Katie Milton Brkich et al., "The Rejection of the NGSS in Georgia: Social Covenants as Contextually Mitigating Factors," offers a compelling critical analysis that highlights how social-political influences, introduced as covenants, shape curricular decisions that may limit science literacy within the curricular landscape of science education at large. In this forum, I contribute to this conversation by first discussing how the standardization of knowledge within its sociopolitical context is limiting and subtractive, as it explicitly dismisses other ways of knowing. Furthermore, I discuss how this underscores the tension of navigating the curricular conflicts that plague teacher preparation programs. Finally, I further expand upon the implications of these social-political influences by situating this discussion within the context of borderland epistemologies.