COLUMN: Teachers, states stepping up to keep climate change education alive as federal government defunds it
This past fall, at an event in New York City's National Museum of the American Indian, a packed room of educators and federal employees applauded the release of a document titled "Climate Literacy: Essential Principles for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change."
The 52-page document, released at Climate Week NYC, laid out principles for improving young people's understanding of the science, skills and aptitudes required to address this fast-moving global challenge - including "hope" and "urgency." Frank Niepold of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) told The Hechinger Report at the time that he hoped it would be widely adopted by states and even internationally. "We're not just talking to classroom teachers," he said. "This is for every kind of educator, every kind of communicator and all the decision makers."
In April, the Trump administration defunded the lead federal program that put out the guide, the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Many of the other agencies that worked on it, including NOAA, have also been decimated by staffing cuts. And the guide itself has been taken down from its government URL, leaving nothing but an error message.
That same week, on April 8, the Department of Commerce argued in a press release announcing further cuts that federally funded climate research has promoted "exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as 'climate anxiety,' which has increased significantly among America's youth." The agency, which houses NOAA, said it would no longer fund educational initiatives for K-12 students.
Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
Youth climate anxiety is real. But it's likely not coming from knowing too much. In fact, climate anxiety coexists with widespread climate ignorance among America's students. That's according to a new national survey of teenagers released in April by EdWeek and the Aspen Institute's This Is Planet Ed (where, disclosure, I'm an adviser):
Just 12 percent of teens feel they know "a lot" about the causes of climate change.
Only 54 percent of teens correctly identified greenhouse gas emissions from human activity as the biggest contributor to climate change.
Only 42 percent of teens recognize that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. Meanwhile, just over half, a majority, wrongly believe that scientists are divided 50-50 on the human role in climate change. This suggests a worryingly high level of exposure to climate denial and disinformation.
51 percent wrongly thought climate change was directly damaging the ozone layer.
57 percent of teens thought recycling would have a "large impact" on climate change, making it the most popular option. (In reality, according to the organization Drawdown, recycling is in the middle of the pack as far as climate solutions go, far behind ideas like reducing food waste or increasing solar power generation).
Related: Education that convinces kids the world isn't doomed
As the U.S. government steps back, and American teens struggle to master the basics, other countries are forging ahead. The PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), the prestigious international "report card" program, announced last fall that it will develop a new measure of climate literacy, to be administered as part of the 2029 test.
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.
Related: Want teachers to teach climate change? You've got to train them
" 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.
This story about climate anxiety was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The post COLUMN: Teachers, states stepping up to keep climate change education alive as federal government defunds it appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
26 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump Plan to Kill Dozens of NASA Missions Threatens US Space Supremacy
(Bloomberg) -- NASA's car-sized Perseverance rover has been roaming the surface of Mars for four years, drilling into the alien soil to collect dirt it places in tubes and leaves on the ground. Shuttered NY College Has Alumni Fighting Over Its Future Trump's Military Parade Has Washington Bracing for Tanks and Weaponry NYC Renters Brace for Price Hikes After Broker-Fee Ban NY Long Island Rail Service Resumes After Grand Central Fire Do World's Fairs Still Matter? Engineers designed Perseverance to be the first step in the agency's exploration of the Red Planet. In the future, more robotic spacecraft would arrive to sweep up the capsules and rocket them back to Earth, where scientists could look for signs that Mars once was, or is, a world with life. The wait for answers may be about to get longer. President Donald Trump's proposed 2026 budget for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration would cancel the planned follow-on mission, potentially abandoning the tubes for decades to Martian dust storms. The White House is calling for a roughly 50% cut to NASA's science spending to $3.9 billion, part of an overall pullback that would deliver the lowest funding level in the agency's history and kill more more than 40 NASA science missions and projects, according to detailed plans released last month. The Trump administration has also left the agency without a permanent leader and without a vision for how America's civilian space policy is going to work with US allies and compete with China and other rivals. The cuts would follow a shift in how the American public thinks about space. NASA has long enjoyed a unique place in US culture, with its exploits celebrated by movies, theme parks and merchandise — but companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX have begun to capture more attention. For decades, NASA's scientific undertakings have provided critical groundwork for researchers seeking to understand the structure of the universe, study how planets form and hunt for evidence that life might exist beyond Earth. Pictures from NASA craft like the Hubble Space Telescope and the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope have inspired and delighted millions. Now, the agency's position at the vanguard of discovery is facing foreclosure. Among the other programs set to lose funding are a craft already on its way to rendezvous with an asteroid that's expected to pass close to Earth in 2029, and multiple efforts to map and explore the acidic clouds of Venus. Researchers worry that abandoning missions would mean investments made by earlier generations might be lost or forgotten. 'Once you launch and you're operating, then all those costs are behind you, and it's relatively inexpensive to just keep the missions going,' said Amanda Hendrix, the chief executive officer of the Planetary Science Institute, a nonprofit research organization. 'So I'm very concerned about these operating missions that are still producing excellent and really important science data.' The Trump administration's narrower vision for NASA comes as it is seeking to reduce waste and jobs in the US government. Critics have faulted NASA over sluggish management of key programs, spiraling costs and delays. Still, the administration is eager to pour more money into putting people in space. It wants to use $7 billion of the $18.8 billion it would allocate to NASA overall to ramp up efforts to return people to the moon, and invest $1 billion more in sending people to Mars. 'This is a NASA that would be primarily human spaceflight focused,' Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for space science and exploration, said of the proposed changes. 'This is a NASA that would say, 'The universe is primarily the moon and Mars,' and basically step away from everything else.' There are signs that the administration's proposed cutbacks won't satisfy lawmakers who view space as vital to US interests. Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who leads a committee that oversees NASA, has proposed legislation that would would provide nearly $10 billion to the agency. 'American dominance in space is a national security imperative,' Cruz said in a statement to Bloomberg. 'The Commerce Committee's bill carefully invests in beating China to the Moon and Mars — while respecting every taxpayer dollar. It's rocket fuel for the commercial space companies and NASA that are working to keep America ahead of China in the Space Race.' As Trump's spending proposal moves through Congress, NASA has been left without a strong leader who can press its case after the president withdrew his nomination of billionaire commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman to run the agency. In a recent interview on the All-In Podcast, Isaacman appeared to suggest Trump pulled his nomination because of his close ties to Musk, who had a public falling out with the president. Trump threatened to cancel SpaceX's government contracts amid the row, but has since backed down. 'Stopping Jared from becoming confirmed is only going to hurt NASA's ability to push back on budget cuts,' Jim Muncy, a space consultant and lobbyist with PoliSpace, said before Isaacman's nomination was pulled. Spaceflight Shift For decades, NASA handled every step of launching rockets, probes and people into space, from developing, building and launching vehicles, to running missions. Only the government had the resources and the capacity to shoulder the risks without returning a profit. That all changed in recent years with the emergence of a vibrant US space industry dominated by wealthy entrepreneurs with a passion for spaceflight and the financial wherewithal to withstand repeated failure. Over time, NASA has ceded more design, development and production work to those companies. SpaceX is carrying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, and sending probes into deep space from a rented launchpad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. After helping to spur the development of SpaceX hardware, NASA is now one of the company's biggest customers. 'This has kind of been the tension with the rise of commercial space,' said Mike French, a consultant for the Space Policy Group. 'NASA has gone from 'We're operating these things; we're building these things' to 'We've gotten really good at buying these things.'' During Trump's presidency, NASA's transformation into an incubator for private industry is likely to gain speed. Throughout its budget proposal, the White House calls for mimicking past programs that have leaned more on outsourcing to the private sector. 'With a leaner budget across all of government, we are all taking a closer look at how we work, where we invest, and how we adjust our methods to accomplish our mission,' NASA's acting administrator, Janet Petro, wrote in a message accompanying the plan. 'At NASA, that means placing a renewed emphasis on human spaceflight, increasing investments in a sustainable plan to return to the Moon for long-term human exploration and accelerating efforts to send American astronauts to Mars.' NASA declined to comment beyond Petro's statement. NASA contracts remain one of the most significant and steady sources of funding for the space industry, which has allowed the agency to set the direction for many businesses. But that balance of power is shifting, and cuts to NASA's funding could cause its leadership to fade. 'NASA would, in a sense, define access and define the culture of spaceflight and define the ambitions of spaceflight,' Dreier said. 'Now, they have competitors for that, and frankly, some of their competitors are laying out more ambitious programs.' Challenging Missions While NASA has evolved into a technical adviser and financial backer for space companies, pure science has remained part of its mission. NASA's transition to more commercial partnerships was started, in part, to free up money to spend on exotic, challenging missions with no obvious near-term commercial rewards. Pulling back is likely to have consequences. Trump's broader push to curtail funding for science — the administration has choked off money for medical, climate and other research — risks eroding an important source of American soft power. After the end of the Cold War-era space race, NASA became a vessel for international cooperation, proving countries with lofty goals can work together. Many of the NASA missions Trump has proposed canceling or pulling away from entailed collaboration with European allies. The prospect of reduced funding is also causing worry about agency talent. Already, NASA is competing with the private space industry for engineers. Shutting down missions could push agency scientists to seek other opportunities. 'Folks are very worried about what they're going to do now with their lives, and where they're going to go,' said Hendrix, the Planetary Science Institute's CEO. The long-term outlook for NASA is difficult to discern. In the coming years, it is expected to continue its Artemis moon program, and start a new program for human exploration of Mars, with commercial companies at the forefront. But the scientific ambitions that long helped define NASA appear likely to become more limited. 'If we elect to say we no longer want to understand our origins, or we no longer want to challenge ourselves to see if there's life out in the cosmos, that is the equivalent of turning our heads down and burying ourselves in our cell phones when we're standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon,' said The Planetary Society's Dreier. 'We miss something more profound and big and deep that we otherwise have no access to in our modern society.' New Grads Join Worst Entry-Level Job Market in Years American Mid: Hampton Inn's Good-Enough Formula for World Domination The Spying Scandal Rocking the World of HR Software The SEC Pinned Its Hack on a Few Hapless Day Traders. The Full Story Is Far More Troubling Cavs Owner Dan Gilbert Wants to Donate His Billions—and Walk Again ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
U.S. funding cuts to Antarctic research sparks climate fears
ITV News Correspondent Martin Stew joins scientists looking for answers to the ever more urgent climate crisis. Historically, most of those scientists have been American, leading the world in that vital research. But under the Trump administration, the U.S. is cutting their funding by more than half. Secretary Kerry, Former U.S. Special Envoy for Climate, has said he is "very sad for humanity that any one nation is standing in the way of what the science is telling us we must do to protect life".
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
A Giant Hole Just Opened in The Sun – And It's Blasting Earth With Solar Wind
A giant hole has opened in the atmosphere of the Sun, and it's blasting out a high-speed wind that is directed right at Earth. The incoming blast of solar particles is worth getting excited about: we're in for a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm starting around Saturday June 14, according to the NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. A coronal hole is a region where the magnetic fields on the surface of the Sun weaken and open up. This allows the wind of charged particles that constantly gusts from the Sun out into the Solar System to escape more freely. When it rushes past Earth, some of the particles become entangled in Earth's magnetic field, sometimes with stunning results. The particles are whisked away on magnetic field lines to high latitudes, where they are dumped out into Earth's upper atmosphere. There, they interact with particles in the atmosphere to produce a dancing glow – the light of the auroras borealis and australis. A G2-level storm (the scale goes up to G5, which is only seen extremely rarely) is one that doesn't pose a significant danger. Some satellites may need to issue minor course corrections, and there may be some high-frequency radio blackouts. The exciting part for us humans is the likelihood of aurora, from the poles down to a maximum latitude of around 55 degrees north and south. The Northern Hemisphere is getting very close to the summer solstice, which is the shortest night of the year, so viewing hours may be somewhat limited. We've been absolutely spoiled for auroras this solar maximum, the most active period in the Sun's 11-year activity cycle – but that's no reason not to get out there and enjoy the fireworks. The Universe's Largest Map Has Arrived, And You Can Stargaze Like Never Before Giant Jets Bigger Than The Milky Way Seen Shooting From Black Hole Humanity Has Just Glimpsed Part of The Sun We've Never Seen Before
