Any education endeavor should have a set of learning objectives (learning goals, performance expectations, etc.) which outline what exactly you want students to learn after having some educational experiences. For education run under government supervision, i.e. public elementary and secondary schools, standards act as those learning objectives. Exactly what those standards are will have large immediate implications for many students and teachers and have lasting effects on society; therefore, standard development should not be taken lightly.

Without standards, the educational experiences students have could be subject to the whims of stakeholders who have the power to alter those experiences to reinforce their own ideologies. For example, the attempts at removing evolution from science courses. Standards could help manage those educational experiences to provide equal opportunities to engage with science. Furthermore, improvement of standards would move those educational experiences towards more productive uses, meaning the time spent in class is more productive for our students, community, and society.

However, any educational experiences will always seek to reinforce a particular epistemology, which is reflected in the learning objectives. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are the current science standards used by twenty states and the District of Colombia. Within these standards, science is portrayed as apolitical, meaning the standards do not address the historical and political role science has played in our society. Without this acknowledgment, science will continue to reinforce neoliberal ideologies that serve the interests of industry (Morales-Doyle et al. 2019). 

A possible strategy to introduce the political nature of science within curriculum is to center instruction around phenomenon which include examples of current social injustice. This serves two purposes. First, by centering science instruction around phenomenon, science is more accurately represented as human endeavor situated in real world contexts. Secondly, science instruction would be more in tune with the interests and problems of our students, encouraging participation for the populations of students who historically have been pushed away from science as a career choice. This strategy can be used alongside current standards, providing an avenue for educators to alter their learning objectives which reflect needs and desires of communities, not just the professional science pipeline fueled by economic greed.

Science does not occur in a vacuum, so we must stop portraying it as such.

An existentialist in crisis,

JLS

References

Morales‐Doyle, D., Childress Price, T., & Chappell, M. J. (2019). Chemicals are contaminants too: Teaching appreciation and critique of science in the era of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Science Education, 103(6), 1347–1366. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21546