Background on Standard 5
When the Board of Education approved the Tennessee Science Framework in 2009, including Standard 5: Biodiversity and Change, which focuses on evolutionary concepts, they did it in spite of widespread sentiments critical of teaching evolution. As noted in Chapter 2, opposition to evolution began as early as the first quarter of the 20th Century in Tennessee. It would be a gross misrepresentation to say that all Tennesseans reject evolutionary theory, but the issue nevertheless remains highly controversial. By one estimate, less than 24% of Tennesseans support the idea of teaching evolution without also tempering it with alternative explanations like creationism or Intelligent Design Theory (Berkman and Plutzer 2010).
Though the Science Framework is written by experts in the Department of Education rather than elected officials, the process is overseen by political actors and its results approved democratically. Both the Education Commissioner and the Board of Education are appointed by the governor, and all are subject to laws and decrees of the General Assembly, a body of elected representatives that makes laws for the state. None of these actors has an interest in attracting the ire of that proportion of the public opposed to evolution. Consider that, in his study of evolution standards in every state across the nation, Gibson found a significant correlation between emphasis on evolution in the standards and public opposition to evolution, measured by affiliations with evangelical denominations with commitments to scriptural inerrancy (Gibson 2004). Given the political realities in Tennessee, the emergence and expansion of a state science education standard dedicated to biological evolution in middle school grades requires some explanation. This chapter aims to provide such an explanation, based on interviews with the authors and a content analysis of publications consulted by these authors. The subsequent chapter will complete this account, by examining how opposition to evolution eventually surfaced and affected the outcome.
The story of Tennessee’s evolution standards begins at the national level with “standards- based education reform,” an education reform movement that began in 1983, after the
publication of A Nation at Risk, a research report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education that claimed that educational proficiency was falling for students across the United States (1983). Standards-based reform emphasizes education standards, to establish common expectations that all students should meet, and accountability, to ensure that students are actually meeting those expectations (Settlage and Meadows 2002). As part of standards-based reform, states adopted education standards and initiated standardized testing. When the No Child Left Behind Act was passed by U.S. Congress in 2001, nearly every state in the union, with the exception of Iowa, already had education standards for kindergarten through high school (Atkin and Black 2003). The Act not only required states to develop sets of education standards for the three main subject areas—math, language and science—and mandated testing, it also connected a school’s funding to test scores. If a school’s students test below proficiency on the standards for three consecutive years, they lose funding and may be taken over by the state.
In the state of Tennessee, the document that sets the standards for science education is called the Tennessee Science Framework. Tennessee’s State Board of Education, an executive body comprising governor-appointed board members that carry out policies authorized by the Tennessee General Assembly, adopts a new Science Framework every 6 years, corresponding with the schedule for schools to purchase new textbooks and other curriculum materials. The
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science textbooks are developed by publishers based on the Science Framework, so the state tries to ensure that the Framework is up-to-date before the textbook adoption process begins.
The Tennessee Science Framework is a special type of document. Only the introduction to the Framework is presented as prose-style text. The bulk of it is presented in table form. The framework is divided into sections, based on grade levels in kindergarten through eighth grade, and based on courses in ninth through twelfth grade. Each section for a grade level comprises a set of Standards, denoted by numbers. For example, Standard 5 is Biodiversity and Change over Time. The set of Standards for the eighth grade includes Standard 5, as well as Standard 9 (Matter) and Standard 12 (Forces of Nature) as well as two sets of "Embedded Standards," on Inquiry and Technology and Engineering.
Though No Child Left Behind mandates that states set science standards, it does not specify the content of those standards. States are permitted to develop this content on their own, though this process takes place against the backdrop of the discourse on scientific literacy.
Scientific literacy was introduced as a goal through two publications from the American
Association for the Advancement of Science: Science for All Americans (1990) and Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy (1993). According to the first of these publications, being scientifically literate consists in having the “understandings and ways of thinking essential for all citizens in a world shaped by science and technology” (AAAS 1990). Evidence that American students were not sufficiently literate in science was provided in the form of low U.S. test scores in science compared to other developed nations (AAAS 1990; see also Claeson et al. 1996).
Science for All Americans and Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy lay out the scientific knowledge and understandings deemed by its authors as most important, based on criteria including utility, contributions to social responsibility, philosophical value and importance to human history or pervasiveness in modern culture (AAAS 1990). One such idea was the Evolution of Life, which was included in Benchmarks as one of six major ideas necessary to understand the living environment.
Despite the fact that understanding evolution is only one of many scientific ideas
identified by Benchmarks as essential to participation in the modern world, it is often inflated to occupy a grander place in the measure of scientific literacy. To support this prominence, many scholars have invoked a quote from Theodore Dobzhansky that “nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution” (Dobzhansky 1973). This quote appears again and again in research articles on teaching evolution (Cummins, Demastes and Hafner 1994; Jackson et al. 1995; Moore 2007; Rudolph and Stewart 1998), not to mention editorials on the topic (Wiles 2010). It also was paraphrased by the authors of the science framework in interviews. The position is that, in order to properly teach biology without making it seem like a disconnected set of facts and concepts, it is necessary to teach evolution as an organizing principle that makes sense of everything else that is taught in biology.
While compelling as a quote, Dobzhansky’s words really only go so far in explaining how teaching and understanding evolution have become synecdoche for scientific literacy more generally. A more likely explanation comes from the fact that, more than any other major idea in modern science, evolution is the target of attack. In other words, the need to defend evolutionary theory is incentive to emphasize its importance. For example, the President of the Thomas B.
Fordham Foundation, an influential think tank in education policy, wrote in the foreword to a report published by the Foundation decrying opposition to the teaching of evolution:
Who cares? Everyone who is troubled by the weak scientific knowledge and skills with which most young Americans emerge from school should care. Everyone who is alarmed
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by the performance of U.S. students on international comparisons of science achievement should care. Everyone who believes that our country’s future vitality and prosperity depend to no small extent on our scientific leadership and our respect for science itself should care. As Paul Gross clearly explains, to the extent that science classes are consumed by matters other than science, our children will to that extent emerge from those classes without knowing science or respecting truth. (Gross 2000)
The implicit value in this passage is scientific literacy, once again measured in test scores and student knowledge of science, and it is undermined when evolution is not taught as truth. If it is the case that teaching evolution becomes most important when people oppose it, then educators have a special incentive to be sure it is taught in Tennessee, which has wrestled with the topic since before the infamous Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925 up to the present day.
The Development of Standard 5 in the 2009 Tennessee Science Framework
In 2007 a new Science Framework was developed in which coverage of evolution, previously reserved for high school Biology courses, was expanded into elementary and middle school grades based on the theory of “learning progressions.”45 The idea of learning progressions refers to a curriculum strategy whereby more complex concepts taught in later grades build upon simpler concepts introduced in earlier grades. The learning progression or “conceptual strand”
that corresponds with evolution in the Framework is Standard 5: Biodiversity and Change. The guiding question for this strand is: “How does natural selection explain how organisms have changed over time?”
Standard 5 is present from the Kindergarten science standards through the high school biology standards, though in elementary school grades students are mostly learning to notice differences and similarities among species, including species present in the fossil record that are no longer extant today. The concepts for Standard 5 are not brought together in a way that resembles evolutionary theory until Grade 8, though the extent to which that occurs is debatable.
To understand why, it is necessary to examine both how Standard 5 is written and how it is interpreted by teachers. The latter will be discussed in the Chapter 6. In this chapter and the next, we will consider the process of developing Standard 5.
I have attempted to reconstruct this process as completely as possible in order to demonstrate the fact that “what the standards say” is actually a very complicated question, considering notions of intent and agency. When processing the behavior of agents, we talk about intentions, stemming from beliefs and desires (Leslie 2000). Sperber’s epidemiological approach to representations likewise presumes an agent who intends to transmit an idea to others. How can we conceive of agency and intent in the establishment of policy such as the Science Framework?
Where do we locate the relevant beliefs and desires? In what way were the intentions of the individuals that work in the name of the state, such as the bureaucrats at the Tennessee Department of Education, relevant in this process? In order to answer these questions, I
examined multiple drafts of the 8th grade science standards from 2007 and interviewed several of the people involved in the process of their development. This account is far from complete, due to the fact that the interviews took place nearly three years after the Standards were developed.
45 According to the “User’s Guide to the Tennessee Science Curriculum Framework” (accessed from
http://www.tn.gov/education/standards/science/Users_guide.pdf on July 30, 2014) this was the first Framework based on the concept of learning progressions.
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Multiple testimony and comparison to documents helps to ensure accuracy, but some details were simply unavailable.
According to Linda Jordan, science coordinator for the Tennessee Department of Education who oversaw most of the process, the Tennessee Science Framework approved in 2007 was precipitated by two situations. First, the science standards were due for their six year revision. Second, Tennessee had entered the American Diploma Project, which required a substantial overhaul of all of the state’s education standards including the three major subject areas (Jordan, Aug 16, 2010).
The American Diploma Project is an initiative created by Achieve, Inc., a non-profit organization comprising governors and corporate leaders, dedicated to standards-based education reform46. The American Diploma Project established recommended standards for Mathematics and Language Arts, though not for Science. The Achieve organization would later be responsible for developing the Common CORE standards in Math and Language Arts, and the Next
Generation Science Standards, released in 2013. The American Diploma Project established minimum requirements for high school graduation that included three mathematics courses, four language arts courses, and three science courses, three and a half social-science courses and two years of a language other than English (ADP 2004).
The motivation for Tennessee officials to join the American Diploma Project was quite clearly economical. The guiding principle for the Project is to ensure that high school graduates have the skills needed by employers. This emphasis on employers is important because the educational overhaul that involved re-developing more “rigorous standards” in Math, Language Arts and Science was promoted publicly as a means of attracting jobs to the state. For example, articles in the Tennessean, the major newspaper in the capital, emphasized the importance of strong standards in order to attract hi-tech industries (e.g. Mielczarek 2008). At the Tennessee Science Teachers Association conference in 2010, a spokesperson from DuPont (a company with a presence in Middle Tennessee) endorsed the Diploma Project in his keynote address,
emphasizing the importance of rigorous standards for making Tennessee attractive to industry47. Similarly, a Powerpoint presentation available through the Department of Tennessee’s website described the American Diploma Project by emphasizing the role of corporate leaders in the Project and the aim of ensuring that graduating students are viable employees, which makes the state more competitive in terms of attracting jobs48. A portion of this Powerpoint was shown at a Rotary Club meeting at my East Tennessee field site, delivered by the Assistant Director of Schools in Fall of 2008,49 and it is likely that the same Powerpoint was shown in many more places throughout Tennessee.
The Yates Committees
Once the governor and his education commissioner initiated the education overhaul entailed by the Diploma Project, the task of revising the Framework was assigned to Dr. Sharon Yates, a special assistant to Keith Brewer, who was the Deputy Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Education at the time. I interviewed Dr. Yates in 2010 in her office on Peabody campus at Vanderbilt University, where she was serving as a literacy specialist and lecturer.
Before working at the Tennessee Department of Education, she worked for the US Department
46 http://www.achieve.org/our-board-directors
47 Field notes.
48 Accessed from http://www.tn.gov/sbe/TDP%201-23-08.pdf on July 29, 2013.
49 Field notes.
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of Education and the Ohio Department of Education. When she left the TDoE, she lectured at Lipscomb University briefly, and then assumed a lecturer post at Peabody Teacher’s College.
Yates’ role in developing the new standards was that of facilitator. She organized committees and persuaded the TDoE to provide funds for lunches and to offset costs to participating teachers. To organize the committees, she solicited resumes from teachers, principals, directors and higher education faculty, and selected them based on specialty in a subject area, experience writing standards, and ability to work with others. She also admitted a political element to the selection, stemming from pressure to follow the recommendations of certain school directors. She then created “teams” of teachers and specialists for each grade level.
These teams were created according to a process she described as “democratic,” whereby members were meant to represent various regions of the state and diversity in gender, race and ethnicity.
After producing drafts of the new standards, the committees were disbanded, and the drafts were turned over to the curriculum specialists at the Tennessee Department of Education, of which there are three, each corresponding to a subject area. The mathematics and language arts standards were discarded when they returned to the Department, but the science coordinator Linda Jordan claimed to have used most of the science standards developed by the Yates
committees. This decision by Jordan was described by Yates as “honorable,” considering the work that had been accomplished by so many teachers around the state. Jordan explained her adoption of this early draft in similar terms:
We wanted to honor everything we could that the teachers had done on those writing committees so we kept what we thought was congruent and comprehensive and made sense, and then added in the technology and engineering embedded standards as well as the inquiry embedded standards. (Jordan interview, August 17, 2010)
Given that Jordan described the initial draft from the Yates committees as an important base on which to build, it makes sense to examine that draft in as much detail as is available. Through sheer luck, I managed eventually to secure a copy of the draft for the 8th Grade standards.50 Before then, I was also able to interview Virginia Cooter, the chair of the committee in charge of middle school science for the Yates draft, in order to record her account of the process.
At the time I interviewed Cooter, she was a middle school science teacher in Greene County, Tennessee. She was active in several professional organizations, including the Tennessee Science Teachers Association (TSTA) and National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). She was effectively a local expert on earth science education, having served as
President of Tennessee Earth Science Teachers (TEST) in the past. She had participated actively in the Tennessee framework for several iterations, working with Jordan during the development of the 2001 Tennessee Science Framework, which was being replaced by the 2007 Framework.
According to Cooter, the older 2001 Framework was used as the starting point for the 2007 Framework. The committee chaired by Cooter started with the former Science Framework and sought to address specific problems, some of which were perceived by members of the committee, and others were identified by third parties. One problem, identified by a report on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted by the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education, was that the Tennessee Framework did not explicitly emphasize “inquiry” and did not include embedded technology and
50 Neither Linda Jordan, Sharon Yates, nor Virginia Cooter saved the initial drafts from the Yates committees, which is not surprising given the passage of time (nearly 3 years at that point). By apparent coincidence, more than a month after our interview, Linda Jordan found a copy attached to an old email and sent it to me.
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engineering standards. Another issue from that same NAEP report was that the Framework had been criticized as not being sufficiently rigorous, so the committee endeavored to improve the rigor by adjusting expectations from students to include more higher-order thinking. Finally, from Cooter’s perspective, certain grades, like Grade 8, had a disproportionate number of science standards, compared to other grades. These standards included two major topics in physical science (11. Forces and Motion, and 13. Interactions of Matter), one in earth science (9. Earth Features) and three in life science (2. Interactions between Living Things and Their
Environment, 4. Heredity and Reproduction, and 5. Diversity and Adaptations Among Living Things). She sought to reduce that number in order to make it more manageable for teachers, and to allow them to spend more time on particular topics.
The counterpart of the evolution standard in the 2001 Framework, was Standard 5:
Diversity and Adaptations Among Living Things, governed by the central theme “that living things have characteristics that enable them to survive in their environment.” While adaptations were clearly the focus in this standard, classification and relatedness among species were also included. For Grade 8, the Learning Expectation for this Standard 5 was that students should be able to “identify characteristics used by scientists to classify organisms into different categories.”
The draft of Grade 8 Standards produced by the middle school science team retained several of the Standards from the 2001 Framework, including the earth science standard and the two physical science standards. Reflecting the intention to address the problems mentioned above, the middle school science team deleted two of the life science standards: Heredity and Reproduction, and Diversity and Adaptations. They also added a standard for Inquiry.
The surviving life science standard on this early draft was focused on ecology and titled
“Interactions between Living Things and their Environment.” It comprised five components, each of which also had 1-3 State Performance Indicators (guidelines used to formulate test questions for each component on state standardized tests). I have included all five components below:
8.5.1 Predict organisms with similar needs may compete with one another for resources including food, space, water, air, and shelter.
8.5.2 Evaluate how organisms may interact with each other in several ways such as producer/consumer, predator/prey, or parasite/host relationships.
8.5.3 Verify that food provides fuel and building material for all organisms, which can be stored or consumed by another organism.
8.5.4 Analyze the eight major biomes of the world (fresh water, ocean, tundra, coniferous forest, deciduous forest, tropical rainforest, grassland, and desert).
8.5.5 Categorize the biotic and abiotic factors in the environment.
Based on these components, it is clear that evolution was absent from this early draft. In order to understand why, it is possible to scrutinize the draft alongside what is known about the committee. The committee itself comprised two higher education faculty and four middle school science teachers. We unfortunately have information only on Virginia Cooter. However, given her position as chair of the committee, along with her substantial experience with writing standards, it reasonable to expect that her influence was substantial. During the interview, she indicated specific interest in each of the themes represented in the standards that were retained.
First, Cooter demonstrated considerable interest in the earth sciences, reflected in sustained activity with the Tennessee Earth Science Teachers and substantial experience consulting on earth science education. In this light, retention of the earth science standard makes sense.