ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida’s proposed new academic standards for science downplay evolution, ignore “climate change” and represent a step backwards for public education, according to several experts who’ve reviewed them.

The Florida Department of Education on Friday released its proposal for what the state’s public school students should learn in science classes from kindergarten through high school.

The goal is lessons that are “content-rich, coherent and grounded in facts and evidence” and that ignore “trendy themes” and “adult ideological contests,” the department said.

It did not specify what themes and contests it objected to, however, nor did a spokesperson immediately respond to questions asking what was disliked in the current standards.

The department is taking public comment on its proposed standards on its website and in meetings, including during a virtual one this afternoon.

Bertha Vazquez, who taught middle school science in South Florida for more than 35 years and now is the director of the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science, said Florida is “moving backwards” with its new plan.

“If it’s not broken, why the hell are we fixing it? We had smash bang good standards,” Vazquez said.

The new proposed standards would replace the current ones, adopted in 2008 after a months-long, statewide fight over the inclusion of evolution as a required subject of study. Those who opposed the 2008 standards argued creationism, or the biblical story that God created all living things, should be taught alongside evolution.

But what was adopted focused solely on evolution, declaring it one of science’s “big ideas” and stating that it is “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology” and “supported by multiple forms of scientific evidence.”

The proposed ones barely mention evolution — a scientific theory explaining change in living species over time from natural selection that has been a cornerstone of biology for more than a century. In fact, the term evolution is never defined in the high school life sciences standards, though the concepts are sprinkled across several units.

“It’s disappointing to see Florida politicize something that shouldn’t be political or remotely controversial. No science standards can be complete without evolution,” said David Griffith, national research director for the Fordham Institute, which reviews states academic standards.

Not making specific mention of the scientific theory of evolution could prevent teachers from including it in lessons and could mean students graduate ill-equipped for college, Vazquez said. Students could, possibly, go from kindergarten through 12th grade without ever hearing about evolution, she said.

“It’s unconscionable,” she added.

A spokesperson for the education department, however, insisted Florida still wants students to learn about evolution and “climate science,” writing in an email, “The Department is not removing these areas of science.”

The new standards include topics related to evolution, such as “evidence for common ancestry and change over time,” and topics related to climate science, including “human impacts on natural systems,” wrote an unnamed department spokesperson.

But the standards ignore human-made climate change, instead calling it “anthropogenic activities” that affect “Earth’s systems,” noted Glenn Branch, the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education.

“I would like to say something nice about the new standards, but I can’t,” he said.

Florida not requiring students to learn about the specific impact humans are having on the Earth’s climate — a topic about which there is broad scientific consensus — is ironic, Branch said.

“As you know, Florida is particularly vulnerable to the disruptive effects of climate change,” he said.

The removal of climate change from the standards is not surprising, however. In 2024, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that stripped the phrase “climate change” from much of Florida law, reversing 16 years of state policy and, critics said, undermining Florida’s support of renewable and clean energy. A few months later, the education department told some science textbook publishers that they must remove the term from their books if they wanted to sell to Florida public schools.

In addition to its shortcomings with climate change and evolution, Branch said many of the proposed units boil down to fun-fact-style trivia that lack depth beyond memorizing definitions.

The standards are too expansive, with close to 1,000 “benchmarks” for teachers to cover in high school science, he added.

They are “a mile wide and an inch deep,” Branch said. “This is an old-fashioned approach.”

In introducing the new proposal, the education department said the new standards were “not merely a cosmetic update” but a “chance to restore science as the discipline of knowledge: observe, question, investigate, weigh evidence, test ideas, and change your mind when the facts require it.”

A department spokesperson also did not immediately respond to a question about exactly what needed to be restored.

“Science begins in wonder, not in ideology,” said Education Commissioner Henry Mack in a statement included in the department’s press release. “The classical tradition taught that nature is intelligible because it is ordered—that the book of creation can be read by reason,” he said. “Florida’s new science standards will form students who observe carefully, reason rigorously, and treat the natural world as something given to be known, not invented.”

The standards were devised with help from an 18-member committee made up of school district employees and one professor of science education. In 2008, another committee, which included teachers but also more professors with expertise in biology, chemistry and physics, served that role.

The education department is conducting a “science standards listening tour” and took public comment at a high school in Hillsborough County on Tuesday. It will hold the virtual hearing today and then another in-person meeting on Monday at a high school in Walton County in the Panhandle.

_____

©2026 Orlando Sentinel. Visit at orlandosentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.