Rereading Science Standards: Exploring and Exploiting Contradictions in STEM Policy

• In Event: The Emerging Politics of STEM Education: Policy, Discourse, and Governance

Abstract

Standards and policy are often treated as coherent discourse. My analysis examines how the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS—The recently released U.S. science education standards) navigates a deep ambivalence around neoliberalism. The paper draws on discourse analysis (Bakhtin, 1990; Lemke, 1995) to examine how contradiction performs and is negotiated within policy The paper starts by examining how science education standards have historically been reactive documents, addressing perceived threats to the science establishment including creationism and ethical accountability in the 1990s version. I examine how the NGSS repeats that. I particularly look at how neoliberalism is framed as one of those threats. Reading the NGSS against Mirowski’s (2011) critique of how neoliberalism has degraded science, I show the ways that junk science, human capital logics, and market rationalities are challenged within this Standards document. However, at the same time, the NGSS accepts neoliberalism uncritically. I examine how the incorporation of engineering across the content, the use of design challenges, and a marginalization of sociology and history transform students into neoliberal subjects. Furthermore, the NGSS has to be read as a direct offspring of the market logics that has governed education policy since Ronald Reagan’s A Nation At Risk (Department of Health, 1983). The NGSS is organized towards’ students “college and career” (market) readiness as products for employer consumption. The paper concludes by analyzing the possibilities and limitations the NGSS provides/imposes for educators seeking to resist neoliberalism.

Author

• Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington - Tacoma