The Texas Education Agency has lost its mind. Again, or still.
P.Z. has details. I’m off to discuss economics with economics teachers. Talk among yourselves until I get back later tonight.
If someone organizes a march on the TEA with torches and other farm implements, somebody text message me, please.
3 Comments | 
Biology, Evolution, Paranoia, Rampant stupidity, Religion, Science, Science and faith, Separation of church and state, TEKS, Texas | Tagged: Creationism, Education, Evolution, Religion, Texas Education Agency | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
President John F. Kennedy died 44 years ago today. Five year anniversaries tend to get more attention.
High school U.S. history students have been alive less than half the time since the assassination. To them it is ancient history, even more than the Vietnam War. Teachers need to find ways to make the history stick even in years that are not multiples of 5.
A new film offers some aid. “Oswald’s Ghost” had it’s world premiere at the Texas Theater in Oak Cliff, the place where Lee Oswald was arrested. Restoration of the theater is not complete, but it is far enough along to host events.
The movie is in severely limited release prior to a January 14, 2008 premier on PBS stations. Director Robert Stone places the assassination in history and tells some of the effects on America, rather than dwelling on facts or controversies around the shooting. The movie got a good review from the Dallas Morning News:
“Nobody had stepped back and told the story of the debate itself,” he says.
“How did these ideas come about? Who propagated them and why were they so widely believed? And what had they done to this country? Seventy percent of Americans still believe the government was involved in the Kennedy assassination or has worked to cover it up. And that’s had a huge impact.”
In the end, a seemingly disparate chorus of voices – including the late Norman Mailer – accomplish the filmmaker’s objective.
As he says, Oswald’s Ghost is “a way of explaining the ’60s. We’re not arguing anymore about what happened in Dealey Plaza. It’s an argument about explaining what came after … and how did everything go so wrong.”
With luck, it will be on DVD for classroom use by early February.
Dallas’s PBS outlet, KERA, is showing another locally-produced film this week that I have found useful in the classroom, focusing on the news coverage that day, JFK: Breaking the News. For slightly more adult teachers, there is the fun of finding news people in their infant careers, people like Robert McNeil then of NBC, Peter Jennings, and then-local Dallas reporters Jim Lehrer and Dan Rather, and Fort Worth reporter Bob Schieffer. Few other one-day events have produced such a stable of news greats — the Kennedy assassination spurred the careers of more new people than any other event with the possible exception of World War II. Jane Pauley narrates the story.
There is a webcam view of Dealey Plaza from the Texas Book Depository Building — the cam claims to be from the 6th floor window from which Oswald shot, but it looks like the top of the building to me.
The Kennedy assassination kicked the wind out of America. In many ways it was the event that triggered 1968, perhaps the worst single year in American history.
44 years, and we still don’t know the full set of ramifications of the events of that day. Historians keep chipping away.
1 Comment | Disasters, History, History images, History museums, History video sources, JFK assassination, Texas, Texas history | Tagged: History, Kennedy assassination, Movies, Oswald | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Before new science textbooks will be approved by the Texas State Board of Education, the Board is engaging in a review and possible rewriting of science standards. In the wake of the Board’s voting to require Texas high school graduates to get an additional year of science education, this should be a good sign of concern for tough standards and high quality education.
Science standard rewrites in other states have been seen as open season on evolution in biology, however. Ohio and Kansas experiences in the since 1999 suggest advocates of science and education should be wary. Texas is not known for strong support of evolution by education officials (a reputation that serious education officials should think hard about changing).
Texas Citizens for Science, a group assembled in 2003 to defend good science and especially evolution, is watching the SBOE actions. TCS President Steven Schafersman has shared his views on actions in the past month, in an e-mail to TCS members and supporters of good textbooks. For the record, I reproduce his e-mail text completely below the fold. This material is also available in different form at the TCS website.
Citizens still carry a lot of clout in government in this nation. Good science standards in textbooks require vigilance of such people. We thank them.
1 Comment | Education, Education quality, Evolution, Science and faith, Texas, Textbook Selection | Tagged: Education, Evolution, Science, Texas State Board of Education, Textbooks | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
You do recall from Creationism 102 that the Earth was born on October 23, yes?
Why not celebrate, like these wise Austinites? Surely it’s scientific, and reasonable . . .
4 Comments | Creationism, Humor, Reason, Science, Science and faith, Texas, Textbook Selection, Textbooks | Tagged: biology textbooks, Creationism, Earth's birthday, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Texas Gov. Rick Perry named Acting Education Commissioner Robert Scott to head the Texas Education Agency yesterday. The Houston Chronicle carried the Associated Press story.
Some Texas educators are disappointed that no one like Mike Moses got the job. Moses is a long-time public school educator who was a very popular and knowledgeable. But disappointment was tempered by relief for what might have happened. Gov. Perry earlier in 2007 named a creationist and hard-back conservative to chair the State Board of Education. Scott is not thought to be that deep into right-wing political ideology.
Scott is a policy wonk, coming out of legislative staff to staff TEA. This is the second time he was acting commissioner. Oddly, he is so little known that it is unclear whether he is the Robert Scott who appears to have acted contrary to ethics and law in an earlier TEA contract problem, or whether it was another TEA employee also named Robert Scott. People who would usually know the difference in such situations, appear not to know in this one.
Were there a stock market in state educational attainment, Texas’s stock would have dropped 8% yesterday, with analysts saying it was better than the expected 12% decrease.
Can teachers alone save Texas’s education system? It’s a risky experiment.
(Text of TEA press release below the fold.)
Leave a Comment » | Education, State school boards, Texas, Texas history | Tagged: Education, Texas Education Agency | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Having a brand new canyon is sort of a once in a lifetime experience. It might even be more rare than that.
Texas’s Canyon Lake Gorge opened to the public last week — a gorge, a canyon, that was carved out over a couple of days in 2002 when flood waters charging over an overtaxed dam cut through soft soils and soft rock to expose millions of years of sediments. Dinosaur footprints were exposed by the flood, too.
A torrent of water from an overflowing lake sliced open the earth in 2002, exposing rock formations, fossils and even dinosaur footprints in just three days. Since then, the canyon has been accessible only to researchers to protect it from vandals, but on Saturday it opens to its first public tour.
“It exposed these rocks so quickly and it dug so deeply, there wasn’t a blade of grass or a layer of algae,” said Bill Ward, a retired geology professor from the University of New Orleans who started cataloging the gorge almost immediately after the flood.
The mile-and-a-half-long gorge, up to 80 feet deep, was dug out from what had been a nondescript valley covered in mesquite and oak trees. It sits behind a spillway built as a safety valve for Canyon Lake, a popular recreation spot in the Texas Hill Country between San Antonio and Austin.
The reservoir was built in the 1960s to prevent flash flooding along the Guadalupe River and to assure the water supply for central Texas. The spillway had never been overrun until July 4, 2002, when 70,000 cubic feet of water gushed downhill toward the Guadalupe River for three days, scraping off vegetation and topsoil and leaving only limestone walls.
Canyon Lake is southwest of Austin, almost due west from San Marcos about 20 miles. The lake backed up from a 1960 flood control project dam built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — the new Canyon Lake Gorge is managed jointly by the Corps and the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority.
Watch carefully, dear reader: Creationists will soon start to claim that the rapid cutting of this canyon verifies a young age for all canyons, and shows that the Earth’s geology can indeed be very young. But that claim will gloss over the fact that while the gorge was cut quickly, it was cut through sediments that took millions or billions of years to lay down. The Associated Press reports problems with such a hypothesis:
The sudden exposure of such canyons is rare but not unprecedented. Flooding in Iowa in 1993 opened a limestone gorge behind a spillway at Corvalville Lake north of Iowa City, but that chasm, Devonian Fossil Gorge, is narrower and shallower than Canyon Lake Gorge.
Neither compares to the world’s most famous canyon. It took water around 5 million to 6 million years to carve the Grand Canyon, which plunges 6,000 feet at its deepest point and stretches 15 miles at its widest.
The more modest Canyon Lake Gorge still displays a fault line and rock formations carved by water that seeped down and bubbled up for millions of years before the flooding.
Some of the canyon’s rocks are punched with holes like Swiss cheese, and the fossils of worms and other ancient wildlife are everywhere. The rocks, typical of the limestone buried throughout central Texas, date back “111 million years, plus or minus a few hundred thousand years,” Ward said.
Six three-toed dinosaur footprints offer evidence of a two-legged carnivore strolling along the water. The footprints were temporarily covered with sand to protect them as workers reinforced the spillway, but they’ll be uncovered again eventually, Rhoad said.
Tours for the new gorge are booked for the next six months. Details on how to reserve space can be found at the website of the Gorge Preservation Society (GPS).
5 Comments | Geography - Physical, geology, History, Natural history, Science, Texas, Travel | Tagged: Canyon Lake Gorge, Floods, geography, geology, History, Natural history, Science, Texas, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Teachers looking for good interactive graphics on human migration in prehistoric times should take a look at the website of Australia’s Bradshaw Foundation. The map requires an Adobe Flash player, and I cannot embed it here — but go take a look, here. “The Journey of Man” seems tailor made for classroom use, if you have a live internet connection and a projector.
Ancient art is the chief focus of the foundation.
Examples of some of the most famous cave and rock paintings populate the site, along with many lesser known creations — the eponymous paintings, the Bradshaw group, generally disappear from U.S. versions of world history texts. The Bradshaw Foundation website explains:
The Bradshaw Paintings are incredibly sophisticated, as you will see from the 32 pictures in the Paintings Section, yet they are not recent creations but originate from an unknown past period which some suggest could have been 50,000 years ago. This art form was first recorded by Joseph Bradshaw in 1891, when he was lost on an Kimberley expedition in the north west of Australia. Dr. Andreas Lommel stated on his expedition to the Kimberleys in 1955 that the rock art he referred to as the Bradshaw Paintings may well predate the present Australian Aborigines.
This ancient art carries a story that should intrigue even junior high school students, and it offers examples of archaeological techniques that are critical to determining the ages of undated art in the wild:
According to legend, they were made by birds. It was said that these birds pecked the rocks until their beaks bled, and then created these fine paintings by using a tail feather and their own blood. This art is of such antiquity that no pigment remains on the rock surface, it is impossible to use carbon dating technology. The composition of the original paints cant be determined, and whatever pigments were used have been locked into the rock itself as shades of Mulberry red, and have become impervious to the elements.
Fortuitously, in 1996 Grahame Walsh discovered a Bradshaw Painting partly covered by a fossilised Mud Wasp nest, which scientists have removed and analysed using a new technique of dating, determining it to be 17,000 + years old.
Texas history and geography teachers should note the Bradshaw Foundation’s work on prehistorica art in the Pecos River Valley: “Pecos Experience: Art and archeaology in the lower Pecos.” There is much more here than is found in most Texas history texts — material useful for student projects or good lesson plans.
Leave a Comment » | Archaeology, Art, Geography - Physical, History and art, History images, Lesson plans, Maps, Prehistory, Technology in the classroom, TEKS, Texas, Texas history | Tagged: Archaeology, Australia, Bradshaw Foundation, human migration, prehistoric humans, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Sec. of Education Margaret Spellings defends the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” Act (NCLB) because, she says, it helps with accountability. It’s all about testing to make sure education takes, don’t you know.
Unless the test might show that Spellings and Bush haven’t done what they promised to do. Then the tests are off.
Bug Girl has the story: The U.S. has pulled out of the international testing for math and science, claiming budget restrictions. Surely the Bush administration did not fail to budget for their big test showing. Is that the real reason? Or do they fear that the test comparisons will show that NCLB has not worked?
Good discussion in the comments, too, about sequencing of math and science courses.
Leave a Comment » | Education assessment, Education quality, No Child Left Behind Act, Politics, Texas | Tagged: , NCLB | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
[Substitute photo from Desserts by Juliette, dessertsbyjuliette.com]
Caption: “When the legend wouldn’t die, Kevin Garvin created a cookie worthy of the Neiman Marcus name.”
Snopes.com and other sites debunk the old urban legend about the woman who was charged “two-fifty” for a chocolate chip cookie recipe at Neiman Marcus’ stores — but in defense of mainstream media, let it be noted that the Dallas Morning News does it up right, repeating the recipe, fact-checking the story, and actually baking the cookies and providing that mouth-watering photo above (et tu, Pavlov?)
The story began circulating in the late ’80s and spread quickly.
Although Neiman’s denied the story – in fact, the company said it had never served cookies in its restaurants – it kept gaining momentum. Finally, with the help of the Internet and e-mail, it became The Urban Legend That Would Not Die.
Inquiries about the costly recipe kept coming in until, finally, the store tasked its bakers to come up with a recipe worthy of the NM reputation. It was perfected in 1995 by Kevin Garvin and is on the company Web site, www.neimanmarcus.com. Free. It also is in the Neiman Marcus Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, $45) by Mr. Garvin and John Harrisson.
The store served cookies made from the recipe as part of its 100th anniversary celebration this month.
When victimized by a hoax, make a cookbook and make some money off of it. Of course, it’s a lot nicer being “Neiman Marcus cookied” than being “swift-boated.”
Here’s the Neiman Marcus version of the Neiman Marcus cookie made famous in the hoax:
Preheat oven to 300 F. Cream the butter with the sugars until fluffy using an electric mixer on medium speed (approximately 30 seconds).
Beat in the egg and vanilla extract for another 30 seconds.
In a mixing bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and baking soda and beat into the butter at low speed for about 15 seconds. Stir in the espresso coffee powder and the chocolate chips.
Using a 1-ounce scoop or 2-tablespoon measure, drop cookies onto a greased cookie sheet about 3 inches apart. Gently press down on the dough with the back of a spoon to spread out into a 2-inch circle.
Bake for about 20 minutes, or until nicely browned around the edges. Bake a little longer for a crispy cookie.
Makes 2 dozen cookies.
PER SERVING: Calories 154 (43% fat) Fat 8 g (5 g sat) Cholesterol 20 mg Sodium 119 mg Fiber 1 g Carbohydrates 21 g Protein 2 g
More:
6 Comments | Food history, History, Hoaxes, Texas, Texas history | Tagged: Hoaxes, Neiman Marcus, Neiman Marcus cookie, Texas, urban legends | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Don’t forget about the victims of Katrina who still need help. But add to your worries the more than 50,000 families in Texas whose homes were seriously damaged by Hurricane Rita who have had no inkling of help, now two years after the storm.
Gov. Rick Perry declared the state disaster; Pres. George Bush declared the national distaster — but only about 1% of the money allocated has been spent, and Texans are hurting.
FrecklesCassie, the author of the blog Political Teen Tidbits, makes the case for action here: “Hurricane Damage isn’t the Only Problem .”
Drop a letter to Rick Perry; drop a letter to George Bush. Tell them to get off their duffs and do something. That’s what they get the big hair and make the big bucks for.
Copy Cassie’s post and send it to your best friends in e-mail; put up a blog post and link to Cassie’s post.
Where are Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn when Texas needs them? Cornyn is up for election next year, and he’s not all over this?
Looks to me like the Democrats could pick up a U.S. Senate seat in Texas, too. Texas wouldn’t be ignored like this if Phil Gramm and George Bush were still alive . . .
2 Comments | Disasters, Government, Politics, Texas | Tagged: government inaction, Hurricane Rita, Texas disasters | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Really. A Texas earthquake. September 15, 2007.
Missed it? Well, it was at the dinner hour, 06:16:42 PM (CDT). You may have thought it was Bubba’s great sauce for the barbecue, or the raspberry in the iced tea.
US Geological Survey provides a state-by-state listing of latest earthquakes. Texas is not a particularly active zone — but there are quakes, even here.
This last one, just over a week ago, was a 2.7 on the Richter scale, too weak to merit much news coverage even in the flatlands. It shook Milam County and surprised people there, but it didn’t do much damage:
In terms of destruction, the earthquake was hardly significant.
Emergency responders said they knew of only one report of damage: A teapot fell off of a woman’s stove.
In California, people probably wouldn’t have even noticed the tremor. But this earthquake happened in the Lone Star State and left Brazos Valley residents baffled.
“You just don’t expect your house to shake,” said Burleson County resident Karen Bolt. She was in her trailer home cleaning dishes when the temblor began.
USGS provides more details than you can use:
| Magnitude | 2.7 |
|---|---|
| Date-Time |
|
| Location | 30.74N 96.74W |
| Depth | 5.0 kilometers |
| Region | CENTRAL TEXAS |
| Distances | 35 km (20 miles) W of Bryan, Texas 65 km (40 miles) ENE of Taylor, Texas 110 km (70 miles) ENE of AUSTIN, Texas 170 km (105 miles) NW of Houston, Texas |
| Location Uncertainty | Error estimate: horizontal +/- 16.2 km; depth fixed by location program |
| Parameters | Nst=4, Nph=4, Dmin=123.3 km, Rmss=1.25 sec, Erho=16.2 km, Erzz=0 km, Gp=130.4 degrees |
| Source | USGS NEIC (WDCS-D) |
| Remarks | Felt in the Caldwell-Rockdale area. |
| Event ID | ushhc |
Still, Texans should be relieved it was a small one. The largest recorded Texas earthquake was in 1931, with an epicenter near Valentine. At 5.7 magnitude and VII intensity, it nearly destroyed the little town of Valentine.
In terms of magnitude and damage, this is the largest earthquake known to have occurred in Texas. The most severe damage was reported at Valentine, where all buildings except wood-frame houses were damaged severely and all brick chimneys toppled or were damaged. The schoolhouse, which consisted of one section of concrete blocks and another section of bricks, was damaged so badly that it had to be rebuilt. Small cracks formed in the schoolhouse yard. Some walls collapsed in adobe buildings, and ceilings and partitions were damaged in wood-frame structures. Some concrete and brick walls were cracked severely. One low wall, reinforced with concrete, was broken and thrown down. Tombstones in a local cemetery were rotated. Damage to property was reported from widely scattered points in Brewster, Jeff Davis, Culberson, and Presidio Counties. Landslides occurred in the Van Horn Mountaiins, southwest of Lobo; in the Chisos Mountains, in the area of Big Bend; and farther northwest, near Pilares and Porvenir. Landslides also occurred in the Guadalupe Mountains, near Carlsbad, New Mexico, and slides of rock and dirt were reported near Picacho, New Mexico. Well water and springs were muddied throughout the area. Also felt in parts of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and in Chihauhua and Coahuila, Mexico.
Texas history courses could make some use of these data, for map reading exercises, and for general geography about the state. Click on the map below, the isoseismal map of the 1931 Valentine, Texas quake, and geography teachers will begin to dream of warm-up exercises right away.
3 Comments | Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, History, Images, Maps, Natural history, Natural resources, Science, Technology in the classroom, Texas, Texas history | Tagged: Classroom technology, earthquakes, geography, geology, Texas, USGS | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Intelligent design advocates’ chief claim holds that where a pattern may be discerned, there is someone with intelligence scheming away.
That explains a recent spattering of activities in Texas that otherwise are just blots of minor, irritating news. It points to animus against science in top religious and political circles in Texas — if, of course, there is anything at all to intelligent design’s chief premise.
Scientists and citizens for good government, and parents concerned about good education, should note these recent actions:
First, ID advocates tried to establish a stealth toehold at Baylor University. The Waco Tribune explained the otherwise odd events surrounding Bill Dembski’s latest foray into Baylor — he got himself designated as a “post-doc” student for an engineer’s project, and a website featuring a new sciency term, “informatics,” quickly appeared. School administrators were not satisfied with the transparency and legitimacy of funding for the project, and pulled the plug on it, producing wails of “oppression” from the ID harpy chorus.
Dembski is a professor at the Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. Had he been collaborating with Robert Marks at Baylor, one would think that collaboration from his professorial position would carry more clout, attract more funding, and generally make a lot more sense than having the multiple-degreed Dembski do post-doc work in engineering, a field he’s not yet got a degree in. Apart from the sheer humor of Dembski pursuing one more degree that is not biology in order to try to get the credentials to assault biology, the sheer stupidity of the affair has put scientists off-guard, satisfied that Baylor’s integrity watchdogs have protected science adquately. I’m not so sure.
Second, without much fanfare outside extreme fundamentalist circles, the Institute for Creation Research moved most of its operation from California to Dallas. The stated reasons include proximity to DFW Airport, which makes sense for a corporation like J. C. Penney or Exxon-Mobil, but doesn’t really make a lot of sense for a “school” that has fought to get the right to grant graduate degrees in California.
Third, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s appointment of a stiff-necked creationist to be the chairman of the Texas State Board of Education produced concern among educators and scientists, especially remembering Chairman Don McLeroy’s positions on creationism and evolution in the last biology textbook approval round, in 2003 (not to mention his anti-disease prevention stance on health books in 2004). Concern was defused by a Dallas Morning News article in which McLeroy and other creationists on the board said they would not work to put intelligent design into the curriculum.
But reports from meetings of the SBOE in the past week make it clear that the creationist agenda is still very much alive, with McLeroy working with other creationists to break standard procedures for curriculum review, and to stack panels reviewing science standards with people who will work against evolution, cosmology, environmental protection and wildlife management, and disease prevention. Politics of Christian dominionists appear to dominate the discussions at the education board, rather than the rigor of the curriculum or how best to teach students so they can ace federally-mandated state tests. Pedagogy takes a back seat to religious politics.
Individually, each of these events is just another in a long string of nuttiness. The moving of ICR to Texas, however, means that ICR representatives would have the Texas citizen’s right to testify at textbook hearings. These may be unconnected events of wingnuttery, or they may be initial moves to be in the right place to gut science textbooks in the next round of Texas textbook approvals.
It is best not to assume intelligent design where mere incompetence also provides an sufficient answer.
But watch what happens next.
2 Comments | Creationism, Intelligent Design, Science, Science and faith, Texas, Texas Lege, Textbook Selection, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Go to the University of Florida Smathers Library site, and admire the beauty of these old maps of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. (While I think fair use would cover it, I’m holding back on posting an image until copyright permission comes through — you’re licensed to use them in the classroom, however.)
What else would you expect from a library named after Sen. George A. Smathers, who was part of that legendary 1950 Senate campaign in Florida?
The maps featured on the first page include Spanish, Dutch, English, Belgian, French and Italian maps of the early explorers, suitable certainly for Texas history courses, and also for Florida, Louisiana and U.S. history units on European exploration.
This site is quite Florida-centric, but it’s links also provide some interesting and valuable resources, such as the link to satellite imagery of the areas, like the NOAA map, below.
Tip of the old scrub brush to A Cracker Boy Looks at Florida
Leave a Comment » | DBQ sources, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Historic documents, History, History and art, History images, Maps, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
It looks a lot like inside baseball. It’s conducted away from classrooms, while teachers struggle to deliver science to students in crowded classrooms without adequate textbooks, without adequate science labs and without adequate time. The perpetrators hew to Otto von Bismark’s claim that the public shouldn’t see their laws or sausages being made.
Since Bismark, in the U.S. we have food safety laws to protect our sausage. In Texas, the political scheming in the State Board of Education (SBOE) continues to spoil science education.
Science standards for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) — the Texas state science education standards — are being rewritten by the Texas Education Agency, under direction of the SBOE. While procedures have been consistent over the past 15 years or so, and the state legislature reined in SBOE from political shenanigans in textbook selection, SBOE members are fighting back to get the right to skew science standards. For weeks the selection of committees to review specific standards have been held up so members of the SBOE can stack the committees to put their political views in.
Board members are insisting on stacking the review committees now, weeks after the deadline for members to nominate qualified teachers and experts to review the standards. This is the gateway to the path of bad standards through which we earlier watched other school boards frolic — Cobb County, Georgia, Dover, Pennsylvania, and the State of Ohio. Taxpayers in Cobb County and Dover paid the price when courts correctly noted that the changes proposed violated the religious freedom clauses of the state constitutions and the First Amendment. Ohio’s board backed down when a new governor cleaned house, and when it became clear that their position would lose in court.
Simply gutting the standards, however, may not rise to the standard of illegal religious influence. Keeping kids in the dark may not violate federal or state law. It’s immoral, but would the Texas State Board stick to that side of morality? Many observers doubt it, given the track record of recent years striking important health information from texts that might save a few lives, and the legislature’s pro-cancer legislation this year.
Some observers have provided detailed reports that to many of us look like simple foot dragging. In the past week it has become more clear that the foot dragging is really political positioning.
If anyone was lulled to sleep by the Dallas Morning News article a few weeks ago which touted board members’ claims they would not advocate putting intelligent design into the biology curriculum, the greater fears now seem to be coming true: Board members did NOT say they would stand for good science, or that they would not try to cut evolution, Big Bang, astronomy, geology, accurate medicine and health, and paleontology out of curricula. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times warned:
Board chairman Don McLeroy, though indicating that he won’t support the teaching of intelligent design, says he would like to see more inclusion in textbooks of what he called weaknesses in the evolutionary theory, a sentiment expressed by many of the predominantly Republican 15-member board.
This only sounds like another version of a common tactic by religious pressure groups that seek to create a controversy about evolution that only exists in their opposition. That nicely covers their ultimate goal of converting classrooms into pulpits for religious teachings.
Texas schoolchildren will be the losers if the teaching of science, or health, or history — all subjects that have been the target of pressure groups — is based on something other than the best known and most widely accepted bodies of knowledge. In a pluralistic nation with many creeds and religions, letting personal faith become the guiding force for the public school curriculum invites creation of a battleground.
Texans should watch the State Board of Education in the months to come.
Just over a month ago one of the chief theorists behind Big Bang theory died in Austin, Ralph Alpher. His death went largely unnoticed. In 2003, with the Nobel Prize winning-physicist Ilya Prigogine of the University of Texas not yet cool in the grave, charlatans felt free to misrepresent his work on thermodynamics, saying he had “proved” that evolution could not occur. In fact, his prize-winning work showed that on a planet like Earth, evolution is a virtual certainty. Prigogine, Alpher: A greater tragedy is brewing: Will Big Bang survive the hatchets of anti-science forces on the SBOE? Many hard theories of science are unpopular with religious fanatics in Texas. Those fanatics are over-represented on the SBOE.
Don’t just watch. Write to your board member, to the TEA director, to the governor, to the legislature. One way to keep “no child left behind” is by holding all children back. Texas and America cannot afford such Taliban-like enforcement of ignorance.
5 Comments | Bogus history, Politics, Science, Science and faith, State school boards, Texas, Texas Lege, Textbook Selection, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Leave a Comment » | Biology, Natural history, Science, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 