Page 469 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

444 J.L. Atkinson

When students are placed in science classrooms where they are not expected to
engage in higher level thinking or complex experimentation because they will “never
be college-bound,” the expectations for these students are manifest many times in the
types of activities planned for them. As a result, these students lack an understanding
or appreciation for the application of science in their own lives, and educators puzzle
as to why they do not perform as well as their counterparts in advanced classes.
Tracking is not a phenomenon limited to secondary science. Students are tracked as
early as elementary school. Students who do not perform well in reading and math-
ematics are pulled from science and social studies classes to be remediated in order
to pass statewide standardized assessments. Again, the emphasis is on the economy
rather than equity as schools struggle to keep funding through test scores. Because
of decreasing exposure to science, these students through elementary and middle
school have different science experiences (Lynch 2000). As a result, when students
are tracked in secondary science, they continue to have a lack of quality science
teaching. The perception of students’ limited performances is not a statement of
individual merit; instead, deficiencies in the science curriculum and the limits
imposed by a lifetime of tracking is deemphasized or ignored.

Implications for the Future of Science Curricula

In order to prepare students as scientifically literate citizens, we should examine
several policies concerning the current ideals of science curricula. Consistency in
science teaching is needed. Science teaching in the early grades cannot continue to
be for a select group of students or limited exclusively to extra time leftover after
math and language arts instruction. Qualified teachers with strong science back-
grounds and understandings of the strategies, which help diverse students participate
as science learners, should be present throughout all grades. These things dissolve
the gap mentality.
Policies concerning tracking and curricula should be examined with regards to
race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Curricula decisions, which reinforce the
economic ideals of the United States will not create equity because the current
economic system depends on a stratified system of people to support different
classes of workers. Implicit in the class system are racial inequities, socioeconomic
class inequities, and gender inequities. These inequities are also evident in pay sala-
ries, job demographics, the worth of the “stay-at-home mom,” and the value of
indigenous knowledge. One national set of students is the most important goal of
education based upon standardized knowledge supported by science CRTs.
When the science curricula is not measured by CRTs and linked to graduation,
discussions concerning the standards can center on the application of diverse types
of knowledge and their integration with science standards. One might argue that
different forms of assessment are now needed so that students are not compared
across the state, but my response is that any evaluation model only evaluates the
central ideologies upon which the curricula is derived. Regardless of how standards