Nurturing and Sustaining Effective Programs in Science Education for Grades K-8 Building a Village in California: Summary of a Convocation (2009) / Chapter Skim
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1 The Challenges Facing California
1 The Challenges Facing California
Pages 1-14
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• -8 students in California spend too little time studying science, many of K their teachers are not well prepared in the subject, and the support system for science instruction has deteriorated. • proliferation of overly detailed standards and poorly conceived assess A ments has trivialized science education.
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. SCIENCE EDUCATION IN CALIFORNIA As the world continues to change at an ever-faster pace, policy leaders in the United States must ask themselves how they can help prepare the nation's children to succeed in an increasingly competitive and technologically advanced workplace, Dorrance said.
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Although the Bay Area is a center of innovation in science and technology in the United States, school districts there face challenges similar to those faced across the state. The study shows that 1 in 7 Bay Area teachers has been teaching less than two years, and in 16 Bay Area districts (representing 20 percent of Bay Area students)
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Teacher and district surveys indicate that less time has been spent on science since passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which initially mandated regular testing in mathematics and reading but not science. In particular, many districts with schools that have been targeted for improvement because of their poor test results in mathematics and reading report spending little or no time on science.
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study, most districts offer minimal professional development in science. Over the past three years, 32 percent of multiple-subject elementary school teachers in self-contained classrooms report receiving fewer than six hours of professional develop ment in science, and 38 percent report receiving none (see Figure 1-4)
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Anne Marie Bergen, a middle school teacher from the Oakdale Joint Unified School District who also serves as chair of the California Teacher Advisory Council for the California Council on Science and Technology, emphasized the lack of preparation many elementary school teachers have received in science. "Many teachers are not comfortable teaching science," she said.
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Kathy DiRanna, the statewide director of WestEd's K-12 Alliance, observed that one-third of the nation's English language learners are in California, and they constitute about a quarter of the K-12 students in the state. About 54 percent of students in Orange County's Santa Ana For additional information about the K-12 Science Alliance, see http://www.wested.
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Furthermore, it is a very diverse population, with great differences in the language they speak, their parents' backgrounds, whether they are literate in their home language, and the number of years they have lived in the United States. Dennis Bartels, the executive director of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, described a transformation that he observed in California science education in just the past few years.
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3. Help the United States generate new scientific knowledge and technology by casting the widest possible net for talent.
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-- Bruce Alberts The National Research Council's report Taking Science to School, a comprehensive analysis of how students in grades K-8 can best learn science, concluded that effective science education needs to combine four strands of learning (National Research Council, 2007a)
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• Engages in science-related issues and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen. The United States has an opportunity to move toward this vision of science education, said Alberts, "because there's a widespread recognition that the current chaotic system does not work." For example, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers had a meeting in Chicago in April 2009, at which they decided to push for c ommon standards in mathematics and English language arts, with science to follow.
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"This is where science comes to life for them, and it's critical to continue to provide these opportunities while we're working on what's going on in schools." The earlier study of Bay Area elementary schools also found that the majority of elementary schools receive support for science education from an external partner, including informal learning institutions, colleges and universities, local businesses, and community-based organizations. Teachers rate the quality of the professional development they receive from these external sources higher that those in the public school system.
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Specific strategies mentioned by convocation participants are to increase the classroom time spent on science, select new materials, integrate science with mathematics or language arts, provide more opportunities for professional development in science, seek new funding sources to support science education, and leverage the expertise of passionate science teachers. Susan Pritchard, a middle school science teacher with the La Habra City School District and the current president of the California Science Teachers Association,11 observed that bringing together the people represented at the convocation was an important step.
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14 NURTURING AND SUSTAINING EFFECTIVE PROGRAMS this village, has an extraordinary opportunity to change students' lives. An opportunity to improve our country.
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