Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on May 14, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Far too many students are entering higher education ill-equipped to handle the rigors of collegiate-level science classes, according to professors who say they’ve had to alter their curricula to adjust to the new normal.
What happened to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) brilliance of yesteryear, which put men on the moon and developed the atom bomb? Today, several science professors have said they are lucky if their students don’t have to take a remedial math class.
“Students seem to be coming to college relatively poorly prepared for … science education at the college level,” said J. Scott Turner, a retired biology professor who now serves as the director of science programs with the center-right National Association of Scholars (NAS).
The problem stems from a combination of factors, scholars have said, including the dumbing down of high school, equity education requirements, far-leftism in Schools of Education, which train teachers, and nationwide STEM standards that are the equivalent of the failed common core program.
But the Franklin Standards, proposed in 2024 by the National Association of Scholars and named in honor of Benjamin Franklin, are gaining ground and could help provide a solution to STEM education, scholars told the Fix.
[RELATED: America Needs New Science Standards]
Ill-prepared pupils
Today, the lack of preparation among some students entering college means even concepts that require a minimal understanding of algebra or calculus cannot be taught, said Randy Wayne, a professor of biology at Cornell University.
“If Cornell is one of the better educational institutions in the country, then we should be sounding the alarm for what’s happening everywhere,” said Wayne, a NAS member.
On paper, Wayne told the Fix, Cornell is selecting some of the top students from around the country, but once they arrive on campus, he said, it quickly becomes apparent they lack both the knowledge and learning capabilities possessed by students in the past.
As a result, he said, he and his colleagues at Cornell are probably only able to teach their students about 75 percent of what they did in previous decades.
Another major problem with contemporary science education is that “students aren’t taught enough content to be able to make decisions [about scientific claims] on their own” and instead learn to blindly accept authority and consensus, Wayne said.
The consequences of such trends were prominently on display during COVID-19 as people “were happy to ‘believe the science’ and never even thought about understanding the science,” he said.
Similar observations have been made by Maria Emelianenko, chair of the George Mason University math department, and Alex Small, chair of the physics and astronomy department at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
Identifying culprits
Given these trends, Turner told the Fix, he and his colleagues at the NAS decided to take a closer look at what’s going on in K-12 science education.
Among the most serious problems contributing to K-12 science education’s decline, they noted, were a general degradation of standards, loss of rigor, push for equity, and overemphasis on certain pedagogical approaches that may sound appealing in university lecture halls but prove inappropriate in K-12 classrooms.
Importantly, though, these problems did not emerge in a vacuum but are downstream of pedagogical theories dominant in schools of education, the manner in which K-12 teachers are trained, and the formal standards set for science education at the state level, according to the NAS assessment.
The group suggests that schools of education at universities increasingly elevate pedagogical theory over content knowledge when training would-be teachers. Furthermore, given colleges of education tend to be fairly liberal politically, Turner and his colleagues suggest, it is not uncommon for them to integrate left-leaning political ideology into curricula and emphasize the need to lower standards to ensure more students, especially those from putatively disadvantaged backgrounds, can smoothly advance from one grade to the next.
[RELATED: The Franklin Standards]
Meet the Common Core of STEM standards
One of the main culprits for these misguided approaches to education spreading from the university classrooms of education majors to the science classrooms of K-12 students are a set of highly influential science education standards known as the Next Generation Science Standards, or NGSS.
Released in 2013 as part of a joint effort by the National Academy of Sciences, Achieve, and multiple other organizations, the NGSS were intended to better prepare high school graduates for their college science courses and eventually careers in STEM fields.
According to Turner, however, the NGSS, although well-intentioned, were ultimately formulated by a fairly narrow group of individuals associated with colleges of education and teachers unions. The end product, he said, turned out to be so “tangled and steeped in pedagogical theory” that “the essence of science was lost.”
Wayne added the NGSS are deliberately content-poor as part of an equity-driven effort to ensure more students meet the expectations built into the standards and ultimately pass their K-12 science classes.
Multiple attempts via phone and email were made to contact the National Academies regarding these criticisms, however, the Fix did not receive a reply.
Jenny Sarna, Achieve’s former director of district support and the current director at NextGenScience, an organization which describes itself as aiming to “support educators with the implementation of rigorous science standards across the nation,” stated in an email to the Fix that state science standards are adopted “through public rigorous processes involving community input and feedback from experts in science and education to ensure the content is scientifically accurate and developmentally appropriate.”
Changes needed
The assessment by Turner and his colleagues, however, is that these processes have failed students. According to the National Science Teaching Association, the NGSS have been adopted by or informed the science standards of every state with the exception of Florida.
Even though education standards are set at the state level, Sadredin “Dean” Moosavi, a geologist at Riverland College in Minnesota who also served on the committee that developed the Franklin Standards, told the Fix it can be rather difficult for even conservative states to escape the influence of the NGSS, as well as the pedagogical theories dominant in university schools of education.
“The states themselves, when they go to make standards, will draw from the universities and teachers of their own states,” Moosavi said. “… The teachers that school districts hire are trained in university education programs.”
Even some scholars outside of the NAS question the Next Generation Science Standards, although they do not always agree with the NAS’s conclusions.
High school science teacher John Vellardito, for example, who has written critically of the NGSS’s failure to include several once basic biological concepts pertaining to immunology and infectious disease, stated in an email to the Fix, “I do not believe that a focus on equity, activism, and pedagogy over scientific content is responsible for the observed changes in STEM education (inc. NGSS.)”
“STEM reforms,” he wrote, “have been influenced by various agents acting in their own self-interest … academics and educational consultants require novelty, publishers of educational materials and services require revisions, and the assessment and technology sectors require new solutions in search of problems.”
[RELATED: Florida and NAS Forge New K-12 Standards to Expose Communism’s Dark History]
Finding solutions
Irrespective of the exact reason for the loss of content from American science education, Turner and his colleagues, at present, are seeking to remedy this and other problems with science education through an alternative set of science standards, the “Franklin Standards,” named in honor of Benjamin Franklin and released in 2024.
The Franklin Standards, Moosavi said, were intended to build from the best science standards from the 1980s through early 2000s and serve as a modernized, apolitical set that prioritizes core content while also making sure classroom activities are age-appropriate.
So far, their efforts have seen some success.
According to an email Wayne sent to the Fix in April, “Not only are the Franklin Standards being used to inform the Oklahoma Science Standards but multiple states, which account for more than 4 million students, are also looking at the Franklin Standards to inform their science standards.”
If the Franklin Standards get adopted more widely, Cornell Professor Wayne told the Fix, “I see the possibility that in-coming [college] students will have a deeper and broader knowledge of STEM and the necessary habits of learning.”
This might allow him to “go back to teaching the content I used to include in biology courses rather than the 75% I cover now,” he said.
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