What do America’s middle schools teach about climate change? Not very much
In mid-october, just two weeks after Hurricane Ian struck her state, Bertha Vazquez asked her class of seventh graders to go online and search for information about climate change. Specifically, she tasked them to find sites that cast doubt on its human causes and who paid for them.
It was a sophisticated exercise for the 12-year-olds, Vazquez said, teaching them to discern climate facts from a mass of online disinformation. But she also thought it an important capstone to the end of two weeks she dedicates to teaching her Miami students about climate change, possible solutions and the barriers to progress.
“I’m really passionate about this issue,” she said. “I have to find a way to sneak it in.”
That’s because in Florida, where Vazquez has taught for more than 30 years, and where her students are already seeing the dramatic effects of a warming planet, the words “climate change” do not appear in the state’s middle or elementary school education standards.
Climate change is set to transform where students can live and what jobs they’ll do as adults. And yet, despite being one of the most important issues for young people, it appears only minimally in many state middle school science standards nationwide. Florida does not include the topic and Texas dedicates three bullet points to climate change in its 27 pages of standards. More than 40 states have adopted standards that include just one explicit reference to climate change.
“Middle school is where these kids are starting to get their moral compass and to back that compass up with logic,” said Michael Padilla, a professor emeritus at Clemson University and a former president of the National Science Teachers Association. “So middle school is a classic opportunity to have more focus on climate change.”
For those who do receive formal instruction on climate change, it will most likely happen in middle school science classrooms. But many middle school standards don’t explicitly mention climate change, so it falls largely on teachers and individual school districts to find ways to integrate it into lessons, often working against the dual hurdles of limited time and inadequate support.
Vazquez makes the state’s requirement that she teach energy transfer an opportunity to talk about how wind turbines work. The ecology requirement becomes a chance to discuss the consequences of deforestation.
But her commitment to the subject is not representative of how climate change is taught around the country. Around half of middle school science teachers either don’t cover the subject or spend less than two hours a year on it, according to a survey by the National Center for Science Education.
That’s hardly enough time to teach the essentials, said Glenn Branch, the center’s deputy director. They need to learn, at the very least, the fundamentals of climate science, including the role humans play, the consequences of a changing climate, as well as solutions.
Over the course of a year, a middle school science class can expect to cover everything from photosynthesis to the electromagnetic spectrum, all in 180 days.
The general topics are dictated by educational standards, the greatest mechanism by which a state can influence what children learn and teachers spend time on.
A decade ago, 26 states and several groups representing teachers and scientists unveiled the Next Generation Science Standards. Since then 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the standards or similar ones.
But at the middle school level, even the Next Generation standards include only one standard out of about 60 that explicitly mentions climate change. An analysis by researchers at the University of Maryland found that 17 other standards have a connection to climate change, but leave it up to states, districts and teachers to make those connections in their lessons.
Still, some of the most populous states continue to write their own and a review of those standards found that climate change doesn’t feature as prominently. In some cases, this is because the standards haven’t been updated, Branch said. States typically review them every 10 years or so, but Florida’s current standards were adopted in 2008.
In other cases, though, climate change’s place in standards is still under debate.