Quality science education is essential for every California student. It promotes students’ critical thinking and equips kids with the knowledge and skills that lead to improved outcomes across all subject areas. It also has the highest potential of narrowing the opportunity gap, by encouraging kids’ innate curiosity and making education more relevant to their lives.
Over the last few years, California has made progress toward improving science education by adopting updated standards, a new science framework and a corresponding assessment. However, there isn’t a placeholder in the state school accountability dashboard for the assessment results. Therefore, it’s not clear that science education is a key priority for districts.
This letter, calling on the State Board of Education to include a placeholder for the California Science Test on the state’s accountability dashboard, sent a strong message that science should be a priority.
