Fundies on the school board = religion in science textbooks. [View All]

[ColbertWatcher]

The most important job the next administration has is to protect the integrity of education in this country with special emphasis on science.

The objective of education should be to teach facts not a self-serving agenda, whether that agenda arises from a religious or corporate point of view.

Take some recent news from Texas. One of the jobs of the Texas State Board of Education is to select the six members of a committee that reviews and approves textbooks to be used statewide.

Just recently, 12 of the 15 TSBE decided to install three members of this textbook committee whose understanding of science is questionable to say the least,

Two of the appointees are authors of a book that questions many of the tenets of Charles Darwin's theory of how humans and other life forms evolved. One of them, Stephen Meyer, is also vice president of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based group that promotes an explanation of the origin of life similar to creationism. The other author is Ralph Seelke, a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

Also on the panel is Baylor University chemistry professor Charles Garner, who, like the other two, signed the Discovery Institute's "Dissent from Darwinism" statement that sharply questions key aspects of the theory of evolution.

--Dallas Morning News

To understand a little more about this thing called "The Discovery Institute," let's ask one of their critics, the Internet Infidels, who describe Discovery's "wedge project,"

"If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the "thin edge of the wedge," was Phillip Johnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

--Infidels.org

Discovery's "wedge project" has three phases,

Phase I, "Scientific Research, Writing, and Publicity" involves the Paleontology Research Program (led by Dr. Paul Chien), the Molecular Biology Research Program (led by Dr. Douglas Axe), and any individual researcher who is given a fellowship by the Institute.

(...)

Phase II, "Publicity and Opinion-Making" involves communicating the research of Phase I. The Center plans to do this through book tours, opinion-making conferences, apologetics seminars, a teacher training program, use of opinion-editorials in newspapers, television program productions (either with Public Broadcasting or another broadcaster), and the printing of publications to distribute.

(...)

Phase III, "Cultural Confrontation and Renewal" begins sometime in 2003 and may take as long as twenty years to complete. It involves three things: (1) "Academic and Scientific Challenge Conferences"; (2) "Potential Legal Action for Teacher Training"; and (3) "Research Fellowship Program: shift to social sciences and humanities".

--Infidels.org

In 2004, Time magazine wrote about the influence so-called "adoption" states have on textbooks nationwide,

When Texas talks, textbook publishers tend to listen. As one of the largest purchasers of school textbooks ($65 million this year), the state has regularly exerted a strong influence on the content of books used by schools across the country. After the Texas board of education accommodated Fundamentalist Christians in 1974 by requiring that evolution be taught as "only one of several explanations" of the origins of mankind, some publishers began to alter their texts to make them more widely acceptable. For instance, in the 1981 high school biology book published by Laidlaw Bros., a division of Doubleday, the word evolution did not appear, even in the glossary or index.

(...)

The textbook struggle in Texas has awakened other states to their potential power. California, North Carolina and Georgia are among the 22 other "adoption" states that make up a list of approved textbooks from which all state school districts choose, while New York and 27 other "open" states let each local district pick its own books. Obviously, the bigger the book order, the greater the clout. (...) California Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig, an aggressive reformer, wants to form a textbook buyers' cooperative. Representatives of Florida and California, which together buy 13% of the nation's textbooks (in contrast with Texas' 6%), will hold a meeting later this month for interested educators. Says Honig: "If Texas can influence books that much on little matters, think how powerful we would be if we could all agree on criteria for textbooks."

--Time

And a little more about Bill Honig, the "aggressive reformer" eager to exert his power on the content of school science textbooks who somehow lost his job before being able to implement his evil designs,

"In 1983 Honig had challenged the authorization of the Institute for Creation Research to award academic degrees. Creationism, the core of their curriculum, lacked scientific rigor, he had said. A protacted fight over the issue had ended when the legislature removed ICR from Honig's purview. The fight confirmed the Christian Right's perception that the School's Superintendant
was in league with Satan. He was still insisting, after all, that evolution be included as more <...> than just a theory <...>. Thus Bill Honig, evolutionist, multiculturalist, and Jew, became a natural
target of fundementalist organizations like The National Association of Christian Educators, who dispatched 'prayer warriors', to assert 'God's will upon Bill Honig.'"

--http://web.archive.org/web/20050213160907/http://www.skepticfiles.org/evolut/honig02e.htm">Skeptic Files via Wayback Machine

Honig was later convicted of

"...four counts of participating in making state contracts in which he had a financial interest."

--CalBar.ca.gov

But, Honig is by no means the worst offender, take Neil Bush, for instance,

CREW’s three-month investigation revealed that school districts are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, including NCLB funds, on Ignite!’s Curriculum on Wheels (COW), a cart-mounted video projector and hard drive loaded with a year’s supply of Ignite!’s social studies, science, or math curricula. At a standard price of $3,800-$4,200 per unit, the COW is a very expensive device with limited use. A recent New York Times article about the use of the COW in Spotsylvania, Virginia, put the cost into perspective: each school in the district receives $1,000 "to cover all the lab supplies, equipment and other expenses connected with science for an entire year." Adding to the initial expense, schools must pay an annual $1,000 licensing, upkeep and upgrade fee in order to retain the COW for more than one year.

--Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

It seems America's education is stuck between a religious ideologue rock and an opportunistic corporate hard place.

The ideologues want to inject their brand of religion into the curricula, while the corporate-types want to squeeze the school districts out of much-needed money by selling them snake oil.

January can't come fast enough.