Spurned Nobelists Appeal Science Standards Rejection

One of the Nobel Prize winners co-discovered more than 10 chemical elements. Another is a Harvard professor who studies the behavior of molecules. And the third was lauded by the Nobel committee as “one of the most creative research workers of our age.”

Glenn T. Seaborg, Dudley R. Herschbach and Henry Taube all won science’s top honor for their work in chemistry. But long before that, two went to California public schools. And all worry that today’s schools are not doing an acceptable job of preparing students to follow in their footsteps.

So all three joined with more than 30 scientists and teachers to volunteer to write “standards” for what California students should know in science.

They offered to do it for free.

But the state commission responsible for coming up with the standards turned them down flat. Instead, it gave the job to a group based at Cal State San Bernardino--for $178,000.

Most of that group’s principal members are educators, not scientists. They earlier helped write standards already used in some schools--standards viewed by the scientists as “dumbed-down.”

Officials of the state Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards said they opted for the San Bernardino group earlier this month because its members had more experience writing standards to guide instruction from kindergarten through high schools. The scientists, they said, had great resumes but were vague about how they would go about the work.

“They wouldn’t know a classroom if you put it in front of them,” said Judy Codding, a member of the commission appointed to come up with the state’s first academic standards not only in science but in reading, language arts, math, history and social science.

The dismissal, however, has enraged the scientists, who last week filed a formal appeal of the process.

As they see it, it’s more than a choice between two groups or even a matter of cost or who has Nobel prizes. It’s a choice between competing philosophies of how science should be taught in American schools--similar to the battle being fought over math education.

How much can you demand of children in the MTV age without turning them off? And at what point, in trying to make subjects appealing, do you lose real understanding of the great--but difficult--discoveries of mankind?

The best-known member of the scientists volunteering to write California’s science standards is Seaborg, 87, a former chancellor of UC Berkeley. He has long been a leading voice warning about the sad state of America’s public schools, having co-chaired the panel that wrote the landmark 1983 report “A Nation at Risk.”

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In explaining his participation in the Associated Scientists group, Seaborg argued that schools have gotten even worse since then--and put part of the blame on attempts to broaden the appeal of science without retaining its rigor.

“Educational content is continually diluted in a failed effort to produce palatable bits of information for progressively less skilled students,” Seaborg wrote in a letter included in the scientists’ proposal to the state. “It is essential that we take a stand and insist on educational standards with greater content. We, as scientists, have a moral obligation to help stem the tide of mediocrity by putting our understanding of scientific principles and knowledge at the service of our children.”

The other side--epitomized by the San Bernardino-based Institute for Science--is at the forefront of efforts to reform science education by making it less abstract, less about H2O and more about water.

Largely composed of education professors and teachers, this group believes that science classes have focused too much on memorizing terms, laws and formulas and not enough on hands-on demonstrations, observation and understanding of the physical world.

“When reformers see standards that have all those [scientific] terms down to the lowest grade level, they think you’ll be teaching kids to memorize the First Law of Thermodynamics and the result is the kids can answer a multiple-choice question but they don’t understand it,” said Roland Otto, a nuclear physicist who is a key member of the San Bernardino reform group.

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Scientific concepts “tend to be very difficult for kids to grasp . . . [so] we’re leaving all these kids who don’t get it behind,” said Otto, who is in charge of education programs at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory--where he was recruited by Seaborg, an associate director.

Science now, Otto said, is too elitist. Too few poor and minority students stick with it. And too many students give up and wind up being scientifically illiterate.

But many in Seaborg’s rival Associated Scientists group believe the essentials of their fields are being discarded in an attempt to make classes attractive for a wide range of students. They worry, for instance, that children won’t be taught such basics as how all substances are made up of molecules, and that molecules are made up of atoms. Instead, the reformers would teach children that “big things are made up of small things,” said Stan Metzenberg, a biologist at Cal State Northridge, who brought together the scientists to counter the influence of what he saw as well-meaning but misguided educators.

“It’s truly regrettable, but individuals who have never taken an upper division college science course are often entrusted with the job of defining the ‘content’ of science for the public schools, and that leads to mediocre and ‘dumbed down’ curricula,” Metzenberg wrote in his letter recruiting scientists to participate in the standards-writing project.

In defending the rejection of Metzenberg’s proposal, Scott Hill, the executive director of the state standards commission, noted that the San Bernardino group also has Nobel laureates who will review its work--although none will be directly involved.

In addition to Otto, its leaders are Bonnie Brunkhorst, an earth scientist in the education department at Cal State San Bernardino; Dorothy Terman, the science coordinator for the Irvine Unified School District; and Tom Smithson, a Cal State Sacramento education professor.

“The big difference was that one group had extensive experience writing achievement standards for science and one did not,” Hill said. In addition, Metzenberg’s group did not submit a detailed work plan, he said, although the criteria for the standards-writing contract did not mention a need for such a plan.

The Sacramento-based commission earlier hired consultants to help it write standards for a range of other subjects. The state Board of Education, which has the final say over the standards, approved the document covering reading and language arts last week. Next month, the board will decide on math standards, which have prompted a bitter battle, as well.

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Math reformers downplay memorization, believing it does not lead to true understanding--or enjoyment. They believe in having children try to figure out the Pythagorean Theorem on their own, for instance, rather than have a teacher explain that basic rule of trigonometry. As in the science debate, that approach is ridiculed by a rival, traditionalist camp, which complains that the new approach leaves children unable to figure out simple percentages without a calculator.

Standards in the other fields, including science, are to be completed by next fall. Statewide tests then will be created to monitor how well students are measuring up to them.

California’s decisions are expected to influence schools across the country in part because the state is the nation’s largest market for textbooks, prompting publishers to incorporate the new standards in revised editions sold everywhere.

Codding, a former Pasadena high school principal who sits on the standards commission, said it was not hard to pick the San Bernardino group as the consultant for the science guidelines. Though the group that included the three Nobel Prize winners had “an impressive collection of resumes,” it did not have a game plan or experience writing classroom standards, she said.

Metzenberg doesn’t accept that and asked the state Department of General Services to reverse the decision on grounds that the commission failed to evaluate the scientists’ proposal fairly.

He noted that his team includes James Dyke, who oversaw the development of highly regarded science standards for the state of Virginia as well as scientists who have worked on similar documents in Massachusetts, South Dakota and for the National Academy of Sciences. The group also includes master teachers who have won local and national awards.

But his most powerful ammunition remains the pleas of the scientists he recruited to lend their expertise to elementary science instruction.

Taube, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his work on the behavior of electrons in metals, is a retired Stanford professor. “While it is true that our schools face increasing social challenges, there is no excuse for offering only ‘watered-down’ science,” he wrote in a letter attached to the group’s proposal.

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Seaborg, who attended high school in Watts, was more personal in explaining his involvement, recalling how he was inspired to pursue a career in science by a teacher there. He then earned degrees at UCLA and UC Berkeley, worked on the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atomic bomb, and pursued his research on uranium-related elements--the work that earned him and Edwin M. McMillan the 1951 Nobel Prize.

Still an active researcher, Seaborg committed himself to put in at least 10 days helping write chemistry standards.

Herschbach, who along with Seaborg is a co-director of the group, won his Nobel in 1986 and has been deeply involved in K-12 education. He worked on the science standards developed by the National Academy of Sciences, where he is an advisor to the Office of Public Understanding of Science.

In his letter explaining his involvement, he said his interest in improving the quality of K-12 education was spurred by the role a teacher in San Jose played in his life after he entered high school there in 1946. “Nobody in my family even knew anyone who had gone to college,” he wrote. “But I was fortunate to grow up in California . . . at a time when the public enthusiasm for education was intense.”

His teachers, he added, “instilled in their students a profound respect for the values they had fought for and insisted on commensurate standards.”

Otto said he understands the concerns of the scientists. They worry “that we are not serving those kids who are like them [who] got it the first time” and who went on to college and excelled.

He said he also understands why many fellow scientists think that the efforts of the reformers seems more like “science appreciation” than true science.

“It’s very hard to find a middle ground because it is so politicized,” he said. “I don’t know the answer to that tension.”

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Draft Science Standards

While the California Commission on Academic Content and Performance Standards only this month hired San Bernardino-based consultants to help it craft final science standards for the state’s schools, the consulting group--the Institute for Science--already is working on draft standards for various areas of science. Here are some samples for different grade levels:

Life Science

* Grades K-2: Every student demonstrates understanding that living things are made of smaller parts.

* Grades 6-8: Every student demonstrates understanding that most . . . living things have tissues, organs and organ systems that are specialized to perform life functions such as digestion, respiration.

Physical Science

* Grades 6-8: Every student demonstrates ability to recognize relationships between mass, volume and density. Students recognize the difference between mass and weight.

* Grades 9-12: Every student demonstrates understanding of the differences in the arrangement and order or disorder of atoms in the solid, liquid, gas and plasma states.

Technology, Science and Society

* Grades 3-5: Every student demonstrates ability to compare the ways that different societies meet the same needs through time.

* Grades 6-8: Every student demonstrates understanding that technological systems with many components operate in our society to meet our needs.

Source: California Draft Science Standards