Jack Krebs website: www.sunflower.com/~jkrebs
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is a respected conservative educational research institution. Recently the Fordham Foundation issued the report, "State of the State Standards 2000", in which they evaluated the curricular standards of all 50 states in all core curricular areas. The entire report can be obtained at http://www.edexcellence.net.
The Kansas Science Standards got an F. Kansas's score was by far the worst in the nation. The Kansas Science Standards received only 9 out of 100 points, compared to the next worse score which was 39. In all, nine states received A's, 10 states B's, 6 states C's,9 states D's, and 12 states received F's.
The standards were evaluated on 25 criteria divided into 5 main categories.
Category Points Possible A Purpose, expectations, and
audience B Organization 4 C Coverage and Content D Quality E Negatives Total
A complete description of each criteria, and Kansas's score on each, can be seen here. Criteria
In addition, the leader of the science standards evaluation team, Dr. Lawrence S.Lerner, wrote a narrative summary about the Kansas Science Standards, which can be read in its entirety here. Narrative
This summary said, in part "The Kansas standards have been much in the news of late, and with good reason. A very detailed Kansas Science Education Standards, Fifth Working Draft (June 1999) was the fruit of a year's labor by a committee of highly qualified scientists, teachers from both public and Catholic schools, and expert consultants. The resulting document, about 100 pages long, would have attained one of the highest ratings among the state standards reviewed here. Its special strength lay in the way it tied together individual standards with brief but clear explications of the underlying theory and methodology.
As is now widely known, however, the State Board of Education gutted the document, removing almost every reference to the theoretical backbones of the sciences having historical content - astronomy, geology, and biology - and replacing some of the material with nonsense of a pseudoscientific bent. . . .
There is much ... ignorant mischief. Worse, it is not limited to biological evolution, as is almost universally true in other state standards of this genre. Rather, as noted above, there is a sweeping excision of all references to evolution in the universe as a whole, in the solar system, and on Earth. By means of these cuts, the Kansas State Board of Education has reduced biology to natural history, geology to rock collecting, and astronomy to stargazing.
The direct damage affects two-thirds of the standard physical science-life science-Earth/space science curriculum. But the damage extends to the non-historical sciences in a more subtle way. Teaching students that most sciences lack a theoretical backbone denigrates the significance of theory in physics and chemistry as well.
The Kansas State Education Standards in science are a disservice and an insult to the young people of Kansas. Dorothy went from Kansas to Oz seeking wonders and there found empty pseudoscience. She had the good sense to return to Kansas. Sadly, the State Board of Education seems to wish to issue a one-way ticket to all the state's children."