THOUGHTS ON WHY THE EARTH SCIENCE LITERACY PRINCIPLES HAVE NOT CONSPICUOUSLY CHANGED (AND PROBABLY WILL NOT CONSPICUOUSLY CHANGE) EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES: NEW USER-MANUALS DO NOT YIELD NEW SYSTEMS

If the goals of education and education reform are to make the citizenry wiser or more literate in a conspicuous way, reform efforts of the last several decades are either failures or so torturously slow in their successes that failure is a logical label. How long can we wait for the general public to be either geoscience literate or to behave as if they are? There is no conspicuous evidence that the populous is wiser or more literate about any aspect of science that is traceable to an educational innovation or reform of the last forty years.

Are the Earth Science Literacy Principles different? Why would they be? They, like the related sets of Earth systems literacy principles, follow the patterns of countless initiatives before them. They reflect a good overview of the discipline, were developed by caring, passionate and smart professionals working tirelessly to improve the outcomes of education, and they fail to learn lessons from past efforts within education or from successful efforts outside of education.

Key ideas:

• Reform efforts have not substantially improved educational outcomes in decades.
• We can learn from both the past failures and successful innovations in other areas why failure is routine and use those lessons to move forward more successfully.
• CZ Science, climate change, the effectiveness of teaching in the field and the “rainbow chart” that synthesizes literacy principles and ideas from the NGSS can all help in shaping efforts that are more likely to be successful in improving educational outcomes.
• And, yes, I’m talking to you when I suggest that the greatest obstacles to successful educational reform are largely the same as those that prevent appropriate responses to climate change. Most people, including most of the geoscience education community (and myself!) believe things to be true that are obviously false.

Successful innovations across a range of fields include common characteristics, such as they generally involve changes in infrastructure or technologies as a central part of the effort. The fundamental structure of schooling is remarkably similar to what it was over a century ago (unlike virtually every other aspect of our daily lives). Through efforts like the Literacy Principles and the NGSS, we have rewritten the user-manual without changing system infrastructure. This makes failure likely.