Birds, Bees, & Benchmarks: National Sexuality Education Standards - Annual Conference Preview

By Kurt Conklin, MPH, MCHES (SIECUS) and Nora Gelperin, M.Ed (Answer)

While the nation was busy enduring months of election-year primary campaign stumping and two major party conventions throughout 2012, a small announcement in Education Week this past January quietly shifted America’s sexuality education landscape.

For the first time ever, curriculum planners, teachers, local and state school board members, and parents have a set of uniform, national sexuality education standards to measure the content of their schools’ programs: The National Sexuality Education Standards. The goal of the Standards is “to provide clear, consistent, and straightforward guidance on the essential minimum, core content for sexuality education that is age-appropriate for students in grades K-12.”

The Standards are the result of a two-year effort spearheaded by five national organizations: The American Association of Health Education, The American School Health Association, The National Education Association Health Information Network, The Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education and The Future of Sex Education (FoSE) Initiative. (FoSE includes three national sexuality education organizations, including two of our own: Answer, SIECUS, and Advocates for Youth.)

The National Sexuality Education Standards join a growing body of national standards for other academic subjects, such as math, reading and health, which only benefit our national education system. The Standards are based on research-driven evidence and developmental- and age-appropriate norms. Yet we’ve heard some school stakeholders express concern that the Standards could generate controversy.

We’ve heard some educators, parents, and politicians argue that school sexuality education programs should teach only abstinence until marriage, and remain silent about topics such as contraception, sexual orientation, and relationships outside of marriage. In their view, the sole purpose of school-based sexuality education is marriage promotion, not intellectual growth or skills development.
As a mom (Nora) and an uncle (Kurt), we respectfully disagree. The education and health professionals who helped to develop the Standards took a comprehensive view based on their real-life experiences with parents, students, and school personnel from myriad walks of life in diverse communities around the U.S. Given the median age of first marriage as 26.9 for U.S. females and 28.9 for U.S. males, and the fact that 63% of U.S. 12^th-graders have already had sexual intercourse, school-age youth need more information than ever to make informed decisions about healthy relationships that have the potential to involve sexual activity. Sound sexuality education includes information on why (and how) young people can benefit from postponing sexual involvement until they are mature and ready, and the Standards account for this—without neglecting many other skills that parents say their children want and need.

The new National Sexuality Education Standards can help you respond to students’ informational needs with age- and developmentally-appropriate instruction that is relevant to young people’s lives. The Standards are voluntary and no school district should be expected to swallow them whole. You can make the most of them by inviting your school stakeholders to explore them and discuss them in community meetings where parents, teachers, curriculum planners, and the students themselves can ask hard questions and seek common ground to make the Standards work for everyone. Implementation can begin with elements that find the widest buy-in. The more difficult and potentially controversial topics can be placed on the sidelines for further study and adopted at a later date.

The Standards are a major step forward in standardizing, normalizing, and improving sexuality education throughout the nation. If widely implemented, our youths’ well-being, health and academic achievement can dramatically improve. Programs modeled after the Standards could lower the nation’s unacceptably high rate of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (especially in states hostile to sexuality education, where those rates are highest). Emphasis, of course, is on the “if”—improvement is achievable if curriculum planners, staff development specialists, teachers, parents and school board members make the most of this new resource.

In an election year when the course of history may well be changed at the polls, we hope the course of history in your local school districts will change for the better when you take the National Sexuality Education Standards and make them yours. Are you ready?

Attend this session at the Learning Forward 2012 Annual Conference in Boston

G15 – Birds, Bees, & Benchmarks: National Sexuality Education Standards

Tuesday December 14, 9am-12pm.