much of the content limited by NGSS ‘assessment boundaries’ — which specify what is not on a test and thus may not be taught at all — is crucial for understanding concepts that are foundational for future college-level science courses.”

The NGSS also lack math education, which has been replaced “by a preference for subjective judgment in critical areas.” Also deficient are chemistry, physics, and life sciences, especially biology, which may be understandable if viewed in light of the biological realities now being denied by mainstream medicine and culture as well as education. The physical sciences fare no better.

NGSS include Engineering

While the NAS report found the addition of engineering a positive note, which previous standards did not include, the authors acknowledge that:

• A substantial disconnect exists between the high-school engineering standards and the essential math and physics content that will allow a student to grasp engineering concepts. Without the requisite physics content, engineering can only be given a cursory nod. Likewise, the delay of algebra to grade nine in the Common Core mathematics standards results in pushing higher-level math so late into high school that vital trigonometry and calculus understanding is missing when a student learns high school-level engineering.

They add that the NGSS’s engineering component “consists overwhelmingly of ‘global issues’ such as environmentalism and social welfare, rather than any preparation for building bridges, offshore oil rigs, fiberglass, electronics, or space elevators. Neither does it mention that engineering might be dedicated to the national interest by work for the American military.”

Other troubling findings include that the NGSS rely heavily on computer models rather than empirical data which “encourages students to confuse the map for the territory, the abstracted representation provided by a model for the natural world itself.”

The climate sequence is replete with an “emphasis on activism to reduce pollution, etc., rather than disinterested inquiry into the nature of climate science.” NAS points out that from kindergarten onward, the NGSS insert environmentalist policy prescriptions and label them as science, along with the doctrines of sustainability and human-caused climate change ... so conspicuous that it would be impossible for even a neutral reader to miss....”

The standards insert social justice propaganda into science classes to allegedly level the playing field for students, but in doing so, they sell all students short. “The central claim,” states NAS, “is that non-dominant groups, such as blacks, Hispanics, the poor, and girls, don’t do so well in science classes—because of the ‘privilege’ of ‘dominant groups.’ While the student population in the United States is becoming more diverse, science achievement gaps persist by demographic subgroups. Science standards therefore must be framed so that ‘Achievement gaps [are] closed among demographic subgroups of students.’ The NGSS characterize the ‘achievement gap’ as a function of privilege, which the standards must strive to eliminate.”

Many observers view this as insulting to minority groups in particular and to all students in general. As the NAS report states: “The NGSS do not explicitly say ‘we have removed rigorous content because we don’t believe black and Hispanic students can handle it.’ Yet the material they substitute for content knowledge, such as process and inquiry, is material meant in various ways to inspire and/or support ‘non-dominant populations.’” The bottom line: “the NGSS’ desire to promote diversity and equity subordinates science instruction to remedial English and mathematics.”

Finally, Climbing Down charges that the NGSS’ “astonishing devotion to activism” is entirely improper in science education. As with many other progressive curriculum standards tainting modern government education, the NGSS “facilitate the work of those activists who steer science education toward training progressive activists.”

The CO2 Coalition says John Droz’s example of standing for scientific integrity in North Carolina may provide broader inspiration to resist “the education establishment’s degradation of science teaching.” Along these lines, the coalition offers books, videos, and lesson plans free upon request, correctly asserting that “the cost of failing to repel the modern attack on rational thought is incalculable.”

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