"We might as well turn this into a chicken house," quipped Dylan Schockley, a 9-year-old trying his best to be blasé about the babies, which on a recent morning were hatching.

Peck by peck, sometimes for hours, chicks worked free of their shells to be greeted by awestruck children who hung a birth announcement on the classroom door.

How chicks came to be hatching in a downstate classroom is the story of how Delaware, from its back country roads to its toughest urban classrooms, hatched a world-class science education program.

"The curriculum standards that were established ... are considered to be one of the top three sets of science curriculum standards in the nation," said Joseph Miller, a member of the National Science Board, which oversees the National Academy of Sciences.

A former chief technology officer at DuPont, Miller was co-chairman of Delaware's Science Framework Commission. The group of teachers, college instructors, scientists and business leaders was so determined to improve science education in the state that, at one point, it had the provost of MIT and other top scientists reviewing proposed grade-school standards.

For the Laurel youngsters to hatch chicks, it took 21 days in an incubator. For Delaware to grow science standards and a curriculum, it has taken more than a decade of labor. The framework commission was formed in 1992.

Today, the work and the determination are paying off. State test scores in science are steadily rising across all racial and income groups. Invaluable lessons have been learned about school reform. And classrooms are alive with wonder.

"We got to have chicks and plant flowers," said Miya Newcomb, another Laurel fourth-grader. "And we got to build a dam and build houses and we made lights for the houses."

Hands-on learning

Fourth-graders build dams and stream tables to investigate the rate at which forces change the earth. They electrify homemade doll houses to demonstrate they understand energy and its effects.

Fifth-graders study crayfish to understand the relationship of structure to function. And second-graders - if they aren't studying the relationship of fulcrum to beam on the playground seesaw - are busy meeting state standards in earth science by identifying soil components.

"If they do a smear of the soil and see it comes out orange, they know it has clay in it," explained Kathy Lynch, a North Laurel teacher. "It's amazing what they learn."

Lynch said when she began teaching 12 years ago, science was essentially tacked onto other subjects such as math or reading. "And teachers had to go out and get the materials," she said.

"Oh, it was awful," Green said. "If you wanted to do an experiment, you had to hunt down the material and by the time you found it all, you were too tired to do anything."

Today, tons of science teaching materials - each piece chosen for a specific grade level and a specific curriculum - are packed in large, brightly colored plastic crates and shipped to the state's K-8 teachers from a vast warehouse in Smyrna called the Science Resource Center.

"It's been a lifesaver for teachers," said Green, lifting the lid of a crate filled with everything from batteries to seeds, materials that form the core of Delaware's hands-on or kit-based approach to science education.

Book reading in science doesn't inspire children to go on in the subject, said Joyce Evans, a physicist turned learning specialist and program director at the National Science Foundation, which gave Delaware $6.5 million to build a science curriculum.

"One of the things Delaware did was engage children in learning science," Evans said. It's called an inquiry approach."

The aim is to induct children into the scientific community, to teach them to investigate, to seek answers to questions and record their findings, which is why thousands of caterpillar larvae are sent into second grades across the state each year so little scientists can study the life cycle of butterflies.

"Children are inherently curious," Evans said. "Now the secret to that is to organize the learning environment. There has to be ... an effective learning environment ... so it's not just activity for activity's sake."

The organization chores are left to the resource center run by the Delaware Science Coalition, whose members are the state, its school districts and the Delaware Foundation for Science and Mathematics Education, a nonprofit group of local corporations that largely provides money to develop and test new curriculum ideas. Each time a curriculum idea is piloted, students are tested and the results assessed to determine its effectiveness.

The plastic science crates have come to be known as Smithsonian kits because the state named its science program for the museum in Washington, D.C. But the name is the only connection. Delaware's science standards and curriculum are home-grown.

Keeping commitment

Their development started with then-Gov. Mike Castle wanting to reform education, said Rachel Wood, who was a Delmar High School science teacher. Wood co-chaired the framework commission with Miller and today oversees the resource center and teacher training.

Castle hired Pascal D. "Pat" Forgione as superintendent of education. Forgione set up the science commission and others like it for other subjects. When Castle went to Congress, Tom Carper, now a U.S. senator, continued the commitment to school reform, Wood said. The state's science standards have come to be viewed as models.

Achieve, the nonprofit, bipartisan group of governors and corporate chief executives that analyzes and assesses state standards and curriculums, recently studied life science standards for high schoolers.

"Just let me say that Delaware was the most highly rated by our reviewers," said Jean Flattery, a former science teacher who heads what Achieve calls its benchmark studies.

When Wood and Miller began as co-chairs of the framework commission, Wood said, Forgione decreed that half the more than 40 commission members be teachers.

"That's what was so visionary about Forgione," Wood said. "That validated the teachers. It was people within the profession ... having a major role."

At the time, the early 1990s, Wood recalled, the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Science, was formulating national science education standards and Delaware closely modeled its on the national ones.

"Once these commissions started," Wood said, "Forgione put us together with some of the best people in the entire nation, both scientists and science educators."

Perseverance pays

Miller recalled that after the commission settled on its first set of standards, he and Wood took them to the reviewers Forgione had hired.

'We were so proud of what we developed ... and they just tore it to shreds," Miller said.

It took 2 1/2 years for the commission to hammer out science standards that met the reviewers' standards - for kindergarten through high school.

In 1995, Forgione left for a federal job, saying on his way out that what the state needed now was implementers. Wood and Jack Collette, a DuPont scientist on the commission, were among those who stepped in, helping form the Science Coalition and applying for the National Science Foundation grant.

Wood, the third generation in her family to teach in public schools, "understands the plight and the life of teachers," Miller said. That may explain why she included a budget line for baby-sitting in the science foundation grant application. Teachers have families of their own, are overwhelmingly female at the elementary level and have had little science training, Wood said. She had to be able to meet their needs if they were to sign up for some 120 hours of science training.

Wood went around the state cajoling elementary teachers into signing up for training. Lynch and Green were in the first group. This year, Green won a Presidential Award in the competition for science teachers administered by the National Science Foundation, and each year she goes beyond the curriculum and has her students study the life cycle of chicks.

Since 1995, 2,500 teachers around the state have received comprehensive training to teach science, which, at the middle-school and high-school levels, also requires them to attend some college classes. Curriculums are in place at the elementary and middle school levels, and the state is working on the high school level.

The science teaching is so effective, state officials say, that children are making significant gains on test scores regardless of race and family income.

Green said she knew the program was a hit the first year she took it back to her classroom.

"I'd say it's time for science," she said, "and you'd think I said it was time for recess."

Reach Michele Fuetsch at 324-2386 or mfuetsch@delawareonline.com.

Copyright ©2003, The News Journal.