Andreas Schleicher, who oversees PISA at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, told me that the test is designed to promote students’ sense of agency. He says it will be based in part on material that has long been covered in schools in countries including Japan and Canada.
Meanwhile, back home in the U.S., science educators are circulating the climate literacy guide as “samizdat” — the term for self-publication of banned books in the former Soviet Union. Colorado cites the guide in updated state science standards, currently under review. And the University of Washington added a new page featuring a copy of the guide to an existing online open educational resource called STEM Teaching Tools, which gets about 10,000 to 15,000 visitors a month.
Education consultant Deb Morrison, who worked on the STEM Teaching Tools resource, says they rushed to release it in time for the National Conference on Science Education in Philadelphia in March, where they held over a dozen sessions on the topic for science teachers from around the country.
“ I would say that educators in every state are teaching climate,” she said. “It may be framed to manage the sort of tensions that exist in different places, to be able to meet people where they’re at, but they’re still teaching climate in Florida, in Maine, in Mississippi, in Oregon, in Alabama.”
That said, Morrison said the removal of the guide from its dot.gov domain, not to mention the cancellation of basic government data collection on climate, poses a challenge not just to scientific knowledge, but to equity, justice and democracy.
“Now we’re voting based on opinion or pseudo-expertise in different spaces, and nobody’s actually learning and using evidence.”
For Schleicher, too, advancing climate literacy through PISA is a key part of a broader project to promote scientific knowledge as a bedrock of international cooperation. In a world where you can find entire YouTube channels dedicated to the proposition that the earth is flat, he said, “Science actually builds consensus among people on an evidence-based objective reality.” Without that, it’s hard to imagine a peaceful or prosperous future for anyone.
A note: This is my final climate and education column for The Hechinger Report with the support of This Is Planet Ed at the Aspen Institute. I’ve been contributing to this series since 2022 and have covered early education through workforce development, traditional and Indigenous knowledge, climate storytelling in children’s media and more. It’s been an honor and you can find my continued freelance coverage of these topics here at Hechinger, at Grist and at my weekly newsletter. You can also sign up for Hechinger’s climate change and education newsletter here.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at preston@hechingerreport.org, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or 212-870-8965.