The rejection of the NGSS in Georgia: social covenants as contextual mitigating factors

This narrative case study focuses on one state’s (Georgia) interaction with and eventual rejection of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which led to the development of the Georgia Standards of Excellence for Science (GSES). We believe that the evolution of policy development, such as standards, should be a concern for all science educators, because we show how even before science teaching is begun, the standards themselves have been positioned by cultural, economic, historical and political influences. We use the analytical framework of contextual mitigating factors (CMFs) to unpack major influences in this decision. In this pursuit, it was particularly à propos in applying CMF analysis to map out the contextualized sociocultural landscapes and to consider how a series of synchronously operating and overlapping covenants contributed to the pathway of Georgia’s rejection of NGSS. This case study identifies tensions within American Dominance, American Opportunity, Classical Liberalism and Neoliberalism as national covenants, and Southern Conservatism and Southern Regionalism as regional covenants. This approach provides a conceptual gateway through which researchers and other stakeholders, such as policy makers, science teachers and science teacher educators, can use to understand the multitude of positional CMFs that frame the approaches to adoption or rejection of state or national science standards. In this case study, an implication is that when science standards are developed within the frameworks of national and regional covenants, an end objective is to establish policies that guarantee the right of Georgia, or other states, to mitigate federal control and interventionism. Another implication points to a tension between the notions of scientific literacy and scientific proficiency in the development of the GSES, and other science standards, and the impact on science teaching and learning.