Recent debates about what American students should be learning in their science classrooms have focused on evolution and climate change. Advocates for America’s latest K-12 science guidelines, the Next Generation Science Standards, claim that anyone who does not adopt or support the new standards, including the controversial content about evolution and climate change, is a “science denier.” Interestingly, this new science education policy excludes a fundamental, far-reaching, and powerful science reality: when the life of a human organism/being begins — thus making the NGSS a “science denier” as well.

The NGSS identifies key concepts or “core ideas” that represent the “most important aspects of science content knowledge” (per the designers). The first core idea in life sciences is that cells are the basic unit of life and that an organism may consist of one cell or many cells. This significant concept is extremely deficient if students are not learning about the structure, function, growth, and development of early human organisms/lives too.