In recent years, research funders such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have laid increasing responsibility on the scientific community to contribute to the public understanding of science and to increase the diversity of the scientific workforce. These efforts are intended to support national goals of greater science literacy and equity of access to science education and careers. They have also spawned a new “bridging” profession between science and education, often referred to as education and public outreach, or EPO (Fraknoi 2005)—the profession in which I currently work. As a Ph.D.-trained outreach scientist for a large environmental sciences research institute based jointly in a university and a federal laboratory, I work with local and regional schools to provide curriculum and professional development for teachers in science content, inquiry-based teaching, and assessment. I often serve as a content expert for district- and state-level curriculum and standards work. I work with our institute's scientists to develop effective EPO efforts for their research projects, and I conduct professional development for scientists and science educators who do such work.

With this perspective, I attended the 117th annual meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) in Tucson, Arizona, in September 2005, entitled Building Community: The Emerging EPO Profession. The meeting drew over 350 space science educators, outreach professionals, and education-involved scientists from around the country. Because I work primarily in the Earth sciences, this was my first encounter with the space science education community as a group.

Although I benefited from the meeting in many ways, I was struck negatively by one unintended theme: Several presenters working with K-12 education reflected views of the national and state science standards (Note 1) as unfair constraints to their ability to deliver effective EPO programs. I call this view the “standards straitjacket.” “Teachers have to teach the standards,” said one presenter. Another apologized for the standards-oriented EPO program he described: “We are, I hate to say it, teaching to the standards.” Other speakers clearly gave the impression that they had done an end run around the standards in order to “sneak” their content into the K-12 curriculum.

Astronomy Education Review Editor and 2005 meeting co-organizer Andrew Fraknoi explained to me that many astronomers feel that there is not much astronomy in the standards. The content of the K-12 chemistry standards is not what makes chemists want to get out of bed in the morning, either. But it is fundamental stuff, ideas without which a student could not learn more chemistry. The same goes for physics, geology, microbiology, and any other area of the standards; the content of the standards does not represent the cutting edge, nor the exciting ideas that drew us to the field, but it is basic to a sound understanding of the discipline. Moreover, in addition to the disciplines seeking greater emphasis on their subject in the schools, industries from cattle breeders to coal miners and computer manufacturers also clamor for inclusion in the science curriculum.

Part of the problem is a structural one: “science” as a school subject is not the same as the disciplines we study. If universities are taken to represent the organization of knowledge into disciplines, the mathematics standards represent a single discipline, taught on most campuses in a single department, whereas the science standards reflect many disciplines. On my own campus, the content of the state science standards is represented by nine departments and several major institutes in the College of Arts and Sciences alone, and another six or eight academic units of the College of Engineering represent the technology-related standards. (If you want to argue equal time for disciplines, the engineers have the biggest grounds for complaint.)

Both the research base and conversations with teachers and district science coordinators make it evident that the problem with school science education is not that schools need more science to teach; they need better science. The depth and breadth of the national standards is daunting already, and state standards tend to get even broader (Kendall et al. 1999; Kendall, DeFrees, & Richardson 2003; Hollweg & Hill 2003). Education leaders in fields from arts to geography have similar concerns about coverage and the time needed to address their standards (National Education Commission on Time and Learning 1994, cited in Marzano 2003, 25). Many academic subjects compete for limited class time, as do society's nonacademic expectations of schools. Yet international comparisons, such as Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) (Note 2), demonstrate repeatedly the greater success of curricula such as those in Japan and Singapore, where students spend up to twice the time on demanding subject matter as in the typical “mile-wide, inch-deep” American curriculum (Marzano 2003, 26). More is really less; it is no improvement at all to cram additional content into the science classroom.

Thus, the end run is not really the solution, nor is the view of standards as a constraint a perspective that helps to improve science education as a whole. In this article, I argue for a new perspective in the EPO professional community that will enable us to escape what can feel like a standards straitjacket. To escape the straitjacket, EPO programs can use the standards more strategically—most simply, by changing approaches within K-12 education, and more broadly by addressing other audiences beyond K-12 students. As the examples suggest (Note 3), many astronomy educators have already recognized these possibilities and begun to take such approaches, in small and large ways. That some of these approaches are difficult and even idealistic means that creativity, collaboration, and risk-taking will be required to accomplish them. Although this piece was provoked by a space science EPO conference, its message applies equally to other disciplinary EPO communities.