Posts Tagged ‘ education reform ’

Corporate Science Education Standards—Far From the Classroom

October 8, 2011

I got a Tweet from Christopher Emdin, Professor at Columbia University Teachers College linking me to his recent article on the Huffington Post entitled 5 Reasons Why Public School Teachers are Occupying Wall Street. His reasons, which I will list below, resonated with me with regard to the way in which corporate boards, through organizations such as Achieve are taking over public education by creating a single curriculum that will be defined by the Common Core State Standards.… Read more

Review of the NRC’s Framework for K-12 Science Education

By Jack Hassard

October 5, 2011

The Carnegie Corporation of New York, which funded the National Research Council’s project A Framework for K-12 Science Education, also provided the financial support for the Fordham Foundation’s review of NRC Framework. Although not a conflict of interest for the Fordham Foundation, it does raise questions about the Carnegie Foundation’s desire to fund an evaluation of its own funded project.… Read more

The Next Generation of Science Standards: Covering Science with Factoids

By Jack Hassard

October 4, 2011

The Next Generation of Science Standards are under development by Achieve, Inc. and will be published next year. Achieve will identify content and science and engineering practices that all students should learn from K – 12, regardless of where they live. The science standards will cover the physical sciences, the life sciences, the earth and space sciences, and engineering, technology and applications of science, but in so doing will create a landscape of factoids to be learned by students, and used to develop assessments to measure student achievement.… Read more

4 Reasons We Need New National Science Education Standards

By Jack Hassard

October 3, 2011

As you know, there are new science standards coming your way, and they are being developed by Achieve, Inc., with funds from the Carnegie Corporation, and other large corporations and foundations. According to Achieve, 20 states are leading the effort, and about 40 teachers have been selected to write the new standards. The teachers have been drawn from Arizona, California, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia.… Read more

Common Corporate Science Standards?

By Jack Hassard

September 24, 2011

My choice of a title for this blog post is not a play on words, but describes the current effort to write the next generation of science standards. The next generation of science standards is being developed by Achieve, Inc., a corporate and foundation support-type organization that was established in 1996 by governors and corporate leaders, not educators, to support standards-based reform. According to the Achieve website, governors and corporate leaders:

formed Achieve as an independent, bipartisan, non-profit education reform organization.

… Read more

Some Questions About the NSTA Position on the New Generation of Science Standards

By Jack Hassard

September 12, 2010

In the most recent issue of NSTA Reports (National Science Teachers Association), Francis Eberle, NSTA Executive Director wrote an opinion piece entitled First Steps Toward New Science Standards. Although not an official position of the NSTA membership, the article does outline the general attitude of the organization toward the recent effort to develop a Conceptual Framework for New Science Standards, and the forthcoming process to develop a new generation of science standards.… Read more

Progressive Science Education

By Jack Hassard

November 16, 2009

I have been reading and have referenced on this weblog the October 2009 special issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST) on the topic/theme “Scientific Literacy and Contexts in PISA Science.” The articles in the special issue provide a broad view of international testing as conceived in PISA, as well as the TIMSS.

One of the articles (by Sadler and Zeidler) which was focused on PISA and Socioscientific Discourse, used the term progressive science education as a way to describe a vision of science education that includes public understanding of science, humanistic science education, context-based science teaching, S-T-S, and socioscientific issues.… Read more