Photo by Peter Pryharski on Unsplash.
At its August 21, 2025, meeting, the Colorado state board of education considered a set of proposed revisions to the state science standards intended to improve their treatment of climate change. The board ultimately voted 7-2 to adopt the revisions — but not before amending them in such a way as to dilute the proposed improvements.
The process began in December 2024, when the board asked the department of education to evaluate the standards — which are essentially the Next Generation Science Standards — and to offer recommendations to improve their treatment of climate change. The department initially recommended eight revisions.
Then, in April 2025, when a draft of the recommendations was presented to the board, four Republican members of the board objected that "the proposed revisions were biased and one-sided," as Chalkbeat (April 10, 2025) reported. After receiving feedback from the board and the public, the department proposed (PDF) a slightly altered set of nine revisions.
The proposed revisions improved the treatment of climate change at the middle school level by explicitly expecting students to understand that "burning fossil fuels release greenhouse gases that cause rising global temperatures," although the obfuscating phrase "and other factors" was added after "fossil fuels" owing to feedback from the board and/or the public.
At the high school level, the proposed revisions would have expected students to "[e]valuate or refine a technological solution that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and other human pollutants that impact natural systems," while the current standards refer only to reducing "impacts of human activities on natural systems."
During its August 21, 2025, meeting, however, the board amended both of these proposed revisions, resulting in the removal of a reference to the rise in global temperatures over the past century in the current middle school standards and a reference to greenhouse gas emissions in the proposed new high school standards.
A new reference to anthropogenic climate change survived, however: in the new standards adopted by the board, high school students are expected to "[u]se a computational representation to illustrate the relationships among Earth systems and how those relationships are being modified due to anthropogenic climate change."
In a story published just before the meeting, which emphasized the support of Colorado youth for climate change education and for the proposed improvements to the state science standards, CPR News (August 20, 2025) noted, "If the state board approves revisions, school districts must implement them within two years."
