The Texas Board of Education handed science a mixed bag of victory and defeat with their Friday vote on state science standards. Although they voted to not include the "strengths and weaknesses" creationist code words, they added amendments that provide major loopholes for creationist teaching.
by Amanda Gefter
Excerpted from New Scientist
It was a mixed bag of victory and defeat for science on Friday when the Texas Board of Education voted on their state science standards. In a move that pleased the scientific community, the board voted to not include proposed changes that would call for the teaching of the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories – code words for allowing creationist views into the classroom.
However, additional amendments that were voted through provide loopholes for creationist teaching. "It's as if they slammed the door shut with strengths and weaknesses, then ran around the house opening windows to let it in a bunch of other ways," says Dan Quinn, who was on site at the hearings. Quinn is communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, a community watchdog organisation.
One amendment calls for students to "analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the complexity of the cell," phrasing that rings of intelligent design arguments.
Another amendment requires students to "analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning any data on sudden appearance and stasis and the sequential groups in the fossil record." These issues are commonly held up by creationists as arguments against evolution, even though the scientific community disagrees.
Anti-evolutionist Don McLeroy, a dentist and chair of the Texas State Board of Education, testified at Friday's hearing: "I disagree with these experts. Someone has got to stand up to experts."
An amendment to the environmental sciences standards requires students to "analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming", despite overwhelming consensus within the scientific community that global warming exists.
An amendment to the Earth and space sciences curriculum requires the teaching of different theories of the origin, age and history of the universe. The board voted to remove from the standards the statement that the universe is roughly 14 billion years old.
"The goal here was to make science more tentative and vague so that teachers have room to tell students, 'This is only one explanation and the scientists are not even sure about it themselves' – which is, of course, utter nonsense," says Quinn.
School textbooks are required to comply with a state's science standards, so all changes to the science standards translate into changes to textbooks. In two years, the board will meet to review the state's textbooks, so creationists have been eager to slip in changes to the standards ahead of time.
Texas is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks in the US, a market publishers can't afford to lose. So they will likely have to water down the science in their books and add in creationist pseudo-science to appease the school board. "If the publishers don't come back with arguments against natural selection and common descent, the board is going to vote to reject those textbooks," Quinn says.
What's more, while the "strengths and weaknesses" language was rather vague, the new amendments provide publishers with a very specific roadmap for what they have to include in their textbooks. "It will be much harder for publishers to fudge," says Quinn.
Creating a Texas-only edition of a biology textbook would be expensive, which means other states would probably end up having to use the same scientifically inaccurate textbooks. "Many publishers are in dire economic straits these days, so the added expense of making a special edition for one state is not something they would be eager to take on," says Steven Newton of the National Center for Science Education. "I think it's likely this would affect other states."
"We're going to be watching and we will make sure that if the textbooks include junk science, that people know about it," Quinn says. "If other states reject these books, publishers might stop publishing for Texas because it's so expensive." Read the full article here.