From the Florida Dept of Ed: “Florida’s K-12 Science Education Plan”

The office of the K-12 Chancellor, Frances Haithcock, has distributed to the school districts what is being called “Florida’s K-12 Science Education Plan”.  The whole memo is brief – about two-and-a-quarter pages, and it can be seen in its entirety here:

Florida’s K-12 Science Education Plan

The memo opens with the claims that

…the Department of Education has recently reaffirmed our dedication to increasing science achievement for all students in Florida. Florida’s Science Education Plan (attached) is ambitious and is designed to increase our student achievement in science to one of the highest in the nation.

The plan, which is decidedly not ambitious, demonstrates clearly that Florida is not yet dedicated to increasing student achievement in science – it just isn’t a priority.

There is at least one good aspect to this plan:  It specifically acknowledges the shortage of chemistry and physics teachers (in item 1 of the plan, located on page 2).

However, there are some striking specific problems.

First of all, the memo lists one “focus” of the plan to be “Preparing students for higher education and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) careers in the 21st century.”  But there are no specific steps listed to do so, at least at the level of the science and engineering pipeline.

Second, the memo says that another “focus” of the plan is “Implementing our rigorous Next Generation Sunshine State Standards for science with fidelity.”  But even the new graduation requirements do not meet the standards for grades 9-12.  The life science standards are met by every student because of the Biology 1 graduation requirement; some of the physical science standards will be addressed by each student because of the “chemistry or physics” graduation requirement; but very few students will meet the Earth/space science standards when they graduate because this subject is not mentioned at all in the graduation requirements .  The plan does not attempt to address this issue.

Third, there seems to be an underlying misunderstanding about how science is learned in the document’s foundation.  The words “inquiry” and “hands-on” do not appear once in the document.  However, one of the components of the plan, “Content Specific Literacy through Comprehension Instructional Sequence” is based entirely on increasing “student comprehension when reading informational text related to science.”  The paragraph following that one also focuses on “reading informational text.”

Science is not learned through reading.  Science is learned through observation, deduction and modeling.  That these components were not mentioned at all in the plan is quite worrisome.