How geography and politics shape teachers’ engagement with climate change science standards

Climate change education is a complex and controversial undertaking in the United States given the federated nature of educational policy and the partisan nature of climate change discourse. Despite international treaty obligations, the United States struggles to implement climate change education across its educational sector. This article examines the political and geographic factors at play in the standardization of climate change science education in Delaware. Using a geographically representative sample of science teachers, we explore the specificity of NGSS-informed climate change science standards enactment, including its relationship to both voting patterns and individual teacher politics. We show how teachers’ political orientation and cultural worldview shapes climate change education independent of local context, raising important questions about professional ethics and the limitations of standards-driven science education reform during a time of intense partisan science denial and socially organized misinformation and disinformation campaigns. Specifically, we find that local political context has no effect on reports of teaching practice; instead, a science teacher’s political orientation influences if and how they enact NGSS-driven climate change science education reforms. We conclude with considerations for the field of climate change science education given the social and political realities of the modern United States educational system.