Many States Omit Climate Education. These Teachers Are Trying to Slip It In.

by Winston Choi-Schagrin (DNYUZ/New York Times) In mid-October, just two weeks after Hurricane Ian struck her state, Bertha Vazquez asked her class of 7th 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, Ms. 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 Ms. Vazquez has taught for more than 30 years, and where her students are already seeing the dramatic impacts 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.

Around half of middle school science teachers either don’t cover the subject or spend less than 2 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.

It is clear that people want climate change to be taught. Around 80 percent of American parents think that schools should teach climate change, a sentiment shared by students.

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.

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, school districts and teachers to make those connections in their lessons.

But researchers have found that many teachers received little climate education themselves.

“The most crucial intervention that we have to make progress on is professional support for teachers,” said Frank Niepold, the senior climate education program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But he warns that this might be the hardest piece of the puzzle to solve.

Some states, including Washington, California, and Maine are turning to teacher training programs.

National science educators have lauded ClimeTime as one of the best efforts. The program receives several million dollars a year in state funding. Since 2018, it has trained 14,000 teachers, or more than a fifth of the teachers in Washington state.

According to teachers, one of the main challenges is a lack of good supplemental materials.

The Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network, an organization that provides free climate education materials, found that only 700 of the 30,000 free online materials they reviewed were accurate and suitable for use in schools.

“This is the topic of the century, and not just because of the potential disasters ahead,” she (Vazquez) said. “But because this is the future of the economy.” READ MORE