Policy and Organizational Dynamics of Science Education Reform: Prospects for the Next Generation Science Standards (Poster 1)

• In Event: System-Building for Improving Elementary Science Teaching and Learning: From the Classroom to the Central Office

Abstract

Purpose
Our purpose is to understand dynamics among education policy and local educational organizations in science education reform, with the aim of informing implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards.

Theoretical Framework
By design, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provide guidance to districts, schools, and teachers to be used flexibly in designing and enacting locally responsive approaches to “three dimensional” science learning (National Research Council, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2022). The role of districts and schools is especially important when individual teachers’ preparation, knowledge, and capabilities are not sufficient to understand and operationalize the instructional ambitions of the NGSS.

The preceding would not appear to bode well for the NGSS. By design, the NGSS play directly into decades-long inattention in science education research to the role of districts and schools in improving science instruction and learning (Chang et al., 2010; Odden et al., 2021). They also play directly into a well-established research narrative about policy/organization dynamics: Any new guidance for instruction further fragments already incoherent policy environments, resulting both in commensurate fragmentation and incoherence in districts and schools and in a proclivity to buffer instruction from environmental influence (Authors, 1992; Meyer & Rowan, 1978).

Synthesizing historical and contemporary research, we have constructed a counter-narrative and associated analytic framework suggesting more order in policy/organizational dynamics than commonly recognized: specifically, educational access, quality, and equity as enduring policy priorities; an accumulation of policy logics for advancing those priorities (what we call “resource-forward”, “practice-forward”, and “empowerment-forward” logics); and the evolution of local education enterprises from school systems to education systems to learning systems in response (Authors, 2022).

Modes of Inquiry
This study uses the preceding framework to structure a review of the historical and contemporary literatures on science education reform, with the aim of exploring its usefulness in considering prospects for the implementation of the NGSS.

Data/Analysis
We began with a systematic search of peer reviewed research on policy/organizational dynamics from the 1990s to the present, only to discover the gap cited above. We continued by identifying leading historical accounts of science education reform in books and handbook chapters, and we used a “snowball” approach to identify additional sources using citations and references. We then constructed a chronological timeline of policy/organizational dynamics structured by the preceding analytical framework.

Findings
Our analysis suggests patterns in science education reform that parallel patterns suggested by our framework:
• Access, quality, and equity as enduring policy priorities.
• The accumulation of resource-forward, practice-forward, and empowerment-forward policy logics.
• The evolution of local education enterprises as school, education, and learning systems.
Yet our analysis also suggests that these patterns have emerged and are evolving more slowly in science than in English/language arts and mathematics, and that they are complicated by post-World War II policy initiatives that have privileged extra-system networks (not districts and schools) as organizations bridging policy and practice.

Significance
These findings fill a gap in science education research by providing novel perspective on policy/organizational dynamics that have immediate implications for the implementation of the NGSS.

Author

• Donald J. Peurach, University of Michigan