Science standards do address scientific literacy: A reply to Zucker and Noyce

In their article, "Lessons from the pandemic about science education" Andrew Zucker and Pendred Noyce stress the importance of students making sense of the world around them, noting that students need to be engaged and informed and "able to distinguish scientific knowledge from misinformation." In particular, they use the COVID-19 pandemic as a call to change the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). We agree with their emphasis on the importance of science literacy; however, we argue that they misrepresent the NGSS and conflate curriculum with standards. The authors hook readers in their opening paragraph by making the startling claim that, under the NGSS, students can graduate high school without ever having "been asked to read science-related books or articles in the popular press. If these statements about the NGSS were true, this would be a damning critique. However, the authors have either missed or chosen to ignore the science and engineering practices in the NGSS.