WHAT IS DIFFERENT THIS TIME? THE NGSS, PRIOR EDUCATIONAL REFORM INITIATIVES, AND THOUGHTS ON AVERTING ANOTHER FAILED REFORM EFFORT

The NGSS envisions sweeping change in how K-12 science is taught but, past educational reform efforts have repeatedly failed to achieve lasting substantial positive change in educational outcomes. Like the 1996 National Science Education Standards (NSES), the NGSS promises to transform science teaching approaches in ways that build deeper understandings of bigger ideas, develop understandings and skills related to the nature and practice of science, and give the geosciences equal footing with life and physical sciences.

Evidence of sweeping changes in outcomes or classroom practice from the implementation of NSES are hard to find twenty years after its publication and broad acceptance. The change envisioned within NGSS is arguably much greater in scale than those envisioned in NSES. Curriculum and instruction are to be well-coordinated not only across the K-12 science curriculum, but also across the entirety of the school curriculum, especially to mathematics and the language arts.

Applications of engineering and technology are also placed on equal footing with the other science disciplines. Viewed collectively, along with geoscience’s recognition as a fundamental high school science, these changes are creating an unprecedented need for preservice and inservice teacher professional development far beyond the current system’s ability to deliver. While excellent preservice and inservice programming exists, it is the exception rather than the rule.

In short, achieving the vision of the NGSS is a very lift, and implementation strategies do not appear substantially different from those twenty years earlier. Given these realities, it seems unlikely that the goals of the NGSS will be satisfied.

All is not lost, however. The use of prospective hindsight - imagining that an event has already occurred and analyzing the imagined situations through “premortems” (developed by Klein) offers promise for averting yet another failure in educational reform. A small-scale version of a premortems is available at: http://bit.ly/NGSSpremortem.