Glenn Branch is the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that promotes and defends accurate and effective science education.
As Iowa continues the process of reviewing and revising its state science standards—which establish the goals for what knowledge and skills students in the state’s public schools are expected to attain—a remark from a famous transient Iowan comes to mind. Offering advice for aspiring writers, Mark Twain emphasized that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,” adding, “’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”
As the Cedar Rapids Gazette previously reported, after the committee of 37 Iowa educators and scientists charged with revising the standards completed its work, the Iowa Department of Education took it upon itself to scrub phrases like “evolution” and “climate change” and a reference to the 4.6-billion-year age of the earth from the draft that was then presented to the public. There was no acknowledgement of the department’s intervention until members of the committee protested.
A spokesperson for the department defended its tampering by explaining that “changes between each review committee and the department recommendation are to be expected” and that the committee was told as much. But while nobody would object to department staff making trivial corrections of the sort of errors that creep into any large document generated by a committee, that’s not what happened here. Instead, lightning bugs were substituted for lightning bolts.
Part of science education is learning the terminology scientists use. Scientists, including faculty at Iowa’s colleges and universities, don’t talk about “biological change over time” or “climate trends” when they talk about evolution or climate change. That’s why Iowa’s current state science standards—as well as the standards in the majority of states across the country—use the terms “evolution” and “climate change” straightforwardly and forthrightly.
The decision to use “evolution” and “climate change” in Iowa’s current state science standards was based on the research and development work of a consortium including the National Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Teaching Association, and 26 states, including Iowa. After Iowa adopted the standards in 2015, there were no complaints from the state’s science teachers about the inclusion of those terms.
And the review committee’s decision to retain the scientifically accurate and pedagogically appropriate language about evolution and climate change in the current standards was informed by decades of expertise and experience in Iowa’s science classrooms. In contrast, if the department’s decision to scrub “evolution” and “climate change” from the draft standards was based on any relevant scholarly expertise or classroom experience, surely Iowans would have been told by now.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the state agency’s tampering is due to scientifically unwarranted doubts about evolution and climate change, whether on the part of department staff or among those whom department leaders regard as their political constituency. Whatever their origin and motivation, though, it is clear that the proposed changes would make Iowa’s state science standards inaccurate, imprecise, and misleading on the crucial topics of climate change and evolution.
Iowa’s science teachers need accurate science standards in order to enable their students to become scientifically literate and to equip them to succeed in STEM education and employment. And they deserve better than to be misled by the feeble glimmerings of the department’s proposed revisions. Learning about science in the way that scientists understand—and talk about—science is part of what’s needed to electrify Iowa’s students about science.
Top photo of Glenn Branch provided by the author and published with permission.