Page 38 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

SUCKED INTO THE CULTURE WAR
Greg Swift
Santa Fe, New Mexico
The most eye-opening year of my
adult life began innocently in late
2002, when my neighbor, Dr.
Steven Sanchez, who was the Director of
Curriculum, Instruction, and Learning
Technologies at the New Mexico
Department of Education, asked me to
help with revision of the “science stan-
dards” that specify what every student in New Mexico should know about science. My assigned role: Advise the Department about what scientific topics were important enough for inclusion, and make sure nothing obsolete or wrong got into the standards by mistake. That seemed simple enough. Within 12 months, however, I was engulfed in stressful conflict, which revolved around an interesting ques- tion—who or what determines the material that is taught in high-school science classes. Scientists? Teachers? Poll results?
Science standards
In the U.S., primary responsibility for education through the 12th grade lies at the state level. Each of the 50 states establishes “standards” for what every student should know, while each of the nation’s 15,000 school districts decides how its local “curriculum” will meet its own state’s standards. For example, New Mexico science standards1 require that every eighth-grade student should know that Earth has a magnetic field, but it is up to each district to decide whether that is taught with magnetism, Earth science, astronomy, all of the above, or in some other context. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 tied federal funding to students’ scores on stan- dardized tests based on each state’s standards. With so much money at stake, this law has had many effects, including the revision of science standards in most states beginning in 2002.
Like the standards for other subjects, the science stan- dards are a coordinated multi-dimensional matrix of sen- tences, indexed by discipline (e.g., physics), topic (e.g., ener- gy), grade level, and content or methodology of science. For example, one New Mexico standard says that every second- grade student should be able to
• “Describe how energy produces changes (e.g., heat melts ice, gas makes cars go uphill, electricity makes TV work).”
Important topics like energy are described with ever-increas- ing sophistication in later grade levels.
In New Mexico, like most states, science-standards revi- sion was coordinated by the state Department of Education, but the actual writing was done by teams of volunteers, most- ly teachers. We all love our own disciplines, and we wish more people would appreciate our favorite subjects, so it’s no surprise that this kind of volunteer-based process can drive standards to explode with detail and sophistication. If a biol- ogy teacher insists that chromosomal crossover during meio-
“...people have different ways of knowing things, and ... the scientific approach is only one of those ways...”
34 Acoustics Today, April 2011
sis deserves inclusion, then a physics teacher may insist that dispersion in wave propagation ought to be there, too. As our New Mexico process evolved, one of my roles became pruning away the exuberant growth of each early draft of the document, mindful that every standard—every sentence in this 40-
page document—would apply to all students, would have the force of law, would be incorporated in standardized tests, and would eventually compete for classroom time with other top- ics within science as well as important topics in other disci- plines such as civics and history. My pruning often consisted of collapsing one full standard into a parenthetical example of another standard. I also caught a mistake that someone had made in an astronomy standard. I felt like I was being useful. There were about 20 drafts in the course of the year, as our multi-dimensional matrix of standards took shape. We ended up covering acoustics in the early grades:
• second grade, “... sound is energy, made by vibrating objects, has pitch and loudness.”
• fourth grade, “...sound waves carry energy through materials...”
• eighth grade: “...vibrations of matter (e.g., sound, earthquakes, water waves) carry wave energy, includ- ing:
• -sound transmission through solids, liquids,
and gases
• -relationship of pitch and loudness of sound to
rate and distance (amplitude) of vibration.”
I was glad my New Mexico teammates believed that everyone should know that pitch is a rate and loudness is an amplitude. Fearful of my personal bias toward acoustics, I would have been reluctant to suggest adding anything about acoustics myself.
I also studied the science standards in other states, and expert assessments of them, to try to understand why New Mexico’s pre-2003 science standards were judged to be among the worst in the country and what we would have to do to make our new standards among the best. And I took note of the situation in Kansas, where controversy about how to teach evolution was making national news at the time. How could so much conflict and confusion arise about evo- lution? When I went to high school (a Catholic school, in the post-Sputnik era), evolution was taught simply and confi- dently, like any other aspect of science. Had something changed? I decided I should study this issue, too.
Evolutionary science, and an alternative
I found that evidence supporting evolution has only grown stronger in the years since I took high-school biology in 1967-68. It is the only scientific explanation for the histo- ry, diversity, and commonalities of life on Earth. Alternative