ABSTRACT
A focus on high academic standards and achievement for all students has been at the heart of sweeping educational reforms since the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). In recent years, this push for high achievement in science education has grown in both urgency and complexity as a result of four primary factors: (a) the growing cultural and linguistic diversity of the U.S. student population; (b) the persistence of testing gaps across demographic subgroups coupled with the increased accountability demands for all students following the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 and the Race To The Top (RT3) initiatives that began in 2010; (c) an increase in both cognitive and linguistic demands inherent in A Framework for K–12 Science Education (National Research Council [NRC], 2011) and the Next Generation Science Standards (Achieve, 2013); and (d) a combination of evolving personal and social reasons all students need to learn challenging science, such as to make informed decisions about technologically driven problems and solutions, for career and college readiness, and as a robust context for learning valuable academic English.
