Thank you for this opportunity.

I speak today as a concerned parent of 3 children being educated in California public schools, as an industrial physicist of 18 years with 19 patents and 66 published papers, and as a volunteer actively involved in improving K-12 science education for the past seven years.

As you may know, I initiated a petition drive to demonstrate to the state that a large fraction of the science education community disagrees with many aspects of both the science materials adoption process as well as the science standards. The list of supporters of this petition is now 34 pages long. I have copies here for you.

I will briefly point out some specific examples of problems in two of these adopted science materials and then discuss more general issues.

1. Harcourt Science 5^th grade, pages C64-C67: Energy is a key part of many standards at many grade levels and is one of the most important concepts in science. The CDSMC report on this program stated that it includes "hands-on investigations and experiments and does not contain extraneous content that is fundamentally contrary to the Standards." In these four pages, 5^th grade students are to be taught the following important concepts about energy:

• Energy
• Kinetic energy
• Potential energy
• Transformation of energy
• Law of conservation of energy
• Mechanical energy
• Thermal energy
• Electric energy
• Light energy
• Sound energy
• Elastic potential energy
• Gravitational potential energy
• Chemical energy

1. On page C67 :"Energy is the ability to cause changes in matter."
2. On page C66: "Energy is the ability to do work."

Does this "rigorous" treatment of energy lead to student learning. I doubt it. It may lead instead to rigor mortis on the part of the student.

And since these materials are untested in classrooms, there is no way to know what students will learn.

1. McGraw-Hill Science 5^th grade

On page 138, the Coriolis effect is discussed - a topic best left to advanced college physics courses. I think that fifth grade students may have some difficulties understanding fictitious forces in rotating reference frames on spherical surfaces. In addition, the book is completely wrong in asserting that water moving down the drain has anything to do with the Coriolis effect. This "Brain Power" inset should be flushed down the drain.

On page 295, students are told that gravity and inertia together make the Earth go around the sun, a somewhat more correct treatment than the Standard which ignores inertia. But to understand this concept requires knowledge of the mathematics of vector addition, as any high school physics teacher can tell you. Yet, this math concept is foreign to 5^th grade students. So students will learn the words, but they won’t really understand.

On page 297, the reason for the seasons is compressed into one sentence and one bad diagram. Again, I believe that no learning is possible, but the student will be able to repeat that the seasons are due to the earth's tilt. They just won't know why.

Now I would like to make some general comments about the science materials adoption process.

The outcome of State Board policy is that materials that have been based on the science of learning and then field tested and revised could not be approved for adoption. None of the approved materials, which were developed rapidly, has been field -tested.

We are playing Russian Roulette with our children's education. I'd rather use proven materials. I think that many would agree with me.