Downtown Scranton, PA.
When the Pennsylvania legislature adjourned on November 30, 2020, House Bill 2795 died in committee. If enacted, the bill would have required the state's public schools to provide instruction on climate change aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. The department of education would also have been required to develop a model climate change science curriculum to be freely available to public and non-profit private schools.
Climate change is absent from Pennsylvania's current state science standards, which date from 2002; the standards received the grade of F for their treatment of the topic in "Making the Grade? How State Public School Science Standards Address Climate Change," the recent report from NCSE and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund. But climate change is included in a proposed new set of standards, soon to be released for public comment.
