Leading Kids to Science

A study presented last week at the annual American Sociological Assn. convention found that American public schools are mediocre at teaching science because “subjects covered in one grade are often again covered in another grade, taking away time from new concepts” and keeping students from the “upward spirals in learning” seen in other countries. That supports what good teachers have known all long: If learning is to occur, the schools must believe in students’ capacity to learn.

California’s new state science standards are a big, welcome step toward embracing and encouraging that belief. Which is more than can be said about the “integrated science” curriculum now being implemented in the Los Angeles Unified School District and elsewhere in the state. Integrated science, a kind of instruction that imparts lessons through games, experiments and other “inquiry-based learning,” tries to keep students from being intimidated by scientific ideas or bored by endless rote memorization. Both are excellent goals, but the integrated science standards proposed last year by the California Commission on Academic Standards took them to an absurd extreme. Rejecting the notion that students should learn specific ideas, the standards instead urged the mastery of fuzzy low-level concepts like this sixth-grade item: “machines help make work easier.” Really.

Fortunately, a group of distinguished scientists, led by Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg, protested the commission’s proposal, and Gov. Pete Wilson wisely asked the group to devise a more substantive set of state science standards. Last month the Academic Standards Commission adopted Seaborg’s standards, which demand more than an awareness that machines can be helpful. Kindergartners, for instance, are expected to understand that water in open containers evaporates, second-graders to know that roots absorb water and nutrients and fifth-graders to fathom atoms and molecules.

The state’s substantive new science standards will encourage those “upward spirals” by giving students and teachers a clear sense of what knowledge is important. Los Angeles and other districts should adopt the standards, knowing that they possess something even more vital than knowledge: faith in students’ ability to learn.