Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClear Education on January 27, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
America needs new science standards. That’s why the National Association of Scholars and Freedom in Education published The Franklin Standards: Model K-12 State Science Standards. These standards are content-rich, rigorous, depoliticized, and should appeal to the broad majority of Americans who want their children truly to be ready for college, career, and informed citizenry. Better state science standards would allow us to improve curriculum frameworks, model lesson plans, teacher education, and teacher licensure.
We need the Franklin Standards because America has taken a false step in K-12 science education. Almost all state education departments have imposed state science standards drawing on sources such as the Next Generation Science Standards, which combine misguided pedagogical theory, low academic standards, politicized instruction, and training in activism. This has led to a significant knowledge gap among Americans, with many students graduating from our schools without the basics of scientific knowledge. America has too few scientists, engineers, and technicians—and the failure of our schools is becoming a national security risk, as America faces ever sharper scientific and technological rivalry from its peer competitor, China. American citizens who don’t go into scientific careers aren’t equipped to tell whether public policies that claim to be “scientific” are based on solid science. Americans must restore rigorous, depoliticized American science instruction if we are to ensure the liberty, prosperity, and security of the United States of America.
The Franklin Standards prepare America’s students for college and careers with comprehensive content knowledge in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Earth and Space Sciences, Technology and Engineering, and History of Science, as well as substantial mathematical content knowledge. It also prepares those not pursuing science as a career to better understand the fundamentals of science for use in their personal and public lives. It does so with sustained attention to the scientific method and the distinction between theory and fact. The Franklin Standards’ straightforward structure makes it easy for teachers to use and easy for parents to hold teachers accountable for how well they teach science. The Franklin Standards’ intensive content standards also facilitate reliable assessment, whether by state-level testing or tests by school districts and individual teachers.
But we can’t just improve science standards alone. We also need to reform Mathematics state standards. In 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative was introduced, and these have significantly influenced Mathematics standards in nearly every state in the nation. Common Core used federal money and regulations to impose radicalized Mathematics standards on every state. These standards based on the Common Core replace factual rigor with “inquiry-based learning”—questions without answers—and subordinate mathematical learning to political activism and the imperatives of “diversity” and “equity.” America must restore content-rich, unpoliticized state Mathematics standards.
This issue is truly a bi-partisan one. Between 2012 and 2023, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has recorded sustained drops in Mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): 13-year-olds Mathematics scores have declined from 285 to 271. In 2022, American students ranked 28th out of 37 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) mathematics examinations. Our performance is well below our spending–we are first in absolute spending and fifth in per capita spending within the OECD. Every state that relies on Common Core-inspired Mathematics standards is crippling students’ understanding of these subjects.
When looking even broader, it isn’t just science and mathematics that need to be reformed. All the different disciplines need to be reformed together. The Franklin Standards include dedicated standards for History of Science, because science and history (social studies) need to be taught together. We also include the expectation to write good science research papers because science also requires excellence in English Language Arts.
The National Association of Scholars, via the Civics Alliance, has published American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards. What we need as well are model Mathematics and English Language Arts standards. These four disciplines together are the core of American K-12 academic instruction. All four interrelate, all four must be reformed in tandem, and all four standards should be content-rich, rigorous, and de-politicized.
These four standards together should provide the public and policymakers a better alternative, which they can use to replace the politicized, mediocre Common Core (English Language Arts and Mathematics), National Council for the Social Studies’ College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, and Next Generation Science Standards.
Students are more or less prepared for class, and public K-12 teachers by their very nature have to teach to a very wide range of students. Rigorous standards should prepare teachers to teach the most prepared students—but teachers will know how to pick and choose sensibly from the topics we include when teaching less prepared students. Standards should give teachers maximum liberty to teach appropriately for their classes to ensure that less prepared students have the opportunity to understand the basics without political bias. This enables a productive citizenry.
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The Franklin Standards, as American Birthright, and standards that should be published in Mathematics and English Language Arts, should work as stand-alone models. States would be better off adopting an ensemble of reformed standards, but states and school districts should be free to adopt just one of these standards. Standards should offer models, not straitjackets.
America needs new science standards, America needs new mathematics standards. Every state or school district that wants a better model than bureaucratic mediocrity needs a Counter-Core of standards—in social studies and in science, in mathematics and in English language arts.
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This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
