Florida’s high school science program is “out of order”, according to the National Academy of Education. Is this a good time to fix it?

During a particularly difficult stretch in my son’s 9th grade biology class several years ago, we were all engaged in a struggle to memorize the steps in the Krebs Cycle, which is a series of chemical reactions that takes place in cells. When he could finally repeat all the steps reliably, I asked him what the Krebs Cycle does in cells. He shrugged his shoulders, and when I told him that the Krebs Cycle is a way that cells produce energy he stared at me blankly. Other than knowing that gasoline had something to do with energy, he didn’t know what energy was. And certainly cells don’t use gasoline.

Clearly, my son should have learned what energy was before being asked to memorize the steps in the Krebs Cycle. But Florida, like most other states, has institutionalized the idea that the first high school science class is biology, to be followed perhaps by chemistry. Then the most intrepid science-oriented students go on to a physics course, which is where students actually learn what energy is. A committee at the National Academy of Education gave this traditional science program some thought and released a white paper in 2009 saying, “This sequence is ‘out of order’ in scientific terms, however. In biology class, 9th graders are introduced to the complex molecules within cells and the structure of DNA even though they know little about atoms and next to nothing about the chemistry and physics that can help them make sense of these structures and their functions.”

I didn’t need the National Academy of Education to tell me this. I worked on Florida’s new science standards in 2007 and 2008 and focused on the middle school physical science standards. My goal in this work was to make sure that even students who managed to avoid taking a physics course in high school would learn in middle school the basics of forces, motion and energy. There was a bit of a struggle as I insisted that several traditional but superfluous topics like simple machines be dropped from the standards. In the end, I pretty much got what I wanted – middle school standards that I thought would assure that every student had a basic understanding of the basic science behind automobiles, airplanes, power plants and everything else.

But as the subsequent years have shown, I was hopelessly naïve. First, I saw physical science being minimized in the integrated middle school science courses that were recommended after the science standards process. Then, some middle school principals found they could bulk up their school grades by having their stronger students take the high school Biology 1 course (and the corresponding statewide end-of-course exam) instead of physical science. As a result, a middle school’s stronger students, the ones most likely to pursue careers in engineering and the physical sciences, didn’t take any physical science in some middle schools. Fortunately, that incentive has now been removed from the prescription for grading middle schools. There is no telling what obstacle to middle school physical science instruction will turn up next.

For now, middle school physical science instruction in Florida is in the best state it could be: the incentive to divert stronger students from physical science has been dropped, and the 8th grade Science FCAT, which is a nice assessment that includes physical science, remains a significant part of middle school grades. But what about high school? The situation at the high school level for physical science almost couldn’t be worse. The standard high school diploma requires biology and two other science classes. If a high school decided to follow the recommendation of the National Academy of Education and institute a physics-chemistry-biology standard science course sequence as has been done in Physics First schools around the nation, parents and students would be wondering why the science that the state says is most important – biology – is being left for last.

Furthermore, the state’s new “Scholar” diploma designation has science requirements that are notably mushy. To be eligible for the Scholar diploma, a student must pass the statewide Biology end-of-course exam and take “chemistry or physics” as well as another course that is as rigorous as chemistry and physics. Why wasn’t a simple biology-chemistry-physics requirement adopted for the Scholar designation? Only the legislators who negotiated the requirements in 2013 know for sure. (Still, the Scholar science situation isn’t as awful as the Scholar math requirement that includes Algebra 2 and either statistics or a course as rigorous as statistics – a student can earn a Scholar diploma without taking Precalculus)

To correct the science requirement for the standard high school diploma, Florida should do what Massachusetts has done – remove the preference for biology in the graduation law by simply requiring that students take three science courses. Massachusetts has a menu of science end-of-course exams that includes Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Technology/Engineering, and passing one of these could be a requirement for graduation, as it is in Massachusetts.

And the fix for the Scholar diploma is easy: require Biology-Chemistry-Physics plus one AP science course, with a passing score on one of the Massachusetts-style end-of-course exams. (And a requirement for Precalculus)

With the enthusiasm for science education in Florida’s K-12 schools at a low ebb among policy-makers (and you thought the public rhetoric about “STEM” meant that science is a priority!) perhaps there is an opportunity to make some major changes in the state’s science education approach. Maybe a proposal to adopt a Massachusetts-style high school science program would get some positive attention from Florida’s legislators. It’s worth a try.

Update, 2:00 pm Monday:  Appendix K of the Next Generation Science Standards document addresses the issue of high school science course ordering.  And it doesn’t advocate setting biology first.