For those who are familiar with NGSS,what are your thoughts?

http://www.nextgenscience.org/overview-0

It appears not to have garnered the negative backlash of the Common Core standards but the difference may partly be that only states who want higher science standards are adopting them and Science is not perceived as fundamental in the same sense as Math and Language Arts.

Our district is in the process of implementing NGSS and the standards will be fully implemented across all grades within the next couple of years.

I have become familiar with the K-8 ones.
It took me a long time to fully digest them. Now I think I like the concepts a lot, BUT very few elementary teachers will be up to implementing them. Properly done, they outline something fantastic.

They seem to be overly specific in some instances, describing exact projects to be done in a certain way. (K: build a structure with tools and materials to reduce the heating effect of sunlight hitting the ground.) (This is from memory, don't pick on me.)

There are many underlying concepts which are woven into the standards but not called out on their own: science deals with the material world, scientists look for patterns, etc. A curriculum based on these which just happened to incorporate the fact knowledge and specific projects called for should be just what I want for my kids.

I haven't seen any developed curricula yet that claim to cover NGSS. I will be very interested to see them when they have been written. The public school teachers I spoke to hadn't seen the standards until this November, were supposed to teach them this year, and have no curricula to use.

I don't actually think our district is top-notch but it is trying to bring our kids into the 21st century. The revamping of elementary and middle school science curriculum probably started almost a decade ago when they began administering science assessments for 5th and 8th grades.

It is truly appalling to hear about the lack of modern science education in elementary and even middle schools in some places. In some districts, elementary science education is pure memorization with zero analysis. Sometimes, the stuff that they are teaching the kids are out of date or irrelevant.

The reason why it will take our district another couple of years to fully implement NGSS across all grades is that it does take a lot of time and work to develop new coherent curriculum for all the courses.

I still recall reading the transcript of a town hall meeting between teachers and our superintendent from two years ago (mid-year)prior to the implementation of Common Core the following school year. One of the teachers complained that the district should just use canned curriculum from one of the major publishers because they are easier and would allow more time for the teachers to learn the curriculum before having to teach it. I don't recall the exact answer but the idea was that it is more important that the curriculum should be high quality and that additional teacher training days would be provided as the curriculum is developed.