NGSS Hurts the Ears

I was elated when the NGSS Framework came out, in 2013, with a clarion call for a 3-D model of curriculum. Most of the previous 30 years had been lonely for the few of us teachers who were using and developing a 3-D science curriculum. The standards movement of the 1990s embraced hands-on and dismissed 3-D’s minds-on focus as a fringe fad. We watched for 20 years as our K–12 colleagues tried every trick the gurus suggested to implement the 169 standards, assured that the hands-on would naturally, on its own, birth the minds-on and scientific literacy for all students. It didn’t. “Oops. Sorry about those decades of futile effort.”

NGSS’s 208 standards have the same aim: science literacy for all students.

My initial elation on reading the Framework draft quickly turned to disappointment: It was trumpeting a primitive, superficial, wannabe 3-D model. Its paper-thin, garbled rendition wouldn’t generate much more literacy than did the previous standards’ 2-D, content-process (or “know-do”) model. The 18 professors who developed the Framework grabbed the right stick and then must have dropped it on the way home. The committee had obviously taken the preamble of the 1990s standards that had suggested a few overarching concepts and repackaged them as their seven cross-cutting ones.

This blog first attempts to repair NGSS’s unintelligible, and, for us in classrooms, dangerously inadequate attempt at 3-D modeling. A second round of widespread failure of K–12 students to meet high expectations in a technology-driven economy will be blamed squarely on teachers, not on the misguided direction and directors leading the way.

The nub of the problem is that there’s just no way that seven cross-cutting concepts, ill-defined and unconnected, can power the promise of a 3-D model, no matter how much elaborate superstructure is balanced on top of them. No surprise: Today, in practice, the NGSS is fast devolving to its 2-D predecessor, albeit with design tasks replacing conventional labs. The chances that our kids are going to shine in NGSS-driven exams are very, very small.

How can I be so certain? Because I developed and wrote many of the questions. I worked for five years helping write the bank of questions that are now being rolled out in a consortium of a dozen states and territories near you. All us teacher-developers in Connecticut made clear to our supervisors, in unison, that we ourselves were flummoxed on how to teach our own kids to answer the wide-ranging questions we were writing.