If you wondered if the appointment of Gail Lowe, R-Lampasas, as new State Board of Education chair signals a new direction for the embattled board, Lowe’s fellow board member — and fellow culture warrior — Terri Leo, R-Spring, has an answer for you:
“Philosophically I believe she is the most conservative SBOE member. We tease her, that if we are not voting with Gail we need to check our conservative compasses.”
Gail Lowe might not decry public schools as the tool of the devil (a la Cynthia Dunbar), but her record on the board makes clear that she shares Dunbar’s primary objective — to push her religious and political agenda into Texas classrooms. She’ll just do it with a smile instead of a sneer.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has just appointed Gail Lowe, R-Lampasas, as chairman of the State Board of Education. Lowe will replace Don McLeroy, whose nomination as chairman the state Senate rejected in May.
In a press release announcing the appointment. Gov. Perry expressed confidence “that through her leadership, we will continue to ensure that Texans receive the educational foundation necessary to be successful in college, the workplace and beyond.”
Far-right pressure groups had been pushing for the appointment of Cynthia Dunbar, who has called public education “unconstitutional,” “tyrannical” and a “tool of perversion.”
We’ll have more soon.
UPDATE:
Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller is releasing the following statement regarding Gov. Rick Perry’s appointment today of Gail Lowe as the new chair of the State Board of Education.
“It’s disappointing that instead of choosing a mainstream conservative who could heal the divisions on the board, the governor once again appointed someone who repeatedly has put political agendas ahead of the education of Texas schoolchildren. Ms. Lowe has marched in lockstep with a faction of board members who believe that their personal beliefs are more important than the experience and expertise of teachers and academics who have dedicated their careers to educating our children and helping them succeed. We can only hope that she will rise above her history on the board and as chair keep the board from continuing to hold the education of our children hostage to divisive ‘culture war’ battles.”
Lowe’s record on the State Board of Education includes:
In 2004 Ms. Lowe opposed requiring that publishers obey curriculum standards and put medically accurate information about responsible pregnancy and disease prevention in new high school health textbooks.
In 2007 Ms. Lowe voted to throw out nearly three years of work by teacher writing teams on new language arts standards. Over the strenuous objections of teachers and curriculum specialists, Lowe instead voted for a standards document that the board’s far-right bloc patched together overnight and slipped under hotel doors the morning of the final vote.
In 2003 and 2009 Ms. Lowe supported dumbing down the state’s public school science curriculum by voting to include unscientific, creationist criticisms of evolution in science textbooks and curriculum standards.
THIRD UPDATE: Read an earlier post from TFNInsider about Lowe, highlighting her highly politicized agenda for public schools (including global warming denial and shoe-horning lots of supposedly “conservative values” into the classroom).
McLeroy is quoted in a Dallas Morning News story about reviews of the current standards by David Barton of WallBuilders and conservative evangelical minister Peter Marshall. Barton has earned only a bachelor’s degree in religious education. Marshall also has no graduate work in the social sciences. But both are prominent political activists among far-right evangelicals.
Despite their absurdly weak credentials, McLeroy told the Dallas Morning News he thinks Barton and Marshall are “very qualified” to sit on an “expert” panel guiding the revision of the social studies standards:
“There is no doubt they have the experience and expertise to advise the writing teams and the board on the standards,” he said, noting he has not yet read the experts’ recommendations.
One of the Ten Commandments forbids lying, but far-right pressure groups seem to think it doesn’t apply to them. Mistruths are plentiful in their campaign to get Cynthia Dunbar named chair of the Texas State Board of Education. The biggest lie is that opponents of her appointment are discriminating against Dunbar because of her religious beliefs. A spokesperson for one fringe group says Dunbar’s critics “oppose religious freedom, particularly Christian conservatives.”
That dishonest line of attack is simply an attempt to distract Texans from the truth: Dunbar, who has homeschooled her own children, shouldn’t be chair of the state board because she hates public schools. They are, she says, “unconstitutional,” “tyrannical,” and “tools of perversion.” Those are her own words. The fact is most people would also oppose an agriculture commissioner who despises farmers or a surgeon general who denounces modern medicine.
Moreover, her own supporters have have made it crystal clear that they think anyone who disagrees with them isn’t a real Christian. See, for example, here, here, here and here. That kind of arrogance and self-righteousness is nauseating. So is lying to people while using faith as a weapon to divide Texans for political gain.
It didn’t take long for the absurdly unqualified ideologues appointed to a social studies curriculum panel by the Texas State Board of Education to start playing politics with our kids’ education. Two far-right members of the so-called “expert” panel guiding the curriculum revision are demanding that César Chavez — the renowned community and labor organizer and civil rights leader — be stricken from the standards because they say he’s not the right kind of role model for students.
That’s only one of the problems with the “expert” reviews of the current social studies standards provided to the Texas Education Agency last week by the panelists. The panel is made up of six members, including a trio of mainstream academics from Texas universities. The others include political activist David Barton of Texas and evangelical minister Peter Marshall of Massachusetts, who used their reviews to criticize the inclusion of Chavez and other historical figures they consider inappropriate. In addition, they and fellow panelist Daniel Dreisbach of American University make lengthy arguments that the Founders intended to create a distinctly Christian American nation based on biblical principles. That contention conflicts with multiple rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court and sharply differs with the research of most scholars. In fact, mainstream scholars point out that the Founders sought to protect the religious freedom of citizens by keeping the affairs of government and religious institutions separate.
But let’s consider first what we fear might become a growing “blacklist” of historical figures, especially Chavez, social conservatives find objectionable.
Look, we were under no illusions when the Texas Senate wisely rejected the confirmation of Don McLeroy as board chair in May. We knew Gov. Rick Perry would likely choose another member of the board’s far-right faction as chair (even though there are other far more responsible conservative Republicans on the board). After all, the far-right faction represents his electoral base, which he will need in his re-election battle next year.
But surely even the governor realizes that choosing an extremist like Dunbar would be almost inconceivably reckless and irresponsible. Dunbar has clearly expressed her loathing for public education in her book One Nation Under God,calling public schools a “tool of perversion,” “unconstitutional” and “tryannical.” She has also personally rejected the public school system, home-schooling her children. In fact, she wrote in her book that sending our children to public schools is “throwing them into the enemy’s flames even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.”
By appointing Dunbar, Gov. Perry would be sending a clear message that he shares Dunbar’s extremism and her contempt for public education. He would be putting his political fortunes ahead of the education of nearly 5 million Texas schoolchildren. In short, such an appointment would be a shocking betrayal of all those children and their families.
We hope Gov. Perry won’t do something so cynical and self-serving. Frankly, we believe he’s better than that. With the next state board meeting set for July 14-17, we will likely find out soon whether we’re wrong about that.
A Texas Freedom Network Education Fund report released in February revealed that more than nine in 10 Texas school districts teach students nothing about responsible pregnancy and disease prevention when it comes to sex except for abstinence-only-until-marriage. One of the most common strategies in abstinence-only curricula, the study’s authors found, was wildly exaggerating the failure rate of condoms as a way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The goal of those programs, of course, is to persuade students that the only way to protect themselves is is through abstinence.
Countless medical studies have shown this approach to be fear-mongering fiction, not responsible education. Now we have another example — the fight against AIDS in Haiti:
In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti’s dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country’s population.
Instead, Haiti’s HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.
In a wide range of interviews with doctors, patients, public health experts and others, The Associated Press found that Haiti’s success in the face of chronic political and social turmoil came because organizations cooperated and tailored programs to the country’s specific challenges.
Much of the credit went to two pioneering nonprofit groups, Boston-based Partners in Health and Port-au-Prince’s GHESKIO, widely considered to be the world’s oldest AIDS clinic.
“The Haitian AIDS community feels like they’re out in front of everyone else on this, and pretty much they are,” said Judith Timyan, senior HIV/AIDS adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Haiti. “They really do some of the best work in the world.”
Researchers say the number of suffers was initially lessened by closing private blood banks, and statistically by high mortality rates — an untreated AIDS sufferer in Haiti lives eight fewer years than an untreated American.
Well-coordinated use of AIDS drugs, education and behavioral changes such as increased condom use have kept the disease from surging back, at least for now.
Meanwhile, education campaigns spread the word on prevention measures. More than 51 million free condoms have been shipped to the country of since 2004 and are advertised everywhere on street murals and corner store signs. (emphasis added)
“More Haitians know about modes of transmission than high school students in the U.S.,” Pape said. (Dr. Jean W. Pape is co-founder GHESKIO.)
The article notes that Haiti still faces substantial hurdles in fighting AIDS, but ignorance isn’t one of them. On the other hand, in Texas — which has one of the highest teen birth rates in the nation — keeping teens ignorant is the preferred strategy in most public schools. And religious-right pressure groups did a lot to keep that strategy in place during the last legislation session.
The July/August issue ofChurch and State magazine from Americans United for Separation of Church and State has an excellent cover story about David Barton. Barton, you will recall, is the head of the Christian-right group WallBuilders, which argues that separation of church and state is a “myth” and that our laws and society overall should be based on Christian biblical principles (as interpreted by fundamentalists). Barton is also serving as a so-called “expert” guiding the revision of public school social studies curriculum standards in Texas (although he is absurdly unqualified, lacking even minimal academic credentials in the field). (See here and here.)
Money quotes from the Church and State piece:
Perhaps somewhat egotistically, Barton apparently likens himself to a biblical prophet who has been ordained by God to rebuild the religious foundations of the nation.
Barton aims to do that by rediscovering an allegedly lost or suppressed Christian history of America. It’s an odd task for him, because although he poses as a historian, Barton isn’t one. . . .
We wonder whether many of the foot soldiers in the religious-right movement will ever wake up to how they have been used. Over the years we’ve all seen how religious-right pressure groups wade into areas that would seem to have nothing to do with promoting “traditional family values” (whatever that means to them) and other “culture war” issues. Case in point: a group called CRAVE — Christians Reviving America’s Values — is calling on supporters to oppose the Obama administration on health care reform. From a CRAVE press release headlined “America Cannot Afford Health Care” (and quoting the group’s president, Don Swarthout):
What have the uninsured people been doing for health care all of these years? The answer is simple. They have been going to Emergency Rooms to be treated because our laws and the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors say that they must be treated. . . .
What most observers expect to be a short special session of the Texas Legislature begins today in Austin. Gov. Rick Perry called the session to deal with lawmakers’ failure this spring to reauthorize the Texas Department of Transportation and four other state agencies scheduled to end operations under the state’s system of periodic Sunset review.
If the governor does not expand the session’s call to other topics, we don’t expect lawmakers to deal with hot-button issues like State Board of Education reform, sex education and stem cell research. Even so, far-right pressure groups have been mobilizing activists. Texas Freedom Network will be ready to act if culture warriors attempt to hijack the session.
Texas clearly doesn’t have a monopoly on right-wing nonsense. A group of Oklahoma lawmakers is issuing a proclamation that blames gays, abortion supporters and a host of other demons for the nation’s current economic crisis. Really.
The proclamation claims that the nation’s current economic troubles “are consequences of our greater national moral crisis”:
“(T)his nation has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery . . .”
Then it lays the blame for this moral crisis at the feet of the President Obama for, in part, refusing to participate in a public National Day of Prayer ceremony and for honoring Gay Pride Month (disregarding, the proclamation says, ”the biblical admonitions to live clean and pure lives by proclaiming an entire month to an immoral behavior.”)
The proclamation calls for Christian renewal for the nation and a return to living by biblical principles.
Unlike Kern, apparently, we don’t recall that Lehman Brothers, AIG and a host of other finance powerhouses collapsed last fall because their employees were racing out the door to get abortions or to watch Adam and Steve or Thelma and Louise get hitched.
The US Pastor Council/Texas Pastor Council, which lately has been wading into the waters of electoral politics in Texas, again demonstrates that gay-bashing is one of the religious right’s prominent political weapons. This weekend the Houston-based group sent out a press release attacking Houston city officials for participating in a gay pride event. The group claims that official participation in the event put “the stamp of approval on pedophilia and myriad other sexual disorders.”
The Pastor Council’s grand pooh-bah, Dave Welch, thundered thusly:
“This event promotes and glorifies sexual deviancy that most people find immoral as well as destructive to family and marriage. . . . We will be initiating an open records request to see if one dime of taxpayers’ money was used. We will also certainly communicate to our congregants which of those elected to serve the people chose instead to bow to a narrow and morally depraved special interest group.”
The Pastor Council, which also attacked various corporate sponsors of the event, hasn’t been very subtle about its support for Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s re-election bid next year. And of course, Gov. Perry has scored fairly high in the past on the sneer-o-meter when it comes to gays and lesbians. With the governor charging hard to the right to lock up his base in the Republican primary, don’t be surprised if you see more gay-baiting in coming months.
Still not convinced that evolution is a fraud? A press release yesterday from San Antonio-based Vision Forum Ministries promotes “12 new half-hour episodes that disprove popular Darwinist myths in a family radio drama format.” Vision Forum’s president, Doug Phillips, says the the latest episodes of the Jonathan Park Creation Adventure Series show “the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the much-venerated worldview of Charles Darwin.” More about the series:
“The best-selling Jonathan Park audio drama series follows young Jonathan and his paleontologist family on their adventures around the globe. In ‘Jonathan Park and the Journey Never Taken,’ the Polar Star Medallion mysteriously shows up at the Brenan Museum of Creation, quickly throwing the Creation Response Team into a memorable scavenger hunt. Cryptic clues lead their team to Sweden, Scotland, and beyond in search of a promised treasure. Along the way, they explore the true history of Charles Darwin and his colleagues and learn how these men helped perpetuate the myth of a universe created without a Creator.”
This is the kind of stuff evolution-deniers on the Texas State Board of Education would love to see in science classrooms. The “war on science” marches on.
The controversy over a bill on technology in public school classrooms once again shows that the Texas State Board of Education’s far-right members will fight hard against any policy they perceive as theatening their control over what public school students learn.
On Friday Gov. Rick Perry signed House Bill 4294, a bill by state Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, that would, in part, allow schools districts to use state textbook money to buy laptops and other technology that students could use for electronic instructional materials, such as online textbooks. The bill also establishes procedures for the Texas education commissioner to approve electronic instructional materials that school districts may purchase.
Just how much did creationists gain in the battle over new public school science standards adopted in Texas this spring? Houston Chronicle writer Lisa Falkenberg points to an article from the journal Science that suggests an encouraging answer: not as much as evolution deniers hoped.
As you will recall, creationists on the Texas State Board of Education lost a high-profile battle to require that science students learn phony “weaknesses” of evolution. A majority of board members, backed by countless scientists(including Nobel laureates), successfully opposed that broad requirement. But creationists succeeded in passing other requirements for students to learn pseudoscientific arguments against evolution based on distortions of the fossil record and the complexity of the cell.
The June 12 article in Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, discusses how publishers and textbook authors may be able to use those requirements actually to strengthen instruction on evolution. (The article is locked except for subscribers.) The weight of scientific evidence shows that the creationists’ arguments are nonsense, suggests Kenneth Miller, author of one of the nation’s leading high school biology textbooks. Says Miller:
“The advocates of these (Texas) standards underestimate the strength of the scientific evidence for structures and phenomena that they mistakenly believe evolution cannot account for. The new wording is an opportunity to make biology texts even stronger.”
So, for example, textbooks may simply spend more time discussing how the complexity of the cell supports evolutionary theory. Textbooks can also use discussions of the fossil record to explore the concept of “punctuated equilibrium,” among other topics that are based in sound science.
In short, Miller believes the new Texas science standards can’t force publishers and textbook authors to lie to students, no matter how much creationists might want that to happen.
The flip side of Obama’s ‘empathy’ is apparent hatred and contempt for white people, traditional families, small business owners, evangelical Christians, conservatives, and everyone else that liberals call the ‘racist, heterosexist, nativist, Christianist, capitalist, homophobic power structure’ in America. In other words, what most of us call normal people. These radical leftists regard folks like you and me and our children as the enemy, and it’s their mission in life to put us in our supposed place, which to them means at the back of the bus. They’re in charge now, and they fully intend to use their power to remake America in their image. If the Senate approves Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, Obama will know that he has carte blanche to escalate his all out war on traditional Americans. . . .
The Texas Freedom Network Education Fund’s training for people interested in seeking election to the State Board of Education is now set for 1 -5 p.m., July 22, on the campus of St. Edward’s University in Austin. This nonpartisan training is open to everyone, regardless of political party. People simply interested in learning about what it will take to run a successful state board campaign are also welcome to attend.
That was nonsense. As we noted later, Don McLeroy (who was State Board of Education chairman at the time) had leaked early work from the writing teams to TPPF — work that was nowhere near complete. It seems clear that TPPF’s purpose (and McLeroy’s) was to discredit the work of the writing team members. Most of those team members are hardworking educators and academics who know history and understand quite well how to craft curriculum standards for students.
But not all of them. We have already reported about the ideologues the McLeroy faction on the state board has appointed to a panel of so-called “experts” who will help guide the revision of the social studies standards. It turns out that faction members have also embedded fringe right-wingers on the very curriculum writing teams that they were criticizing last March. Here are three:
We have seen over the past year more public interest in the State Board of Education than at any time since Texas Freedom Network’s founding in 1995. As the board has lurched from one “culture war” battle to another, more and more people have stepped forward to demand that the board stop putting politics ahead of the education of Texas schoolchildren.
The time for politics is during elections. So the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund will sponsor a candidate training for anyone interested in running for a seat on the state board or just wanting to know what it takes to run a winning campaign for the board.
The training, which will be nonpartisan and open to candidates from any political party (or none at all), will be held July 22 in Austin. We will announce time and location as well as registration information soon.
Particpants will learn which state board seats are up for election in 2010 as well as information about campaign planning, messaging and funding. Speakers will include experts with years of experience running — and winning — election campaigns.
In an op-ed column that has run in various newspapers (including in Houston and Austin), Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller explains how the recently ended legislative session demonstrates that the “culture wars” are still a divisive and disruptive influence in Texas politics. We are to publishing the op-ed for TFN Insider readers here.
Legislative Session Shows ‘Culture Wars’ Still Thrive in Texas
National elections last November seemed to signal that voters are exhausted by relentless battles over divisive social issues. But the recently ended legislative session showed that the culture wars still thrive in Texas.
The Texas Freedom Network has been stepping up efforts to protect the right of families to direct the religious education of their own children as the religious right’s assault on that freedom moves into high gear. The latest example of the right’s increasingly aggressive campaign: an Ohio teacher has filed a lawsuit claiming that public school officials have violated his constitutional and civil rights by trying to stop him from promoting his religious beliefs in the classroom.
School officials in Mount Vernon, Ohio, took action against John Freshwater, an eighth-grade science teacher, after an investigation into a series of incidents. The Columbus Dispatch reports:
One of the things you can safely bet on when it comes to the religious right: the worse the fund-raising goes, the more extreme the language gets. Oh sure, it’s not unusual to see nonprofits raise alarm levels in an effort to raise more money. But the religious right seems especially adept (and shameless) in vilifying their vicims, especially gay folks.
Case in point: Vision America, based in the East Texas town of Lufkin.
Let’s see if we have this right. The Texas Legislature adjourned last week without passing legislation to keep five state agencies — including the Texas Department of Transportation and the Texas Department of Insurance — operating after Sept. 1, 2010.
If there are any transportation related issues addressed in the Special Session, then we will want to see the Choose Life License plate on the agenda.
This much should be clear about Texas politics: the radical right — which has the support of the governor — is far more interested in promoting fringe political agendas than in dealing with the real issues that working families care about. Instead of letting lawmakers focus on critical issues like transportation and insurance oversight, right-wingers want yet another divisive, distracting battle over turning license plates into platforms for promoting political agendas.
The same thing is happening in education. State Board of Education debates over curriculum standards increasingly revolve around issues like teaching creationism and attacking church-state separation, not ensuring that Texas students get a 21st-century education.
For the radical right in Texas, it’s always about fueling the “culture wars.”
We reported in April that the creationist faction on the Texas State Board of Education was moving to pack a key “expert” review panel for the social studies curriculum revision with like-minded ideologues. (See here and here.) We now have the names of all the “expert” panelists. As with the science “expert” panel, it appears that the social studies panel will be evenly split between mainstream academics and ideologues aligned with the creationist faction.
The three mainstream academics on the panel are Jesus Francisco de la Teja of Texas State University (appointed by SBOE members Rene Nunez, D-El Paso, and Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi), Jim Kracht of Texas A&M (appointed by Pat Hardy, R-Fort Worth, and Bob Craig, R-Lubbock), and Lybeth Hodges (appointed by Mavis Knight, D-Dallas, and Lawrence Allen, D-Houston).
The three ideologues aligned with the board’s creationist faction are David Barton (appointed by Gail Lowe, R-Lampasas, and Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio), the Rev. Peter Marshall (appointed by Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, and Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond), and Daniel Dreisbach (appointed by Terri Leo, R-Spring, and David Bradley, R-Beaumont Buna).
SBOE members Don McLeroy, R-College Station; Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, R-Dallas; and Rick Agosto, D-San Antonio, were unable to come to agreement on appointing a seventh panelist.
Even a casual look at the vita for each of these “experts” makes clear grossly unequal qualifications. That examination also reveals the agenda of the board’s creationist faction: use the social studies curriculum to promote a political argument against separation of church and state.
So let’s look at each of the so-called “experts” who will guide the revision of social studies standards for an entire generation of children in Texas public schools.
During last week’s public hearing on proposed science standards, evolution deniers on the Texas State Board of Education insisted that they had no intention of promoting “intelligent design”/creationism in public schools. Stephen Meyer, co-founder of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute in Seattle, echoed the claims of the board’s anti-science faction. They just want kids to learn “all of the evidence” about evolution, pro and con, we were told.
Oh, talk to the hand.
Why was Meyer invited to serve on a special science curriculum review panel and to speak at the hearing? It certainly wasn’t because of his science credentials — he’s not a research scientist.
Meyer was on the panel because the Discovery Institute is the biggest shill for “intelligent design,” which the Disco folks puff up as a “scientific” alternative to evolution. But because there isn’t a shred of real scientific evidence to support “intelligent design” (essentially creationism dressed up in a lab coat), the Disco Institute spends most of its time attacking evolution.
One of the ways it does this is by hosting “Summer Seminars” for college undergraduates and graduate students. This year’s seminars include “Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences” and “Intelligent Design in the Social Sciences and Humanities.”
Past speakers have featured such luminaries in the scientific world as:
Meyer, co-founder of the Discovery Institute
Casey Luskin, a lawyer and Disco’s program officer in public policy and legal affairs
William Dembski, who holds doctorates in mathematics and philosophy and a master’s of divinity; served as the director of the short-lived Michael Polanyi Institute, which he described as an “intelligent design think tank” at Baylor University; currently serves on the faculty of the fundamentalist Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth
John West, who holds a doctorate in government, serves as associate director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and vice president for public policy and legal affairs
Paul Nelson, who holds a doctorate in philosophy and is a fellow at the Discovery Institute
Bruce Gordon, doctorate in the philosophy of science, former associate director of the Polanyi Institute at Baylor, currently a research director at the Discovery Institute
Jonathan Witt, doctorate in English and currently a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute
Robert Marks, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor
Yes, the list includes a smattering of folks who do have doctorates in research science, but accomplished research biologists they’re not. Of course, the Disco Institute also notes this about the seminars:
Each seminar will also include frank treatment of the academic realities that ID researchers confront in graduate school and beyond, and strategies for dealing with them.
Uh huh. We bet that means the anti-evolution movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” (click here and here) will be required viewing.
Please. The argument that teaching “weaknesses” of evolution in public schools has nothing to do with promoting “intelligent design”/creationism is a sham. Perpetuating that fraud is why creationists on the Texas state board put Meyer on the science curriculum review panel. It’s why they invited Meyer to speak to the board last week. And it’s why stopping this nonsense is one of the most important things all of us can do to promote a 21st-century science education for Texas students.
Creationists on the Texas State Board of Education have repeatedly insisted that their attempts to dumb down the science curriculum on evolution have nothing to do with promoting their religious beliefs. But often their own words and actions betray them.
At the end of the Jan. 21 public hearing on the science standards, board members were given the opportunity to choose a handful of speakers to close out testimony. Among those chosen by the board’s creationist bloc was one David Muralt, whose affiliation he listed simply as “self.” Muralt put the lie to creationists’ claims that they aren’t trying to promote religion in science classrooms. We have transcribed his testimony (from the 4:26:44 mark on the Full Board Part A 1/21 archived audio file), which includes:
Why do we persist teaching students the religion of atheistic humanism, under the guise of scientific, factual evolution? Which is neither scientific nor factual, when you only present one point of view.
Teaching students that they evolved and are nothing more than animals degrades their quality of life, and robs them of meaning and purpose for life. The twisted reasoning of humanism in seeking to exalt man, reduces him to an animal devoid of will and the ability to choose the virtuous. The fruits of this God-denying teaching are: lying, cheating, stealing, promiscuity, chemical abuse, suicide, crime of all sorts, and a reduction in academic achievement.
There is no factual scientific proof that functional complex life has arisen from disorder by chance. Who are you going to believe – God that was there, or men that weren’t?
Mr. Muralt’s testimony reveals two special conceits of the those behind the creationist movement. First, they believe they know more about science than all the trained scientists who have been studying and researching evolution for more than a century. Second, creationists like Mr. Muralt and his allies on the state board believe only themselves to be truly people of faith. In their eyes, those of us who support giving students a science education that’s based actually on science are atheistic humanists who reject God.
Such arrogance is as astonishing as it is insulting to all people of faith. Swept up in their blanket condemnation are, for example, the Roman Catholic Church, countless mainline Protestants and the majority of Jews. Of course, many other faiths also pose no conflict between science and belief in God. (And enough with the implicit smear that atheists are somehow to blame for “lying, cheating, stealing, promiscuity, chemical abuse, suicide, crime of all sorts.”)
This shouldn’t be surprising, of course. Recall what state board Chairman Don McLeroy, R-College Station, told congregants in a church lecture in July 2005. McLeroy was recounting the debate over proposed biology textbooks two years earlier. He noted that he was one of only “four really conservative, orthodox Christians on the board … who were willing to stand up to the textbooks and say that they don’t present the weaknesses of evolution.” So the other board members weren’t real Christians?
The Texas Freedom Network has always supported the right of families and congregations to pass on their own teachings about faith to their children. But science classes are for teaching science, not religion. No one has right to use public schools to promote their own religious beliefs over everybody else’s.
UPDATE: Dr. McLeroy has asked that we include an additional passage from his church lecture in 2005, in which he discussed what happened during the state board’s debate over biology textbooks in 2003. We are glad to do so here:
(W)e weren’t about to convince any scientists, but we couldn’t convince fellow board members that these books should have evidence. And the more I look back on it, I believe if we would have challenged the naturalistic assumptions that nature is all there is with our fellow board members and challenged these people that were talking about it a little bit that brought up testimony, possibly we would have gotten a few more votes because a lot of these dear friends of mine on the State Board of Education are good, strong Christians that are active in Young Life and other activities. But they were able to totally not even worry about the fact that evolution’s assumption that nature is all there is is in total conflict with the way they live their life.
We appreciate Dr. McLeroy’s interest in an honest and fair dialogue.
Dr. McLeroy’s passage acknowledges what is essentially a larger doctrinal dispute involving differing interpretations of scripture and theology. We believe, however, that public school science classes are not the place to settle doctrinal disputes and disagreements among people of faith.
UPDATED UPDATE: Please note again the passage from Dr. McLeroy’s lecture that we added after our original post. Dr. McLeroy makes it clear that he voted against new biology textbooks in 2003, and wanted his fellow board members to do so, because he believed that those textbooks contradicted his and their religious beliefs. After all, why else would it matter whether his fellow board members are “good, strong Christians” and that evolution (as he characterizes it) “is in total conflict with the way they live their life.” That is clearly not an argument based on science. It’s an argument based on faith and religious doctrine, and public school science classrooms are not the place for such a debate.
Have you wondered how Texas State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy persuaded fellow board members last month to add an amendment weakening proposed science standards dealing with evolution? Well, here’s an interesting Web page put together by an enterprising fellow: “Collapse of a Texas Quote Mine.” The site looks at the many quotes from reputable sources that Dr. McLeroy used to justify calling into question common descent, a core concept of evolutionary theory. The site lists each of the quotes culled by McLeroy (or whoever provided his talking points) and explains how they were distorted and taken out of context in the cause of promoting pseudoscientific nonsense.
Here’s an example. The Web site notes that Dr. McLeroy cherry-picked this quote from Ernst Mayr’sWhat Evolution Is (2001):
…the various steps in the history of the change from ape to man … is entirely based on inferences and any part of it may be refuted at any time.
Sounds like skepticism about a key part of human evolution over time, yes? Well, Mayr certainly didn’t mean it to be. This is the quote in context from his book:
Yet, as far as the general trend in human evolution is concerned, the fossil record is of considerable assistance. By making use of the interpretations of numerous authors, but relying particularly on Stanley (1996) and Wrangham (2001), I am developing a sequence of historical narratives that reconstruct the various steps in the history of the change from ape to man. The resulting picture is entirely based on inferences and any part of it may be refuted at any time. But developing a cohesive story is far more instructive than merely compiling a list of unconnected facts. The most important certainty that has emerged from recent studies is that Homo sapiens is the end product of two major ecological shifts (habitat preference) of our hominid ancestors.
Of course, quote mining is intellectually dishonest, but it’s hardly a new tactic. Evolution deniers have been using it for long time now. So it’s good to see someone document the nonsense. Check it out here.
The header above is from the subject line of a wild-eyed screed sent circulating around the Internets this past weekend by Donna Garner, a former language arts teacher in Central Texas. Social conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education seem to think Ms. Garner is some kind of curriculum guru. (Never mind that most other folks see her as little more than a right-wing gadfly with an e-mail list.)
Last year Ms. Garner helped the board’s far-right faction (led by board chairman Don McLeroy) derail a more than two-year process revising the state’s language arts curriculum standards. (See here and here.) Now she seems to have turned her attention to evolution and proposed science curriculum standards. The e-mail criticizes the state board for giving tentative approval last month to new standards that don’t require students to learn phony “weaknesses” of evolution. It mocks three Republican board members, in particular, each of whom voted to keep the “weaknesses” requirement out of the standards. They “all claim to be conservative Republicans,” the e-mail sneeringly states. One of the three, Bob Craig of Lubbock, the e-mail notes, “says he’s a ’strong Christian.’” And on it goes. (Will any of Ms. Garner’s far-right friends on the board denounce these snide remarks about their fellow board members? We’re not holding our breath.)
Ms. Garner also pretends to know something about science, going on about the difference between “micro-evolution” and “macro-evolution” and listing “weaknesses” of evolution (the Cambrian explosion, gaps in the fossil record, yadda yadda yadda). It’s all standard pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo that evolution deniers have been using to try to water down science education in our kids’ classrooms.
But the real kicker comes at the end, when the depth of loathing for evolution and science becomes crystal clear:
Jeffrey Dahmer, one of America’s most infamous serial killers who cannibalized more than 17 boys before being captured, gave an [sic] last interview with Dateline NBC nine months before his death, and he said the following about why he acted as he did: “If a person doesn’t think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we died, you know, that was it, there was nothing….” (Dateline NBC, The Final Interview, Nov. 29, 1994).
This quote has been making the rounds for years in evangelical circles. In fact, Dahmer seems to have proclaimed himself a born-again Christian after his father sent him evangelical materials in prison.
In any case, the e-mail clearly suggests that people who accept the science of evolution are atheists: “The atheists are winning in Texas.” That’s insulting enough for people of faith who see no conflict with science. But what else is Ms. Garner trying to say here with the story about Dahmer? That we’re responsible for serial murderers like him? Or worse, that we’re all potential cannibalistic murderers ourselves because we accept the science of evolution?
This is repulsive stuff. So what else is new? Remember what Ben Stein (of the anti-evolution movie Expelled) said last year:
Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.
Sickening, yes?
It’s time for Chairman McLeroy and his fellow board members to come clean. Do they agree with Ms. Garner and approve of the kind of repulsive and shameful rhetoric being used to attack those who don’t share her particular religious views? We really want to know.
UPDATE: Correction. Ms. Garner forwarded the original e-mail referenced above, with her own apparent additions marked in red (including the quote from Dahmer). Who signed and apparently wrote the original? Kelly Coghlan, a Houston attorney who wrote the so-called “Religious Viewpoints Anti-Discrimination Act” that the Texas Legislature passed in 2007. That legislation, HB 3678, allows students to turn public school events into opportunities to evangelize. Read more about it here and here. Coghlan’s e-mail includes information and links from the creationist Texans for Better Science Education. In any case, whether or not Garner wrote the original e-mail, she amended and forwarded it to her list. Now what do board members have to say?
This year’s report – The 81st Legislature: Change at the Capitol? – focuses on Texas lawmakers who promote the culture wars in Austin. The report also includes a legislative history of key issues (private school vouchers, sex education, textbook censorship and stem cell research), our annual compilation of the crazy things folks on the religious right said last year, and updated facts and figures in our roundup of far-right groups in Texas.
The level of arrogance displayed by anti-evolution pressure groups and their activists in the war on science has been astonishing.
We have witnessed, for example, creationists openly question the faith of people who see no conflict between their religious beliefs and accepting the science of evolution. (Of course, their rhetoric gets even more heated when they attack atheists.) Now the Texas Freedom Network has obtained an e-mail to the Texas Education Agency (TEA) that provides yet more evidence of this arrogance — and the contempt evolution deniers have for those of us who want Texas kids to get a 21st-century science education based on facts, not ideology.
When TFN learned in November that the Texas State Board of Education would limit testimony to just four hours at its January public hearing on proposed science standards, we protested. We asked supporters of sound science to call on the board to reverse that decision. After all, these standards will be in place for a decade and will dictate the science education of a generation of Texas kids. The least that state board members could do was listen to the concerns of fellow citizens traveling to Austin for the hearing. (And we knew that creationist groups were calling on their supporters to testify at the January hearing.)
Dear TEA: The Texas Freedom Network has requested its supporters to besiege the TEA with emails complaining that not enough public testimony time is being allowed on the new TEKS science standards. I encourage you to resist this pressure from this special interest group. What more or different things could be said than were already said in the November 20 meeting? How much time would ever be enough for these people? Clearly, they simply want to wear out the SBOE with their mantra. Scientific truth is not determined by consensus, and scientists are not the High Priests of our society. (the Lawyers are!) Enough of them have had their say, and I encourage you to hold the line. Enough is enough.
Dr. Charles M. Garner
TEKS Reviewer
Now, that’s real chutzpah, yes? After all, the state board had invited Garner and the other five members of the official curriculum review panel to speak at the hearing. And the panel’s two other evolution opponents included a co-founder of the Discovery Institute — a political pressure group that masquerades as a science institute. Talk about special interests.
Well, if Garner isn’t interested in hearing what fellow citizens think about efforts by evolution deniers to dumb down science education in Texas, what does he think about his colleagues at Baylor?
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Baylor University is committed to the highest standards of scientific inquiry in the search for objective truth about the natural universe. From the time of Francis Bacon, this search for truth has been through the scientific method, in which the veracity of a hypothesis is tested by experimentation.
Evolution, a foundational principle of modern biological sciences, is supported by overwhelming scientific evidence. It is fundamental to the understanding of modern biochemistry, and our faculty incorporate the principle of evolution throughout the biochemistry curriculum. We are a science department, and we do not teach alternative hypotheses or philosophically deduced theories that cannot be tested rigorously.
“Evolution, a foundational principle of modern biology, is supported by overwhelming scientific evidence and is accepted by the vast majority of scientists. Because it is fundamental to the understanding of modern biology, the faculty in the Biology Department at Baylor University, Waco, TX, teach evolution throughout the biology curriculum. We are in accordance with the American Association for Advancement of Science’s statement on evolution. We are a science department, so we do not teach alternative hypotheses or philosophically deduced theories that cannot be tested rigorously.”
Does the fossil record support the idea of biological change over time (biological evolution)?
Yes. The fossil record clearly indicates
a progression in complexity of organisms from very simple fossil forms in the oldest rocks (>3.5 billion years old) to a broad spectrum from simple to complex forms in younger rocks,
that some organisms that were once common are now extinct, and
that the living organisms inhabiting our world today are similar (but generally not the same) as organisms represented as fossils in young sedimentary deposits, which in turn have evolutionary ancestors represented as fossils in yet older rocks.
Mammals, for example, are prevalent today and can be traced back in the fossil record for approximately 200 million years, but are not present as mammals in the fossil record before that; however, fossil forms that have reasonably been interpreted to be associated with the evolutionary precursors to mammals are found in older rocks.
Whether biological evolution occurs has not been a matter of scientific debate for more than a century. It is considered a proven fact. The specific mechanisms of biological change over time continue to be a topic of active research, and include mechanisms proposed by Charles Darwin as well as more recently developed ideas based on our growing knowledge of genetics and molecular biology. Using the methods of modern science, our knowledge of the fundamental mechanisms of life has grown enormously since the initial characterization of the role of DNA in reproduction, inheritance and evolution in the mid-1950s.
Of course, we’re under no illusions. We realize these strong statements from colleagues at his own university still won’t be good enough for Garner. Nothing would be — except for surrendering science education to an ideological agenda.
(Thanks to our science friends who pointed us to these passages on the Baylor Web sites.)
In 2005 the Texas Freedom Network opposed passage of a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions in Texas. We pointed out that same-sex marriage was already illegal in the state. The measure was simply another divisive, mean-spirited “culture war” distraction from issues far more important to working families, like good neighborhood schools and affordable health care. Gov. Rick Perry and his supporters on the religious right called the amendment necessary to “protect” marriage. Actually, the measure was more important for mobilizing social conservatives in advance of the 2006 state elections.
As her partner of 17 years slipped into a coma, Janice Langbehn pleaded with doctors and anyone who would listen to let her into the woman’s hospital room.
Eight anguishing hours passed before Langbehn would be allowed into Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center. By then, she could only say her final farewell as a priest performed the last rites on 39-year-old Lisa Marie Pond.
Jackson staffers advised Langbehn that she could not see Pond earlier because the hospital’s visitation policy in cases of emergency was limited to immediate family and spouses — not partners. In Florida, same-sex marriages or partnerships are not recognized. On Friday, two years after her partner’s death, Langbehn and her attorneys were in federal court, claiming emotional distress and negligence in a suit they filed last June.
Jackson attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case on grounds that the hospital has no obligation to allow patients’ visitors.
Pond’s medical problems began in February 2007 when she, Langbehn and their three adopted children were aboard a cruise ship docked in Miami. The Washington state couple and their children were on vacation.
Pond suddenly collapsed from a heart attack and was rushed to the trauma center.
Though Langbehn had documents declaring her Pond’s legal guardian and giving her the medical ”power of attorney,” Jackson officials refused to recognize her or the kids as family.
Langbehn, who still lives in Washington, was not available for comment Friday, but in a 2007 interview with The Miami Herald she said, “Any family should have the right to hold their loved one’s hand in the last moments of life, and we were denied that.”
The creationists on the Texas State Board of Education just can’t seem to help themselves. Once again one of the board’s far-right members – Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio — makes clear that religious agendas are driving efforts to dumb down science education in Texas public schools.
Writing in a San Antonio Express-News opinion column, Mr. Mercer says the claim that he and other creationists are trying to promote religion by challenging evolution in public school science classrooms is a “red herring.” Then, following a familar pattern, he contradicts himself:
For the last twenty years, teachers have been required to present both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories; and I challenge the Express-News to find one science book approved by the SBOE that includes either creation science or intelligent design.
In fact, members of Texans for Better Science Education, who listened to the numerous testifiers at the public hearing, have stated that the three Republican SBOE members who voted to delete the “weaknesses” provision were swayed by “Darwinists, atheists, ACLU members, and at least one bona fide signer of the infamous Humanist Manifesto III, in an attempt to promote indoctrination over critical thinking skills.”
I pray for my three friends, Pat Hardy of Ft. Worth , Bob Craig of Lubbock, and Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas. They voted against the Republican Party platform and allowed themselves to be constantly lobbied by prominent atheists and secular humanists. These three Republicans will now have to stand accountable before their constituents.
So… attacking evolution has nothing to do with religion, but defending sound science instruction on evolution is “indoctrination” promoted by atheists and secular humantists. Got it?
And attacking evolution has nothing to do with religion, but Mr. Mercer is praying for three Republicans who apparently fell under the influence of said atheists and humanists and even betrayed the Republican Party platform.
(Just curious — which does Mr. Mercer consider more sacred, the Bible or the Republican Party platform? And is he even capable of distinguishing between the two anymore?)
“This is a battle of academic freedom. This is a battle over freedom of speech. It’s an issue of freedom of religion.”
Oh, really? If creationists are telling the truth that they aren’t trying to promote religion in public schools, then why are they framing the debate as being “an issue of freedom of religion”?
Using the Texas GOP Bible platform as a club to attack moderate Republicans is a longstanding tactic of the religious right in this state. So it is no surprise to see Texas culture warriors reciting chapter and verse of the party platform in an attempt to strong-arm State Board of Education members into voting to insert phony “weaknesses” of evolution into the state’s science standards. Board member Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, played the orthodoxy card in his opinion piece in the San Antonio Express News this week:
I pray for my three friends, Pat Hardy of Ft. Worth , Bob Craig of Lubbock, and Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas. They voted against the Republican Party platform and allowed themselves to be constantly lobbied by prominent atheists and secular humanists.
But have Mercer and his friends actually looked at what the Texas Republican Party platform has to say about this matter? Here is the relevant passage from the current GOP platform, which was drafted and approved in 2008:
Theories of Origin – We support objective teaching and equal treatment of strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories, including Intelligent Design. We believe theories of life origins and environmental theories should be taught as scientific theory, not scientific law. Teachers and students should be able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly and without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.
Mercer and his fellow evolution deniers on the state board have protested time and again that they do not want “intelligent design”/creationism taught in Texas classrooms. But that is expressly what their supposedly authoritative Republican Party platform demands. We hate to be literalists about this whole thing, but it only seems fair to hold Mercer and his friends on the state board to the same standard they want to apply to others.
Which is it, Mr. Mercer? Is the party platform (gasp) wrong, or does it let the cat you so desperately want to silence out of the bag?
If you find yourself in a church, synagogue or mosque in Texas this weekend, you might just hear Charles Darwin’s name come up in the sermon (and not to label him a devil!). It’s Evolution Weekend again, and TFN is proud to join The Clergy Letter Project in sponsoring events in Texas congregations.
What is Evolution Weekend, you say?
Evolution Weekend is an opportunity for serious discussion and reflection on the relationship between religion and science. One important goal is to elevate the quality of the discussion on this critical topic – to move beyond sound bites. A second critical goal is to demonstrate that religious people from many faiths and locations understand that evolution is sound science and poses no problems for their faith.
More than 1,000 congregations around the world are participating, including more than 50 in Texas. To celebrate, TFN Insider is pleased to welcome guest blogger Rev. Jeremy Rutledge to offer his insights on religion and science. Jeremy is minister at Covenant Church, a congregation affiliated with the American Baptist Church and the Alliance of Baptists. Read Jeremy’s comments after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
In TFN News Clips (subscribe here) last week, we included a piece from the Christian Science Monitor about efforts by creationists to pass so-called “academic freedom” bills in various states. The bills provide legal support for teachers who challenge evolution with creationist arguments in their public school science classrooms. Texas has no such law (yet).
In any case, we failed to note a choice quote from Texas State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy, R-College Station. The story explained that during the board’s debate on new science standards in January, McLeroy succeeded in passing a particular anti-evolution amendment to the draft document.
“That shocked a lot of people,” says the chairman, Don McLeroy, a self-identified “young earth creationist.” But Mr. McLeroy insists such efforts are well within the law. “It’s certainly not a religious standard…. People are probably opposed to [the new language] for ideological reasons.”
Well, it’s certainly true that people were shocked — shocked that a majority of state board members had somehow accepted the pseudoscientific babble the good dentist offered as arguments for the amendment. (For more on those arguments, see an earlier post here.) Interestingly, McLeroy had declined a request from some board members to have scientists in the audience explain the implications of his and other amendments being offered. Scientists were appalled, as the Houston Chronicle noted:
Also added to the proposed standards by board Chairman Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, is an amendment that directs science teachers and students to “describe the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record.”
They are asking students to explain something that does not exist, said David Hillis, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner.
“This new proposed language is absurd. It shows very clearly why the board should not be rewriting the science standards, especially when they introduce new language that has not even been reviewed by a single science expert,” Hillis said.
But the real howler is the second part of McLeroy’s quote:
“It’s certainly not a religious standard…. People are probably opposed to [the new language] for ideological reasons.”
Oh, do tell. Physician, heal thyself.
The board will take a final vote on the standards in March. Let state board members know that you want them to support a 21st-century science education for Texas kids. Find out how here.
The header above is the subject line in the latest fundraising e-mail from the Free Market Foundation, the Texas affiliate of the Christian-right pressure group Focus on the Family. We suppose “Martians Invade!” sounded too silly to them.
It’s sad that in a country founded on the principle of religious freedom, pressure groups still foster such hatred for people who choose not to practice any religion. In any case, Free Market’s e-mail lists a variety of dangers posed by the atheist horde supposedly descending upon the Lone Star State. Much of the list is standard stuff, such as taking God out of the Pledge of Allegiance, blocking prayer in schools and abortion.
But taxes?
Another big issue is taxes. We’re all tired of our property taxes being raised each year without being allowed to vote on this issue. We are working hard to support legislation to cap raising appraisal taxes more than 5% unless approved by local citizens. These tax increases must stop!
Goodness. What in the world are those evil atheists up to? Not only do they want to destroy all that is holy, but now they want to tax everybody to death.
In all seriousness, this is simply another example of the religious right using faith as a political weapon. TFN has no official position on property taxes. That issue is simply beyond the scope of our mission. But we’ve seen Free Market’s tactic replicated by countless religious-right groups: use fear and hatred to raise money or stir up religious activists in support of or opposition to some partisan agenda, even if it has nothing to do with faith. And never mind who you have to smear to do it.
In fact, the ICR used the occasion to broadcast their belief that any Christian who accepts evolution is inviting “swift destruction,” even implying that pastors who participated in Evolution Weekend are “false teachers…who privily shall bring in damnable heresies.” (Apparently they continue to speak the “King’s English” over at the ICR, naturally preferring the King James Bible.) Read the latest e-mail alert from our young earth creationist friends at the ICR after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
January’s evolution show trial put on by the Texas State Board of Education gave the anti-evolution Discovery Institute a warm fuzzy because one of its co-founders got to share the stage with real scientists. (If you missed it, check out our live blogging that started here.) Because they can’t provide a shred of real scientific evidence to support their anti-evolution babble, the Disco folks try to set up “debates” in reputable venues just for the publicity. The Texas scientists who shared the microphone at the state board hearing didn’t have much choice — state board members had appointed them to a review panel that was part of the formal process for revising public school science curriculum standards.
But given a choice, most scientists aren’t willing to participate in a “debate” with folks from the Discovery Institute. Why? Because the Disco folks haven’t bothered to do the hard work of providing scientific evidence to support their positions. Now PZ Myers tells readers that the Discovery Institute recently asked a professor at the University of Vermont, Nicholas Gotelli, for a debate about evolution and “intelligent design” on his campus. In short, Prof. Gotelli’s answer was along the lines of “you’re joking, right?” You can read the whole delicious exchange for yourself, but here’s a taste of the professor’s stinging reply:
(I)sn’t it sort of pathetic that your large, well-funded institute must scrape around, panhandling for a seminar invitation at a little university in northern New England? Practicing scientists receive frequent invitations to speak in science departments around the world, often on controversial and novel topics. If creationists actually published some legitimate science, they would receive such invitations as well.
In a counter opinion piece, Ms. Leo claims that no board member is trying to remove evolution from the public school science curriculum. “There is also no Board member who is seeking to implement religious beliefs into public school science curricula,” she writes.
For the past twenty years, students in Texas have been required “to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to the strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.” This standard has been applied to all scientific theories. Pro-Evolution Advocates, however, want evolution to be singled out and taught differently from the other theories. They want evolution to be taught without including the weaknesses of this theory.
The evolutionists want the time-tested standard to be removed from our Texas standards and, hence, from our textbooks and teaching materials. The twenty-year old standard does not state nor imply the teaching of religion, just “scientific explanations and scientific evidence.” If a teacher in our state had used this twenty-year-old standard as a “backdoor vehicle” through which to teach students religion, the ACLU most certainly would have sued by now.
There’s plenty more in the rest of her screed, but we’ll focus right now on the dishonesty in just those two paragraphs above.
Ms. Leo falsely claims that the “strengths and weaknesses” standard has been applied to all scientific theories. In fact, Ms. Leo was one of four creationist board members in 2003 who voted to reject proposed new biology textbooks because they didn’t include phony “weaknesses” of evolution promoted by creationists organizations like the Discovery Institute (and any number of evangelical Christian churches). They didn’t vote to reject any textbooks because they didn’t include “weaknesses” of other scientific theories. Not one. They singled out evolution.
Then when a majority of board members voted last month to keep the “strengths and weaknesses” language out of a new standards draft, creationists on the board offered a series of amendments targeting one theory — evolution. In fact, they succeeded in getting two of those amendments adopted, both challenging a core concept of evolution, common descent.
The only people singling out evolution and wanting it taught differently than other scientific theories are those in the creationist bloc. They claim that the “strengths and weaknesses” language has caused no problems in the past, but their own actions prove that’s a lie. They didn’t have the votes on the board to prevail in their war against evolution in 2003. They hope to have enough votes in 2011, when publishers submit new biology textbooks for adoption. In fact, members of the creationist bloc have already said they will insist that those new textbooks include phony “weaknesses” of evolution. If the textbooks don’t include that nonsence, the creationist bloc will move to reject them regardless of what they hear from real scientists.
Ms. Leo goes on, arguing that creationists are just trying to “broaden horizons and enhance thinking” about “varying scientific viewpoints.”
No. They are trying to twist the public school science curriculum into a vehicle for promoting their own narrow religious beliefs over everyone else’s. That’s what Sen. Ellis and Rep. Rose were rightly criticizing in their op-ed.
The truth is that creationists can’t provide a shred of scientific evidence against evolution. Every argument they have made about alleged “weaknesses” of evolution has been debunked by scientific research. Until that changes, their attacks against evolution have no place in a 21st-century science classroom.
Teaching young people about sexuality and health should be serious business. But you wouldn’t know that from the materials used in many Texas classrooms…
Get a sneak peek at a video previewing the release of a new Texas Freedom Network Education Fund report on sexuality education in Texas public schools. (The scene in the video is pulled directly from materials actually used in Texas public school classrooms. We wish we were kidding.)
We will release the report at 11 a.m., Tuesday, Feb. 24, at the Texas Capitol in Austin. You are welcome to join us on the North Steps of the Capitol for the press conference.
The full report - as well as two more videos – will also be available tomorrow on the Web site. So be sure to check back to www.JustSayDontKnow.org tomorrow after 11 a.m.
(Media Inquiries: Contact Dan Quinn at dan@tfn.org, or 512-322-0545.)
Today the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund released a major new study detailing how public schools in our state teach young people about sexuality and health.
And the news is not good.
Our new report — Just Say Don’t Know: Sexuality Education in Texas Public Schools — conclusively demonstrates that Texas is failing families and students when it comes to sexuality education. Less than 4 percent of Texas school districts give young people any information about responsible pregnancy and disease prevention. Even worse, the information students do receive about sexuality and health is often grossly distorted or simply wrong.
You can get an idea of the type of troubling materials students encounter in sex education by viewing the video below. (The information in this video comes straight from actual materials used in Texas classrooms.)
Garner’s new e-mail screed takes us to task for reporting about the outrageous nonsense abstinence-only programs teach Texas teens about sexuality and health. She devotes much of her e-mail to defending Scott and White Worth the Wait, the most widely used abstinence-only curriculum in the state.
She is particularly upset that our report notes Worth the Wait in the section about abstinence-only programs promoting fear and shame about sexuality. In a review of Worth the Wait’s materials, SIECUS notes pretty much the same thing:
Worth the Wait does incorporate important topics suggested by the Guidelines, such as puberty, anatomy, sexual abuse, and legal issues related to sexuality, and the curriculum is based on reliable sources of data. Despite these strengths, Worth the Wait relies on messages of fear, discourages contraceptive use, and promotes biased views of gender, marriage, and pregnancy options.
Garner argues that “nothing could be further from the truth.” We disagree.
But the really goofy stuff comes at the top of Garner’s e-mail.
First, Texas Freedom Network is behind this supposed “study.” … Texas Freedom Network has been in close association for many years with Planned Parenthood (performed 289,750 abortions in 2006-07) and the Human Rights Campaign (largest homosexual organization in the country). TFN, PP, and HRC are like a “sisterhood” and work in conjunction with one another to destroy any vestiges of traditional marriage and traditional values that are left in our country.
The Sisterhood is joined at the hip by ex-TFN presidents, Cecile Richards and Samantha Smoot, who work closely with TFN’s present leader, Kathy Miller.
When reading any ”studies” that come from this group we must remember who profits: Planned Parenthood makes money both ways — either on abortions and/or on contraceptives. HRC perpetuates its organization with an increase in homosexual activity. TFN keeps its board members happy so long as it grabs the media spotlight with its outrageous allegations against conservative State Board of Education members.
Well, now you know.
We would respond to all that, but Kathy is already running late for her meeting with the Sisterhood’s Politburo.
If you’re a regular visitor to TFN Insider, you know that sound science is under siege in Texas. We have one of the highest teen birthrates in the country, but extremists demand that public schools teach abstinence-only in sexuality education classes. Creationists on the State Board of Education are trying to dumb down the public school science curriculum by attacking evolution. And zealots want to ban embryonic stem cell research that gives hope to families struggling with serious medical conditions like cancer and Parkinston’s disease.
Have you had enough?
You can stand up for science and fight back against the religious right’s extremism by attending the Texas Freedom Network’s Legislative Lobby Day on March 10 in Austin.
Before lobby teams head over to the Capitol, we will provide four break-out sessions on critical issues:
sexuality education
stem cell research
evolution, the public school science curriuclum, and the State Board of Education
youth advocacy and sex ed (a specially designed track for youth advocates under 24 years of age and others interested in mobilizing youth on this issue)
We have many wonderful allies, but TFN remains the only broad-based organization specifically devoted to fighting the religious right in Texas — and we need your help to win this important fight against extremism.
Lobby Day beings at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, March 10, at the First United Methodist Church Family Life Center. The center is located at 1300 Lavaca Street near the Capitol in Austin.
The folks at Free Market Foundation think their organization needs a new name. The Focus on the Family affiliate in Texas spends a lot of time trying to use government for promoting conservative Christianity and suing school districts that resist. So in an e-mail blast asking supporters for help with a new name, they acknowledge that the ”Free Market Foundation” brand doesn’t quite match what they do:
We think Free Market sounds more like an economic “think tank” than a pro-family policy organization.
They’ve been around since 1972 and just figured that out?
Moreover, the word “foundation” leads people to think we dole out money to other worthy causes.
And lastly, it is challenging to build grassroots momentum by promoting two names – Free Market Foundation and our legal division, Liberty Legal Institute.
We believe we would be more efficient, reduce confusion and have greater impact by adopting ONE name.
We agree. And being generous folks here at Texas Freedom Network, we’re happy to help. So how about:
Focus on the Family-Texas (Truth in advertising, at least.)
Texans for the Right Religion
Lawsuits-R-Us: Suing Schools for Jesus since 1972
SOS: Sue Our Schools Coalition
Texans for Merging Church and State
Fund More Fundamentalists (They wouldn’t have to change their initials!)
Whatever name they choose, we’re prepared to make a deal. TFN will keep supporting the right of students to practice their own religious faith if Free Market Foundation will stop trying to force all the other students to join them.
Feel free to offer other name suggestions here. We’re sure Free Market will appreciate the help.
Those states that … consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.
“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” [according to the report's author].
Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code’s religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behaviour.”
The top porn-consuming state? Utah. A map in the report indicates that Texas falls somewhere in the middle of the pack, but still ahead of a number of major liberal-leaning states, particularly California and in New England.
It’s bad enough that Texas is failing teens by promoting ignorance about responsible pregnancy and disease prevention in sexuality education classes. But is it really too much to ask that public policy-makers and assorted pressure groups not wallow in ignorance as well?
Our new report on sexuality education reveals that more than nine in 10 public school districts in Texas teach either abstinence-only or nothing at all when it comes to sexuality education. That’s the case despite the state’s high rate of teen births, the increasing problem of sexually transmitted diseases among youth and recent major studies showing that abstinence-only programs are simply ineffective. (See here for one such study. Our report, page 2, notes others.)
Jonathan Saenz of the Free Market Foundation, a conservative group that supports abstinence-based programs, questioned the criticism of those programs, citing links between the Texas Freedom Network and Planned Parenthood.
“These groups want teenagers to have more sex and learn more about sex at an earlier age,” he said. “You can give students greater access to contraception and abortion, but that’s not good for Texas.”
Complete nonsense. Educating young people about responsible pregnancy and disease prevention is a way to decrease the number of abortions and raise healthy teens. Keeping them ignorant certainly isn’t working.
We have just seen the first legislative vote aimed at reining in the Texas State Board of Education. Yesteday the Texas House Public Education Committee unanimously passed House Bill 772, which would require that state board meetings be streamed live over the Internet in video and audio. We released the following statement from Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller:
For too long this board has been able to operate outside the watchful eye of parents and other taxpayers, and lawmakers seem to have had enough. Ideologues have turned the board into a playground for promoting personal political agendas rather than the interests of Texas schoolchildren. If installing a camera helps rein in those board members, we think taxpayers will be well served.
Kathy testified in favor of the bill, which was filed by state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin. Rep. Howard and other lawmakers have been filing other key SBOE reform bills as well. TFN Insider will be closely following the progress of all these bills.
Dr. McLeroy and his supporters insist that their desire to challenge evolution in biology classrooms is not about promoting religion in public schools. Yet he makes clear in the Statesman piece that his religious beliefs are the source of his objections to evolution:
Had enough yet? Had enough of politicians and far-right pressure groups trying to undermine science education in our public schools, hold back important medical research into stem cells, and keep young people ignorant about how to protect themselves from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases? Well, things won’t change unless you and other mainstream Texans take a stand.
Stand up for science at Texas Freedom Network’s legislative Lobby Day on Tuesday, March 10, in Austin. We will provide informative training sessions on these important issues before heading over the Capitol to meet with lawmakers. Click here to find out more about how you can participate. You can make a difference.
UPDATE: Online registration for Lobby Day has ended, but you can still participate by calling 512-322-0545.
Supporters of sound science education and stem cell research had a big presence at the Texas Capitol on Tuesday. More than 200 activists registered for Texas Freedom Network ’s Lobby Day, which included training sessions on supporting stem cell research, responsible sexuality education and sound science education in public schools. Nearly two dozen teams of activists then marched to the Capitol for appointments with lawmakers and staff from around the state.
TFN’s field team is very grateful that so many supporters took the time to stand up for science in Texas. (Click here to find out more about our Stand Up for Science campaign.) This kind of direct contact between constituents and elected officials is critical to TFN’s efforts to promote sound science.
Thursday might offer an early test of the success of yesterday’s lobbying. The Senate Health and Human Services Committee will hold the Legislature’s first hearing on a stem cell bill this session. Senate Bill 73 from state Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, provides for the creation of an adult stem cell research program. The legislation does not specifically address embryonic stem cell research, which scientists say holds the most promise for finding treatments for serious medical conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and cancer. TFN is appreciative of Sen. Nelson’s efforts to promote this important medical research.
On the other hand, as originally filed, the legislation would restrict facilities built with funds from the program to research involving only adult stem cells. TFN activists joined with those from Texans for the Adancement of Medical Research to ask Sen. Nelson to remove that provision from the bill. Keep an eye on TFN Insider for more news on Sen. Nelson’s bill.
ICR officials, charging that they were the victims of “viewpoint discrimination,” have said they will seek help from the courts to overturn the coordinating board’s decision. Now they are also looking for help in the Texas Legislature.
This is the clearest case yet of anti-evolution extremists putting political partisanship ahead of giving Texas kids a sound science education. Now the State Republican Executive Committee (SREC) is pressuring Republicans on the Texas State Board of Education to require that public school students learn phony ”weaknesses” of evolution in their science classrooms.
The committee passed a resolution on March 7 insisting that Republican board members bow to the Texas GOP platform on the issue. The platform, passed at the GOP state convention in June 2008, includes the following plank:
The letter builds a compelling case for “truth telling” in sexuality education:
People of faith must speak out for comprehensive sexuality education. We know that there are people of good faith who differ with us on what young people need. We seek to reach out to those from whom we may be divided to seek what is best for our nation’s youth. We all must be truth seeking, courageous, and just in our efforts to provide all young people with the sexuality education they so urgently need.
UPDATE: Don’t just stew in frustration. Do something about it. -
As we have battled anti-evolution extremists on the Texas State Board of Education over the past year, we knew that a legislative assault on science was inevitable. On Friday, the last day for filing legislation at the Texas Capitol, a far-right lawmaker from East Texas filed the bill we’ve been expecting.
House Bill 4224 by state Rep. Wayne Christian, R-Center, is a full frontal assault on science education in Texas. The bill would open the door to teaching public school students almost any cockamamie concept that any crackpot wants to portray as “science,” regardless of what mainstream scientists and school administrators have to say about it.
Scientists are “atheists.” Parents who want to teach their children about evolution are “monsters.” Pastors who support sound science are “morons.”
Is that the sort of message Chairman Don McLeroy and his cohorts on the State Board of Education have in mind for Texas science classrooms if they succeed in their campaign to shoehorn “weaknesses” of evolution back into the science curriculum standards? That’s certainly the message of a new book McLeroy is now endorsing.
In critiquing the National Academy of Science’s (NAS) missionary evolution tract—Science, Evolution and Creationism, 2008, he identifies their theft of true science by their intentional neglect of other valid scientific possibilities. Then, using NAS’s own statements, he demonstrates that the great “process” of evolution—natural selection—is nothing more than a figure of speech. These chapters alone are worth the reading of this book.
Curious to know what Johnson envisions – and McLeroy endorses – as a proper science education? You can read the full tome for yourself online. Or if you don’t have the time (or the stomach) to explore the full treatise, we have compiled a few choice selections that give you the flavor. Remember, this could well be coming soon to a public school science class near you if evolution opponents on the state board get their way next week. Read more after the jump…
As we get closer to the final vote at the Texas State Board of Education on science standards next week, creationists on the board are showing their real stripes. First it was board chairman Don McLeroy, who endorsed a book equating acceptance of evolution with atheism – making clear that his primary beef with evolution is based on religious beliefs (despite repeated claims to the contrary). And now Terri Leo, R-Spring, gets in on the act.
The first cat Leo let’s out of the bag is the ”end game” for creationists on the board: biology textbooks. What the next generation of textbooks teach about evolution is the subtext for the entire debate on curriculum standards. Leo and her allies lacked the votes in 2003 to force publishers to include phony “weaknesses” of evolution, but now the elusive majority is in sight. Leo is blunt:
In a series of essays published at www.solvinglight.com/blog/, author Robert Bowie Johnson Jr. presents evidence that Barack Obama is directly linked to Satanic teachings through his close association with Oprah Winfrey, who parrots and relentlessly promotes, worldwide, the anti-Christian doctrine of her guru, Eckhart Tolle.
“The voting public has a right to know to what degree Barack Obama, who has called himself a ‘committed Christian,’ considers himself and his wife to be integral parts of Oprah’s and Tolle’s New Age global tribe, a tribe that has adopted the “wisdom” of the ancient serpent as its own,” Mr. Johnson said.
You can read the full release here. We wonder: does Chairman McLeroy also think President Obama is under the influence of Satanic teachings? Inquiring minds want to know.
(Fort Worth Star-Telegram writer Bud Kennedy mentions Johnson’s Satan-Obama accusation in a column today.)
After more than a year of work and often bitter debate, the State Board of Education is set this week to decide what the next generation of Texas students will learn in their public school science classrooms. Media outlets across the country (including the New York Times here and here, the Wall Street Journal today and even FOX News) have focused attention on the important battle over what the state’s new science curriculum standards should require schools to teach about evolution.
Beginning with the public hearing at noon on Wednesday, we will be live-blogging the debate for three days. So you will be able to keep up with the action here. A preliminary vote is scheduled for Thursday, with a final vote coming Friday. (We also encourage you to subscribe to TFN News Clips, a daily e-mail digest of news articles about the religious right and TFN issues.)
As the Texas State Board of Education nears a final vote on new public school science curriculum standards, board chairman Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, is arguing once again that science classes should include supernatural explanations. In a new op-ed from the Austin American-Statesman, McLeroy — a creationist who believes Earth is less than 10,000 years old — writes that the proposed science standards up for a final vote this week include a definition of science that he likes:
Newspapers both inside Texas are focusing attention on this week’s showdown over science education in Texas. The San Antonio Express-News, for example, offers dueling op-eds here and here. The Dallas Morning News does the same here and here.
It’s disturbing enough that the Texas board of education might seek to impose its religious views on public school students in that sizable state. It’s even more alarming that the Lone Star State’s textbook market is so large that many publishers write books to meet its standards and then sell them across the country. The Texas State Board of Education must hold firm to its decision to strip the “strengths and weaknesses” language from the state’s science standard. Texans, like everyone else, are free to believe what they want, but in science class, they should teach science.
12:25 – Our press conference ran long, and we were late getting into the hearing. Unfortunately, State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy has rejected a request for a table for us in the board room (as at the last two board meetings). We’re told that’s “too distracting” for board members, although we set up in a far back corner. Frankly, the issue is more likely one of not liking what we’ve been blogging about at past meetings. In any case, we’re here, we’re blogging, get used to it. (We’re so witty.)
12:33 – The board room is overflowing with folks. The creationists are out in force this time, but we still have lots of science supporters (wearing our signature green).
12:37 – A testifier who has worked in the textbook industry is warning the board that what is decided about science in Texas will be taught throughout the country. Indeed.
12:58 – Terri Leo is complaining because two people in a row have testified against “strengths and weaknesses.” She points out witnesses should be alternating, for and against. For Pete’s sake.
1:01 – A scientist is correctly pointing out that “strengths and weaknesses” is being used as a wedge to promote ideological arguments in science classrooms.
1:07 – Now we have a testifier arguing that the board should broaden the definition of science so that it can’t “keep the creationists out.” It really couldn’t be clearer what the agenda is here. Creationism simply science. It’s faith. Public schools have no business deciding whose religious beliefs to teach in science classrooms.
1:10 – Creationist pressure groups are bringing in their big guns. Coming up is Raymond G. Bohlin, president of Richardson (Tex.)-based Probe Ministries. Bohlin is one of the most prominent supporters of “intelligent design”/creationism in the country. Why are the creationists still pretending that their attacks on evolution have nothing to do with trying to promote creationism in science classrooms? The folks testifying for them are revealing that claim to be nothing but a charade.
1:21 – A member of the science curriculum writing teams notes that amendments creationists added to the standards in January are opposed by a team members. Board member Barbara Cargill notes that she got help from the board’s “science experts” in drafting her amendments. Want to guess who? Couldn’t be Stephen Meyer from the anti-evolution Discovery Institute, could it?
1:24 – And now Raymond Bohlin is testifying, arguing about “the limits of biological change.” “You get just so far, and you can’t push it farther.” He argues that “there is no goal in natural selection,” as opposed to “artificial selection,” as when breeders try to eliminate problematic characteristics in something. We have a hard time following him, perhaps because he doesn’t have much time to develop his thought and get to his point. (But we can guess his point.)
1:28 – Terri Leo: Is knowledge of evolution so necessary for scientific research? Bohlin: Not in my research. (He has a doctorate in molecular and cell biology.)
1:32 - Oh, yeah. Bohlin has recently posted a commentary on the Probe Ministries Web site answering the perennial scientific question: “Is Masturbation A Sin?” (Do you really want to know the answer? More to the point, do you doubt what his answer is?) Perhaps he would like the board to add a curriculum standard requiring students to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of masturbation…
1:35 – A pro-science testifier: “Texas can’t afford to be thought of as an educational backwater.”
1:41 – It’s as if scientists have been talking to a brick wall for the past year. We’re still hearing arguments that “weaknesses” of evolution are plentiful in scientific literature. Yet Nobel laureates and other distinguished scientists have repeatedly shown that’s simply not the case. Are they all lying?
1:48 – A representative of the Austin Geological Society presents a letter calling on the board to support “honest and credible” science and is strongly supportive of teaching about evolution and in opposition to the “strengths and weaknesses” propaganda.
1:56 – TFN sent out the following press release after our 11:30 press conference before the board hearing.
AUSTIN – As the State Board of Education prepares for a decisive vote on science curriculum standards this week, nearly 60 international, national and state science organizations have signed statements opposed to dumbing down instruction on evolution in Texas public schools.
“What’s happening in Texas is clearly ringing alarm bells across the country,” said Lawrence Krauss, director of the Origins Institute and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. “Most parents know that a sound science education will help their kids succeed in college and the jobs of the 21stcentury. The children of Texas deserve that, and the state shouldn’t have to deal with the legal challenges that are likely to result from the board promoting ideology over sound science.”
2:00 – We thought you might want to know a bit about the atmosphere here. The Texas Education Agency lobby was packed with science supporters when we arrived this morning. The litigators from anti-evolution Free Market Foundation Texas affiliate of Focus on the Family had already begun a press conference promoting the “strengths and weaknesses” propaganda. Following that, TFN started its press conference with educators and scientists. We’ve rarely seen so many cameras for a press event at TEA, although it appears that some of the cameras (including ours) were from non-news organizations.
Both press conferences were disrupted by observers. In our case, one observer shouted “my grandfather wasn’t an ape,” or something to that effect. Another chose to pray loudly in an effort to drown out what our speakers were saying. An argument also marred the Focus on the Family press conference.
It’s standing-room-only in the board room itself. In fact, many people are on the floor on the sides and in the back of the room. Numerous reporters — mostly television — are covering the hearing. A number of educators and scientists are in attendance, but it’s clear that creationist organizations — such as Focus and Probe Ministries — have been successful in bringing in evolution opponents.
The hearing is scheduled to go on to at least 6 p.m., but we expect it will stretch a bit beyond that. In any case, however, we don’t expect many people who signed up to speak will be able to do so. It looks like about 125 people have signed up to testify.
2:19 – Please excuse the commercial, but the truth is that we can’t keep up with this important work without the help of supporters of sound science. And the support we are receiving has been very heart-warming. Donations to TFN this week are up and, even better, are being doubled thanks to a Stand Up for Science matching grant from a generous donor. So every dollar gift we receive before Friday is worth two. If you can help: www.tfn.org/challengegrant. And whether or not you can donate, please know that your personal activism on this — by writing letters to the editor, contacting your elected officials, speaking out in support of sound science — is critical for ensuring that Texas kids get a 21st-century science education. Thanks so much for all of your support.
2:45 – The board is back from a break.
2:48 – An evolution opponent criticizes our argument that the board should be listening to science experts. “The people of this state have entrusted you” to make these decisions and not just listen to what the experts say. Actually, we’re fairly certain that Texans would feel more comfortable taking the advice of experts rather than the pseudoscientific arguments of ideologues.
2:51 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar characterizes listening to science experts as bowing to an “oligarchy.”
2:55 – Now creationists are attacking (once again) the TFN Education Fund’s survey of biology and biological anthropology faculty at Texas colleges and universities. The charge is that we have mischaracterized that study by claiming that the survey results apply to all scientists. Untrue. We clearly point out throughout, especially in the introduction (page 4) and the appendix on research methodology (page 17), who we surveyed — biologists and biological anthropologists. As before, we won’t be given an opportunity to respond to these unfounded charges. We’re not surprised.
3:04 – Good heavens. A testifier complains that she was never taught “weaknesses” of evolution in high school. Like what? She brings up “irreducible complexity,” pseudoscientific babble that has been soundly rejected by clear scientific evidence. It’s as if facts and research mean absolutely nothing.
3:35 – Dr. David Daniel presented excellent testimony on behalf of the the prestigious Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST). TAMEST is made up of Texas Nobel Laureates and 200+ National Academy members, so you would think the board would listen carefully to what these guys have to say. And board chair Don McLeroy said he does listen to them — he just trusts his own scientific judgement:
“I read what you guys have to say. I just disgree with you.”
What does McLeroy disagree with? A letter TAMEST sent to the state board (unanimous supported by their Board of Directors) criticizing the board for looking to the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute for expert advice, rather than listening to respected Texas scientists.
3:39 – Josh Rosenau from the National Center for Science Education is presenting letters and statements signed by representatives of nearly 60 international, national and state science organizations opposed to efforts to dumb down instruction on evolution. That’s a pretty large “oligarchy,” yes?
3:42 – Board member Terri Leo is complaining again that too many people in a row are testifying against “strengths and weaknesses.” “It’s not fair.”
3:47 – Josh: Removing “strengths and weaknesses” from the standards means publishers won’t have to invent “weaknesses” of evolution in order to get their textbooks adopted in Texas.
4:06 – Don McLeroy continues to question, as he has in previous hearings, whether understanding evolution is vital to the study of biology.
4:11 – A bright young man (a high school senior) notes that public opinion research shows support for the science of evolution in the United States is among the lowest for countries in the developed world. He then notes that U.S. achievement scores in science also rate very low. A connection?
4:16 – Kelly “www.christianattorney.com” Coghlan of Houston is up. Mr. Coghlan is the guy who helped saddle Texas with the so-called “Religious Viewpoints Anti-Discrimination Act” in 2007. That law requires schools to turn public events into “limited public forums” and essentially allow student speakers to then turn those events into opportunities to pray and evangelize to a captive audience.
4:19 – Taking “strengths and weaknesses” out of the standards will leave schools vulnerable to lawsuits. Really? Not teaching pseudoscience will lead to lawsuits? In what other states has this happened? We heard testimony earlier from the Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute that no other state includes “strengths and weaknesses” in its standards right now. Are those states burdened with lawsuits from folks who want to teach “weaknesses” of evolution?
4:21 – Coghlan wants the standards to keep “strengths and weaknesses”: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well, it is broken. The biology textbook adoption in 2003 is Exhibit A. And the board’s creationists have made it clear that they will try to hijack the 2011 biology textbook adoption.
4:23 – Terri Leo claims taking “strengths and weaknesses” out of the standards will lead to lawsuits over treating evolution differently. That’s absurd. All theories would be treated the same. Yet creationists in January passed amendments in January that single out evolution, something the board’s legal counsel warned them not to do. They have, in fact, laid the foundation for a lawsuit, but not the one they think.
4:26 – We think it’s funny that Coghlan blames the ACLU for making this issue so controversial. The ACLU is always the whipping boy for the religious right, even when the ACLU hasn’t done anything. (In fact, Terri Burke at ACLU of Texas testified in November on this issue, the only time we’ve seen ACLU involved. Yet.)
4:28 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar suggests that taking “strengths and weaknesses” out will mean only “strengths” of evolution will be taught, leading to lawsuits.
4:53 – Lots of conversations among board members between and during the testimony. We haven’t said much yet about the vote coming tomorrow and Friday. Essentially, we’re where we were in January — it will be very close. Chairman McLeroy and other board creationists have been circulating a list of amendments to the standards, nearly all targeting evolution. And they are certain to try again to force “strengths and weaknesses” back into the standards. We also expect efforts by pro-science board members to try to strip out anti-evolution amendments (particularly those challenging the concept of common descent) added in January.
5:18 – Board members are now being allowed to invite specific individuals to testify. It will be interesting to see who board members bring up.
5:25 – Board member Rick Agosto has invited Genie Scott of the National Center for Science Education to speak. That’s encouraging. Genie makes it clear what’s at stake. Putting “strengths and weaknesses” back in the standards will give evolution opponents ammunition to demand pseudoscience in the 2011 biology textbooks. Other states will likely rebel against such nonsense. Says Genie: You will have a Texas edition with junk science in it, and the rest of the country will have a different textbook with real science.
5:31 – Dave Welch of the Texas Pastor Council is now speaking. It’s unclear which board member invited him. Welch wants students to be taught challenges to evolution: “Sound science and academic demand full disclosure of this in order to make a sound decision.” Welch accuses opponents of “strengths and weaknesses” of censorship and claims there are scientifically valid “weaknesses” of evolution.
I assert that any so-called Christian and most emphatically any member of Christian clergy who embraces the deception of Darwinian evolution is no more a Christian than the chimpanzees from which he or she claims to have evolved.
5:38 – Another testifier (we missed the name) suggests that “fervent dogmatists” who support the science of evolution are “religious fundamentalists” themselves. (Update: We think this is a gentleman named Don Patton.)
5:45 – Patton says the fossil record is really just a bunch of clams: “Clams, clams and more clams.” His point, apparently, is that evolution is supported mostly by the fossil record and that the fossil record is insufficient.
5:50 – Prof. Gerald Skoog of Texas Tech is up. Prof. Skoog, who served as an “expert reviewer” of the curriculum standards, presents a letter supporting sound science (and opposing “strengths and weaknesses”) from the National Academy of Sciences.
5:54 – Hiram Sasser, director of litigation for the Free Market Foundation Focus on the Family Texas is up. He points to a letter from legislators supporting “strengths and weaknesses” and to polling showing that most American are skeptical of evolution
Well, yes. Most Americans are skeptical of a lot of things, but science isn’t decided by popular vote. Moreover, a lot of money has been poured into anti-evolution propaganda. Are we surprised by its effects on public opinion?
5:58 – Sasser suggests that taking “strengths and weaknesses” out of the standards is tantamount to totalitarianism and would put schools at legal risk for barring teachers and students from questioning evolution. This is rubbish.
The fact is, evolution is not subject to scientific questioning, as McLeroy suggests. If there are ways to present alternative views in a religion class – or, better yet, church – fine. But science class in a public school isn’t that place.
Even many people of faith accept the theory of evolution. Daniel Foster, a professor at the UT Southwestern Medical Center and an elder at the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas, exemplified this on yesterday’s Viewpoints page, urging the board to reject amendments that question evolution.
“No” votes to the anti-evolution parts of the standards are doubly important because what happens in Texas doesn’t stay here. Because the state has so many students, textbook publishers write to Texas standards and then sell their books to districts around the nation.
Doubting evolution shouldn’t be Texas’ legacy. More importantly, our students should not be subject to an erroneous line of teaching.
As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that “New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong”. Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not.
Nor will the new work do anything to diminish the standing of Darwin himself. When it came to gravitation and the laws of motion, Isaac Newton didn’t see the whole picture either, but he remains one of science’s giants. In the same way, Darwin’s ideas will prove influential for decades to come.
6:47 – We told you earlier that dueling press conferences (for and against dumbing down instruction in evolution) were interrupted by observers, as happened with this woman:
“My grandfather was not a monkey!” one woman shouted at a crowd before the meeting began.
You can read more about today’s science debate in an Associated Press story that just hit the wire.
6:48 – Steven Schafersman of Texas Citizens for Science is up. He is taking the board to the woodshed for refusing to hear from science experts when considering amendments to the standards in January.
6:51 – Testimony has just ended. The board will begin debate on the standards tomorrow, likely around mid-morning. TFN Insider will be live-blogging the debate and keeping you updated on events here.
With the final public hearing behind them, Texas State Board of Education members today will debate public school science curriculum standards that will be in place for a decade. Board members will likely consider a slew of amendments creationists have been circulating. Many of those amendments specifically target evolution, and almost certainly at least one will again call for requiring students to learn “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories (but it’s always about evolution).
9:17 – The Texas State Board of Education meeting has begun, and we have some encouraging news. Dallas member Mavis Knight, a strong supporter of sound science standards, is participating by videoconference. It appears that Mary Helen Berlanga from Corpus Christi is not present, but no motion can pass on a 7-7 tie. So if all votes hold from January, the pro-science board members should be able to block bad amendments today. (We said “if” and “should be able.”)
The board has not yet reached the agenda item on science standards.
9:24 – A representative of the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation is talking to the board about early revisions of the social studies standards, which the board will take up after science. We’re waiting for a copy of the document the representative is presenting to the board.
9:40 – Board member Terri Leo decries any suggestion to leave out of the social studies standards important historical figures to make room for “multicultural” issues and personalities. “I’ve never heard of half of these people,” Leo says of one proposed list of names. Well, we haven’t seen the list of proposed names or those who might be left out, and everyone agrees that key historical figures should be covered in social studies classrooms. But that Ms. Leo has never heard of someone in history is hardly a sound criterion the state should be following for deciding who gets in and who gets left out of standards.
9:53 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar is suggesting that the board should perhaps start the social studies process over. Let’s recap: board members have appointed members to social studies writing teams, who have already met once. The board has received one report on their work, from the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The teams have not finished their work. In fact, a representative of the Texas Education Agency has informed the board that writing teams were still very early in the revision process. Ms. Dunbar, however, is concerned that the writing teams will present drafts based on “entrenched” interests (”academia,” she says), not parents and others. (Are many teachers not parents?) Chairman Don McLeroy wants to cancel the social studies revision process at this point and then come up with a new proposal for how to proceed.
10:01 – It appears the board will defer a decision until tomorrow on how to proceed on social studies standards.
10:03 – By the way, we now have the document presented by Brooke Dollens Terry of Texas Public Policy Foundation. Following are the names she says have been added to the standards for third grade. (Terri Leo says she has never heard of half of the names being added, but it’s unclear if she means for all the standards or just for third grade.)
Grace Hopper, Margaret Knight, Quanah Parker, Dr. Hector P. Garcia, Maya Lin, Maya Angelou, Sandra Cisneros, Kadir Nelson, Jean Pinkey, Angela Shelf Medear, Elisabet Ney, Carmen Lomas Garza, and Bill Martin.
10:07 – The board is about to begin its debate on science.
10:09 – Board member Ken Mercer of San Antonio moves to add “strengths and weaknesses” back into the science standards.
10:12 – Mercer: This about allowing students to discuss and question strengths and weaknesses of all scientific theories. He claims receiving 15,0000-16,000 e-mails on this from around the state.
10:15 – Mercer goes down the “microevolution” vs. “macroevolution” path again. And he brings up “Piltdown man” and a list of other “weaknesses” he claims plague evolutionary theory.
10:19 – OK, it looks like board member David Bradley’s computer screen has TFN Insider up. Good morning, Mr. Bradley!
10:20 – Member Bob Craig of Lubbock offers a substitute amendment. “I am fully cognizant to the difference between faith and science. But I believe they can co-exist.” He argues that what the writing teams suggested in December still allows students to freely discuss all aspects of science. Mr. Craig proposes to keep the work group language (without “strengths and weaknesses”) but adds “including discussing what is not fully understood so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.”
10:26 – Dallas member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller supports Mr. Craig’s motion.
10:30 – This should be interesting. Mr. Mercer and other creationists have argued that taking “strengths and weaknesses” out of the standards will bar students from discussing and asking questions. Mr. Craig’s amendment addresses that, explicitly affirms the right of students to discuss and question while keeping phony “weaknesses” out of textbooks.
10:32 – Mavis Knight speaks in favor of Mr. Craig’s motion.
10:34 – The creationists have a difficult decision to make here. Is this about the freedom of students to ask questions, as they have argued, or is this about promoting phony attacks on evolution in textbooks?
10:36 – Pat Hardy speaks in favor of Mr. Craig’s motion.
10:37 – Terri Leo opposes Mr. Craig’s motion. She says the language is “too ambiguous.” She wants teachers to tell students specific “weaknesses.”
10:38 – Lawrence Allen supports Mr. Craig’s motion.
10:39 – By the way, Texas Freedom Network supports Mr. Craig’s motion (although we hadn’t seen it until now). It’s a wise and responsible way to ensure that students are free to ask questions. That’s how they learn.
10:41 – Cynthia Dunbar opposes Mr. Craig’s motion. She notes a comment from Ms. Miller that she (Ms. Miller) is a committed Christian. Ms. Dunbar says that religious beliefs are irrelevant to what the board should so. Oh, really? Then why have her creationist colleagues and their allies questioned the faith of those who oppose putting “strengths and weaknesses” in the standards.
10:43 – Rick Agosto opposes Mr. Craig’s amendment. “If it’s not ‘fully understood,’ then I don’t consider that science.”
10:44 – Once again, Mr. Craig has moved that the board retain the language proposed by writing teams in December (without “strengths and weaknesses”) but add to the expectation that students analyze and evaluate scientific explanations: “including discussing what is not fully understood so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.”
10:46 – Barbara Cargill opposes Mr. Craig’s motion. She says “strengths and weaknesses” language protects the ability of teachers to tell students “weaknesses” of evolution (however phony those “weaknesses” are, apparently). “Darwinists have tried to smother all the challenges … (and) weaknesses of evolution.”
10:52 – Mr. Mercer opposes Mr. Craig’s motion. “What are they afraid of? Why all this national attention over one word, ‘weaknesses’?”
10:54 – McLeroy calls a 10-minute recess.
11:08 – They’re back. Ms. Knight moves to change Mr. Craig’s amendment to read: “fully understand IN ALL FIELD OF SCIENCE.” So the wording would be: “including discussing what is not fully understood in all fields of science.” The board accepts that change without objection. We’re back to Mr. Craig’s motion.
11:12 – Mr. Craig’s motion fails 6-8. We’re back to Mr. Mercer’s original amendment adding back “strengths and weaknesses.”
11:13 – Mr. Mercer’s motion fails 7-7!!!
11;15 – This is huge victory for sound science education in Texas. Moreover, the creationists’ opposition to Mr. Craig’s motion exposed their hypocrisy about wanting to ensure that students can ask questions about science.
BREAKING NEWS: A proposed amendment adding “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories back to the science standards has failed on a 7-7 vote.
11:17 – With the defeat of “strengths and weaknesses,” the board is now on to other amendments. Ms. Cargill begins.
11:20 Despite Chairman McLeroy’s repeated prohibition against signs in the hearing room (targeted at TFN members quietly holding signs saying things like “Stand Up for Science”), creationists who wanted “strengths and weaknesses” in the standards have brought a couple of bright neon signs to the hearing room today reading:
“Don’t Censor Science”
and
“No Science Censorship”
Finally, Mr. Agosto requested that Chairman McLeroy ask the creationists to withdraw their signs. He did.
11:28 – Here is the vote breakdown on the Mercer “strengths and weaknesses” amendment:
Yes: Bradley, Cargill, Dunbar, Lowe, McLeroy, Mercer, Leo
Berlanga is absent today. We are told she will be able to participate tomorrow by videoconference.
This is a huge victory for sound science, but not the final word. The final vote will be taken on Friday. And board members may now offer additional amendments to the standards, so there is still room for mischeif by anti-evolution board members. So Act 1 is over with a victory for science advocates. Stay tuned as Act 2 begins.
11: 32 – Ms. Cargill’s amendments right now appear to be mostly small changes to some elementary science classes. Nothing on evolution yet.
12:02 – We’re still here. Ms. Cargill continues to offer amendments to elementary-level science classes. For the most part, these are fine and are bringing no objections from board members. Anti-evolution amendments are still to come.
12:12 – The board is now moving on to amendments for standards for courses in secondary schools.
12:13 – Gail Lowe offers amendments that would apply to all high school courses. We’re checking them now. Update: So far, these look OK.
1:43 – Sometimes the hypocrisy is really astounding. The anti-evolution Discovery Institute is harshly criticizing State Board of Education member Rick Agosto for asking that creationists remove their anti-evolution signs from the board room. Says the Disco:
Apparently Texas Board of Education member Rick Agosto isn’t just content to censor science by removing any criticisms of evolution from the science curriculum. The San Antonio Democrat even wants to prevent citizens from expressing their disagreement with that censorship. This morning Agosto demanded that some citizens quietly holding signs stating “Don’t Censor Science” at the Board meeting take down their signs. He even called on security personnel to forcibly remove the signs, but Board chair Don McElroy intervened to stop that abuse of power.
We saw no effort to have security personnel remove anybody from the board room. Mr. Agosto was simply asking Chairman McLeroy to enforce the rule that McLeroy decreed after pro-science citizens brought signs with them to the November hearing.
Does the Discovery Institute think rules are only for people who support sound science?
1:47 – Terri Leo offers a bad amendment to the biology standards:
Analyze and evaluate the evidence regarding formation of simple organic molecules and their organization into long complex molecules having information such as the DNA molecule for self-replicating life.
Mr. Agosto says he will vote for it but then discuss it with science experts later with an eye toward moving to strike it tomorrow if necessary. That’s just a bad parliamentary strategy. It’s harder to remove an amendment than to defeat it outright.
The amendment passes 8-6, with Agosto and Craig voting for it.
1:50 – Mavis Knight moves to strip out the January amendment from Don McLeroy questioning common ancestry.
1:57 – Chairman McLeroy argues against Knight’s amendment and criticizes those who say his January arguments for the original amendment were “dishonest” and “deceitful.”
1:59 – Knight’s amendment fails 7-6, with Agosto abstaining.
2:01 – McLeroy moves the following amendment to the biology standards:
Analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of natural selection to explain the complexity of the cell.
Let the pseudoscientific babble and distortions begin…
2:03 – McLeroy acknowledges that his January amendment was intended to attack what he describes as the first important principle of evolution, common ancestry. He says now he’s going after the second, natural selection. He wants schools to be “honest” with the kids.
2:04 – McLeroy defends his new amendment by reading passages from the work of Bruce Alberts, former president of the National Academy of Sciences. We don’t have Alberts’ work available here, but we highly (HIGHLY) doubt that he would be pleased to see McLeroy interpret his work as proof of a “weakness” of evolution.
2:16 – Wow. Now McLeroy wants to amend his amendment to read the “sufficiency or insufficiency of unguided natural processes to explain the complexity of the cell.”
That’s creationism, pure and simple. McLeroy has just called on the standards to pit science against God.
2:18 – McLeroy withdraws the amendment to his amendment. He goes back to his original proposal attacking natural selection. It passes 9-5, with Agosto and Nunez voting yes.
2:21 – The board moves on to amendments for chemistry.
2:22 – What we’re seeing is a combination of things. Some board members seem to be seeking some political cover. On the other hand, some may genuinely not be aware that they’re putting creationist nonsense in the science standards.
2:32 – Nothing big on chemistry. On to Earth and Space Science. Bob Craig offers five amendments. One would change a problematic amendment passed in January that suggested there are differing scientific theories about the origin of the universe. Another changes language in a January amendment attacking common descent.
2:39 – We’re hearing news from the Capitol that the House Public Education Committee has approved legislation that would put the State Board of Education under sunset review. Will provide more details when we get them.
2:43 – Mr. Craig’s amendment about the origins of the universe fails 6-8, with Agosto voting no.
2:45 – Update: We hear that the House Public Education Committee vote to put the state board under sunset review was unanimous.
2:48 – Mr. Craig’s amendments, by the way, have come from a majority of members of the Earth and Space Science curriculum writing team. Creationist board members, sometimes joined by one or two other members, are opposing them (even if the have absolutely nothing to do with evolution, origins or common descent.) None can pass anyway on a 7-7 tie.
2:54 – Mr. Craig’s amendment to change language in the January amendment challenging common descent fails 6-8, with Agosto voting no.
2:56 – Barbara Cargill now offers an amendment for Earth and Space Science designed to challenge the Big Bang theory. She wants teachers to tell students that there are different estimates of the age of the universe. (Like, maybe billions of years vs. 10,000?)
3:00 – Cargill says she has no intention to open the door to teaching creationist suggestions on the age of the universe. Uh huh. Right.
3:02 – Cargill slipped up a little while ago, saying “universal common design” instead of “universal common descent.” Oops. A revealing slip, yes?
3:05 – Cargill’s amendment passes 11-3.
3:09 – These and other Cargill amendments are designed to fudge science, making it more tentative on key points.
3:15 – Gail Lowe offers an amendment to the environmental systems course for high school. The current standard: “discuss the positive and negative influence of commonly held ethical beliefs on scientific practices such as methods used to increase food production or the existence of global warming.” Lowe wants to drop global warming. Mavis Knight suggests that students be asked to analyze and evaluate differing views on the existence of global warming. The revised amendment passes.
3:25 – The board has just voted to pass the amended standards on for consideration at the final board meeting tomorrow.
3:35 – We will be wrapping up this live-blogging now. We’ll be back for the final vote tomorrow.
OK, we’ve had a little time to digest all that went on today at the Texas State Board of Education. Without going through each of the many amendments that passed, here’s essentially what happened. This morning the board slammed the door on bringing creationism into classrooms through phony “weaknesses” arguments. But then board members turned around and threw open all the windows to pseudoscientific nonsense attacking core concepts like common descent and natural selection.
The amendments approved today are very problematic, regardless of the important victory over “strengths and weaknesses.” We anticipate that all 15 board members will be participating tomorrow, however, including a pro-science member who was absent today. So there is still time to reverse course.
Tomorrow, with the final vote, the board has a serious decision to make: is the science education of the next generation of Texas schoolchildren going to be based on fact-based, 21st-century science or on the personal beliefs of board members promoting phony arguments and pseudoscience?
You can still weigh in by sending e-mails to board members at sboeteks@tea.state.tx.us. Texas Education Agency staff will distribute e-mails to board members.
Watch this short clip of State Board of Education chairman Don McLeroy explaining the true motivation behind his two amendments to proposed Texas science standards dealing with common descent and natural selection:
We’ll say this for McLeroy – he’s not trying to hide his intent. The purpose of his amendments is to cause kids to question the validity of the “two key parts of the great claim of evolution, which is common ancestry by unguided natural processes.” McLeroy - and by extension those who voted to support this amendment – want to convince students that evolution is not true.
And can we ask, if the natural process is not “unguided,” then who is guiding it?
9:00 – Today the Texas State Board of Education finally decides what the next generation of Texas students will learn about evolution in their public school science classrooms. The morning preliminaries are ceremonial, but we expect debate on the science curriculum standards to begin within the hour. Stay tuned.
9:48 – The science debate is beginning.
9:50 – Cynthia Dunbar moves to amend the standards to ask students to study evidence “supportive and nonsupportive” of scientific theories. This is just another way of saying “strengths and weaknesses.”
10:05 – The board is on break as members discuss the amendment with each other.
10:08 – They’re back. Dunbar brings up the old nonsense that she’s protecting “academic freedom” and the state from being sued. She argues that if folks think “strengths and weaknesses” is “tainted,” then “supportive and nonsupportive evidence” should be fine. She misses the point. There is NO scientific evidence nonsupportive of evolution. Evolution is settled science for all but ideologues who oppose it for religious reasons.
10:14 – Bob Craig offers an amendment to the amendment, striking “supportive and nonsupportive” and replacing it with scientific evidence “on all sides” of the issue.
10:22 – One wonders if this board would also agree that students should learn “supportive and nonsupportive” evidence that Earth revolves around the sun. Or maybe we can have teachers present all sides to that debate. www.fixedearth.com can provide the side that says it doesn’t.
10:25 – Craig’s amendment: “analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations in all fields of science by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, by examining both scientific evidence that is supportive and not supportive of those explanations, so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.”
10:34 – Strike that. The above was Dunbar’s original amendment. This is Craig’s substitute: “analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations in all fields of science by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.”
10:37 – Craig’s amendment will pass, it appears.
10:44 – Mary Helen Berlanga says she will oppose both Craig’s and Dunbar’s amendment because she wants to stick with the draft from the teacher and expert writing teams.
10:55 – Another extended break is ending.
11:00 – The amendment is changed to move “in all fields of science” to the beginning of the standard.
11:07 – This is the amendment: “In all fields of science, analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.” The amendment passes 13-2, with Berlanga and Rene Nunez voting no.
11:10 – The board moves on to amendments at other grade levels.
11:14 – The amendment with “on all sides” applies to all science classes in third grade and up.
11:58 – Board members have moved off of evolution over the past hour, but we expect them to bring up amendments after an extended break.
12:32 – Members are now going to hear amendments attempting to strip out anti-science amendments adopted by the board yesterday and in January. Lawrence Allen offers an amendment striking chairman Don McLeroy’s measure challenging common descent in the biology standards.
12:36 – McLeroy is opposed. “If I knew I had to debate this again today, I would have brought all my evidence.” The fossil record, he says, doesn’t support common ancestry.
12:40 McLeroy: “People say I’m talking out of context when I speak about stasis.”
Well, yes, he is.
12:41: McLeroy: “I disagree with all these experts. Somebody has to stand up to these experts. I don’t know why they’re doing it.”
12:42: Stay tuned for our video clip on this strange lecture as soon as we have it ready.
12:42: McLeroy: The fossil record both supports and doesn’t support evolution. Let the students decide, he says.
12:43: Cynthia Dunbar: Striking McLeroy’s amendment will be OK because the new “compromise amendment” adopted earlier will allow these kinds of arguments. But then she says she opposes the motion to strike it. Very confusing.
12:45 – Barbara Cargill opposes Allen’s amendment striking the McLeroy measure. “Why is it that some things do stay the same over time?” She buys McLeroy’s “stasis” argument.
12:47 – Geraldine Miller: Supports Allen’s amendment. McLeroy’s amendment “basically doesn’t make any sense.”
12:49 – David Bradley opposes Allen’s amendment. Knight supports it. Bob Craig supports it. Craig: McLeroy’s measure conflicts with the compromise adopted earlier. Agosto gave a confusing statement, so it’s hard to know but we think he supports Allen’s amendment. Mercer opposes Allen’s amendment. Berlanga: Supports Allen’s amendment. “When we need legal assistance, we go to an attorney…. When we know any assistance, we go to the experts in the field. I’m not a scientist.” She argues to listen to the science experts.
12:58 – Mercer: “The issue of sudden appearance in the fossil record is important.”
12:59 – McLeroy: Mocks the argument that who is he, a dentist, to challenge scientists. He criticizes “the appeal to authority” as an argument against his position. “They are the experts, but science doesn’t operate on consensus.” But now he appeals to authority by quote-mining Stephen J. Gould.
1:03 – McLeroy: “Genetics is the foundation for modern biology, not evolution.” “Genetics goes back to a Christian monk who did precise data.” Huh?
1:06 – Allen’s amendment passes 8-7, striking McLeroy’s challenge to common descent in the standards. Very important victory.
1:08 – The board is taking a short break.
1:30 – Dunbar offers an amendment, calling for students to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency of scientific explanations concerning any data on sudden appearance and stasis and the sequential groups in the fossil record.” Bob Craig wants to amend, striking “the sufficiency of.” Berlanga is bothered that the board is making recommendations on specific standards without allowing time for members to discuss the amendments with science experts. Very good question, of course.
1:43 – Terri Leo, acting as chair, says all this was debated yesterday, and the board doesn’t need anymore input from the science community. Of course, the board never asked science experts to advise the board about McLeroy’s measure in January or this week.
1:46 – Dunbar’s amendment, as amended by Craig, passes 13-2.
McLeroy is happy, which says it all. Creationists will now pressure publishers to challenge common ancestry in textbooks and base their challenges on McLeroy’s arguments.
1:49 – Allen moves to strip out McLeroy’s amendment, passed yesterday, challenging natural selection.
1:54 – This amendment passes 8-7.
1:59 – Craig offers an amendment: “Analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the complexity of the cell.” This amendment passes 13-2.
2:03 – Allen moves to strike a Terri Leo amendment passed yesterday that stated: “Analyze and evaluate the evidence regarding formation of simple organic molecules and their organization into long complex molecules having information such as the DNA molecule for self-replicating life.” The motion fails 5-10.
4:19 – Apologies for the long gap since the last post. We’ve been working with reporters for the last two hours. In addition to the amendments on the biology standards, board members also considered a measure to remove suggestions from the Earth and Space Science standards that there are competing scientific theories (besides Big Bang) on the origins of the universe. That amendment failed. The board then moved to adopt the full science standards document on a 13-2 vote.
The Texas Freedom Network has released the following statement on the final adoption of science curriculum standards by the State Board of Education today:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 27, 2009
TFN President Kathy Miller: Texas State Board of Education Adopts Flawed Science Standards
The word “weaknesses” no longer appears in the science standards. But the document still has plenty of potential footholds for creationist attacks on evolution to make their way into Texas classrooms.
Through a series of contradictory and convoluted amendments, the board crafted a road map that creationists will use to pressure publishers into putting phony arguments attacking established science into textbooks.
We appreciate that the politicians on the board seek compromise, but don’t agree that compromises can be made on established mainstream science or on honest education policy.
What’s truly unfortunate is that we now have to revisit this entire debate in two years when new science textbooks are adopted. Perhaps the Texas legislature can do something to prevent that.
###
The Texas Freedom Network is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization of religious and community leaders who advance a mainstream agenda supporting public education, religious freedom and individual liberties.
“I disagree with these experts. Somebody’s gotta stand up to experts that are… I don’t know why they’re doing it. They’re wonderful people.”
During today’s Texas State Board of Education debate over new public school science standards, board chairman Don McLeroy defended a measure challenging evolution and the concept of common descent specifically. Here’s the video clip:
Board members voted to strip from the standards a McLeroy measure that would have required science teachers to challenge specifically the concept of common descent. They then turned around and passed what they called a compromise amendment that does the same thing but with different language: “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning any data on sudden appearance and stasis and the sequential groups in the fossil record.” McLeroy had argued that such data disproves the concept of common descent and will demand that publishers say as much in new textbooks are adopted in 2011. He was later heard gushing to reporters: “Science has regained its luster.”
The Texas State Board of Education did more than open the door to creationist attacks on evolution when passing new science curriculum standards today. It also watered down a section on global warming in the standards for the environmental systems high school course.
The environmental systems curriculum standards drafted by a writing team in December had included the following standard:
(9)(G) discuss the positive and negative influence of commonly held ethical beliefs on scientific practices such as methods used to increase food production or the existence of global warming
The measure was changed to read: “analyze how ethical beliefs can be used to influence scientific practices such as methods of increasing food production.” Then the board added the following standard: “Analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” As with evolution, there is consensus in the mainstream science community on the existence of global warming. The debate revolves around the mechanisms causing it.
As we noted yesterday, evolution wasn’t the only target of social conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education this week. New public school science curriculum standards approved by the board also weaken instruction on climate change.
Board Chairman Don McLeroy told a reporter that he thinks the standards, including a measure suggesting there is no scientific consensus on global warming, “perfectly good”:
Conservatives like me think the evidence (for human contributions to global warming) is a bunch of hooey.
Changes in the atmosphere, the oceans and glaciers and ice caps now show unequivocally that the world is warming due to human activities, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in new report released today in Paris.
The IPCC, which brings together the world’s leading climate scientists and experts, concluded that major advances in climate modelling and the collection and analysis of data now give scientists “very high confidence” – at least a 9 out of 10 chance of being correct – in their understanding of how human activities are causing the world to warm. This level of confidence is much greater than the IPCC indicated in their last report in 2001.
Climate change isn’t one of the issues the Texas Freedom Network follows closely. But Chairman McLeroy’s comment reveals precisely the problem we are working to overcome: ideologues trying to promote personal and political agendas over honest science, research and facts in public school classrooms.
A bill aimed at undercutting acceptance of evolution in Florida science classes, which kicked up a fuss but didn’t pass in the Florida Legislature last year, apparently is going nowhere this year.
A Senate version of the bill has yet to receive a committee hearing and has no companion bill in the House.
That means, said one proponent of the idea, that the bill has little chance of passage in this frantic session, heavily devoted to cutting and balancing the state budget.
“With no companion in the House, it doesn’t have much likelihood,” said Rep. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla.
In the crush of the last couple of days, we didn’t have time until now to read through this essay by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago about the debate over evolution and science in Texas public schools. Prof. Coyne wonders just how far to take the “strengths and weaknesses” (or the “teach all sides”) debate over evolution:
What’s next? Since there are many who deny the Holocaust, can we expect legislation requiring history classes to discuss the “strengths and weaknesses” of the idea that Nazis persecuted Jews? Should we teach our children astrology in their psychology classes as an alternative theory of human behaviour? And, given the number of shamans in the world, shouldn’t their views be represented in medical schools?
The Texas Legislature should “take a thorough look” at changing the structure of the embattled Texas State Board of Education, maybe changing it to a nonpartisan or appointed board, Texas House Speaker Joe Straus told the Star-Telegram Editorial Board Friday.
… Besides the board’s handling of science standards, Straus said, “I have some other concerns about that elected body having so much management authority over significant dollars,” referring to investments of the Permanent School Fund.
He said it would be “interesting” to look at nonpartisan board elections. Straus also brought up changing back to an appointed board.
“I’ve spoken to some people who were leaders in the effort to make it an elected board, and they’re very sorry,” he said.
Perhaps the anti-evolution pressure groups that led the attack on honest science in Texas think that no one was paying attention to their repulsive tactics. Well, we were.
In defense of her views, Mrs. Miller launched into a remarkable speech about how she is a Christian and “a student of the Bible,” as if her personal religious beliefs have any relevance to what should be taught in science classes. . . . Once again, a defender of evolution has appealed to religion rather than science to justify his or her views. Mrs. Miller is certainly entitled to her religious views, but she wasn’t elected to serve on a state board of theology. While the government has a legitimate secular interest in teaching the science of evolution, it has no right whatever to try to dictate students’ theological beliefs about evolution, pro or con. The fact that evolution defenders can’t stick to science when justifying their censorship of the science curriculum is telling.
Houston lawyer Kelly “www.christianattorney.com” Coghlan is burning up the Internets with another screed on the evolution battle in Texas public schools. (Coghlan was the author of another e-mail a few weeks back linking acceptance of the science of evolution to serial murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer.) He testified at least week’s Texas State Board of Education public hearing, darkly warning that the state would face lawsuits if the board eliminated a science curriculum requirement that students learn phony arguments attacking evolution. The board ultimately refused to retain the “strengths and weaknesses” requirement, but Coghlan is declaring victory anyway.
(T)he phrase was replaced with an even broader standard requiring teaching “all sides of scientific evidence” which implicitly includes teaching the scientific weaknesses. Some other issues were also voted on, and our side (pro-science) prevailed on most of these issues in close votes. The evolution lobby won the battle but lost the war.
There is no doubt, of course, that creationist pressure groups and their allies on the board will try to use the new language to force publishers to dumb down instruction on evolution. But what’s most interesting about Coghlan’s e-mail is the contempt with which he holds three Republicans who opposed “strengths and weaknesses” but supported the compromise that Coghlan now praises. He lists each of the three, asking for candidates to run against each in the next election:
We must elect people of integrity to the State Board. Over the next 2 years, this Board will decide which textbooks are used to teach our 4.7 million students. We don’t want to have to go through this same ordeal again. We must eliminate Board members who lack a moral compass on important issues such as these.
The lesson: political compromises with extremists earn you little but future troubles. The world of extremists is black and white. If they can’t get their way completely, they will squeeze everything out of you they can get and then push you over the political cliff. Talk about “lacking a moral compass.”
Texas has the nation’s third-highest teen birth rate yet receives more federal abstinence-only funding than any other state in the country. What’s wrong with this picture?
We just finished a briefing for Capitol reporters about two very important bills under consideration by the Texas House Public Education Committee this afternoon. House Bill 741 by Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, would require that Texas public schools teach comprehensive, “abstinence-plus,” sex education. HB 1567 by Rep. Michael Villarreal, D-San Antonio, would require that all information taught about condoms and other forms of contraception and disease prevention be medically accurate.
A Texas Freedom Network Education Fund report about sexuality education in public schools shows why these bills are so important. More than 9 in 10 Texas school districts teach nothing about responsible pregnancy and disease prevention, taking instead an abstinence-only approach. And most abstinence-only programs are plagued with errors and misinformation and rely on fear, shame and stereotypes to teach teens about sexuality and health. Moreover, public polling shows that support for comprehensive sexuality education is overwhelming.
So what’s the problem? Need you ask?
The abstinence-only pressure groups are out in force. Kyleen Wright of Texans for Life Coalition, for example, has been giving media interviews before her committee testimony. Wright helped lead successful efforts in 2004 to keep any medically accurate information about contraception and disease prevention out of new Texas high school health textbooks. Boiled down, Wright’s message is “ignorance works.” Well, no, it doesn’t. The state’s high teen birth rates are testament to that.
The Texas House Public Education Committee is about to take up two key bills that would bring important reforms to what the state’s public schools teach about sex education. Click here for a live video webcast of the hearing. (Then click on LiveStream 6 for the Public Education Committee meeting.) TFN Insider will also be providing updates.
6:00 - Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, is now laying out House Bill 741, which would require Texas public schools to teach comprehensive — or “abstinence-plus” — sexuality education if they teach about sexual health at all. Rep. Castro notes that Texas has the nation’s third-highest rate of teen births, a statistic that itself argues for major changes to the state’s predominantly abstinence-only approach to sexuality education. (Parents would still have the right to opt their children out of such classes.)
6:22 – Dr. Jan Realini, president of the Healthy Futures in San Antonio and member of the Texas Medical Association Council on Public Health, offers powerful testimony for arming teens with medically accurate information about how to protect themselves from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
6:44 – David Wiley, a professor of health education at Texas State University and co-author of the TFN Education Fund’s two-year study on sex education in Texas public schools, is now testifying. Prof. Wiley decries the “conspiracy of silence” surrounding sex education and calls for honest, medically accurate information in public schools.
7:08 – Social conservatives are testifying and are upset (of course) with the bill. They see no need to change the existing statute on sex education — regardless of soaring teen birth rates in Texas.
7:13 – State Rep. Randy Weber, R-Pearland, doesn’t much like the bill. “Do we teach safe smoking?” “Do we expect our kids to remain abstinent from drinking and driving?” We expected this kind of silliness.
7:15 – Kyleen Wright of Texans for Life Coalition claims abstinence-0nly is working and that teen birth rates are down. She fails to mention demographic changes over the last two decades that help account for that. In any case, they’re now rising — and Texas is already near the top. Wright: We are not for censoring information, but we want parents’ rights to be respected. “Parents have spoken loud and clear during their School Health Advisory Councils” that they want abstinence-only education. Moments ago, she noted that the TFN Education Fund report was accurate in noting that more than 94 percent of school districts teach abstinence-only. But now she refuses to acknowledge another key finding: those School Health Advisory Councils are a sham. They aren’t meeting and aren’t making recommendations. She also ignores public opinion polling that shows parents overwhelmingly support comprehensive, abstinence-plus education.
7:56 – OK, we’re betting this is the first time the words “anal intercourse” and “clitoris” have ever echoed off the walls of this hearing room. Just sayin’.
7:57 – A health education graduate student notes that too many undergraduates are simply ignorant about basic information regarding human sexuality, including anatomy.
7:58 – Members of the Texas Freedom Network’s Youth Leadership Council are lined up to testify this evening. These young people from Texas colleges and high schools are working to promote responsible sexuality education. We’re very proud of the courage and passion they bring to their activism on this critical issue.
8:34 – Abstinence-only program providers aren’t particularly happy with Rep. Castro’s bill either. Is it because the bill would require that their programs teach medically accurate information instead of exaggerating claims of contraceptive failure rates in an attempt to persuade students that condoms and other methods of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are virtually useless?
8:48 – Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller is now testifying in support of Rep. Castro’s bill. She’s walking committee members through some key findings from the TFN Education Fund report about what’s really happening in classrooms regarding sex education.
8:54 – Jonathan Saenz from the Free Market Foundation Focus on the Family-Texas is now testifying. Saenz says he has no problem with teaching medically accurate information on sex education. So should we expect him to support HB 1567 by Rep. Michael Villarreal, D-San Antonio? HB 1567 would require that information taught in public schools about condoms and contraception be medically accurate — a requirement that would force a lot of changes to many abstinence-only programs.
9:19 – The committee is about to hear testimony on Rep. Villarreal’s bill.
9:24 – This bill is just common sense. If schools are going to teach anything about contraception, shouldn’t the information be scientifically accurate? Of course. Yet efforts to pass such a measure in past legislative sessions have failed because social conservatives opposed them.
9:28 – TFN’s Kathy Miller testifies in support of the bill. She notes that the TFN Education Fund study found a high rate of factual errors in abstinence-only programs used in Texas public schools.
9:40 – Kelly Wilson, co-author of the TFN Education Fund report and an assistant professor of health education at Texas State University-San Marcos, is also testifying in support of Rep. Villarreal’s bill. She offers some examples of nonsense her study found being taught in sexuality education programs. (Example: sexually, men are like microwaves that heat up quickly, while women are like crockpots that take a while longer.)
9:45 – Kyleen Wright of Texans for Life Coalition is testifying against the bill. Is anyone surprised? So much for common sense. “First and foremost, I’m for parents’ rights.” Does she think any parents wants their kids taught medically inaccurate information?
9:49 – Wright: “You offend parents far less by giving less information than (by) giving (teens) more.”Good grief. We can’t remember a more absurd argument for keeping teens ignorant.
9:52 – Anyone doubt that in the next few days we’ll see over-the-top, hair-on-fire e-mails from far-right groups shrieking that some lawmakers want to expose children to all form of sexual perversion?
10:09 – Dr. Jan Realini (Healthy Futures) is testifying in favor of the bill. Dr. Realini is a physician working in public health and explains what she sees working with teens who are pregnant or who have sexually transmitted diseases. Too many, she says, have been kept ignorant of the medically accurate information they needed to protect themselves.
10:12 – Testimony on these sex ed reform bills is winding down. The committee will leave the bills pending.
Did you miss our live-blogging of the Texas House Public Education Committee hearing on reforming sexuality education in the state with the nation’s third-highest teen birth rate? Well, we offer this gem from Kyleen Wright of the Texans for Life Coalition, which insists on abstinence-only-until-marriage education in public schools:
9:49 – Wright: “You offend parents far less by giving less information than (by) giving (teens) more.”
Good grief. We can’t remember a more absurd argument for keeping teens ignorant.
From science to sex education and issues like private school vouchers, religious freedom and civil liberties, the Texas Freedom Network is engaged on numerous fronts in defending mainstream values against the religious right in Texas. We are fortunate to have the help of a dedicated band of student interns to help us here at the office, at the Capitol and at the State Board of Education. In addition to our regular internships, TFN also sponsors a “Legislative Academy” every two years for students interested in learning more about public policy advocacy and the legislative process. This year we have six hard-working, dedicated interns in our Lege Academy program. We thought you might like to hear from one about her experiences, Mary Tuma. Mary is a senior fellow in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin:
Now that the State Board of Education has adopted new science curriculum standards, publishers can write their textbooks for the Texas adoption in 2011. The state board’s creationists will use the flawed standards they approved as a weapon to force publishers into dumbing down instruction on evolution. To get a sense of some of the nonsense they will demand to see in the textbooks, check out board chairman Don McLeroy’s Web site.
Chairman McLeroy, who led the charge during the standards debate to weaken instruction on evolution, includes commentary about science and other topics on his Web site. Evolution, however, is a primary target there.
Proposed schemes for private school vouchers — which drain money from neighborhood public schools to pay for tuition at private and religious schools — have sparked heated battles in Texas legislative sessions since the 1990s. Tomorrow the Senate Education Committee will take up two key voucher bills.
Senate Bill 1301 by Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, would provide vouchers for students with autism and autism spectrum disorder. SB 183 by Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, would create a broader voucher program for students with disabilities.
All Texas kids, regardless of their abilities or disabilities, deserve a quality education in Texas public schools. But voucher schemes aren’t the answer. Why? Among the reasons:
In a worldwide survey of 50 populations, a team of geneticists has identified many fingerprints of natural selection in the human genome. These are sites on the genome where specific sequences of DNA show signs of having become more common in the population, presumably because they helped their owners adapt to new climates, diseases or other factors.
The genetic regions where natural selection has acted turn out to differ in various populations, doubtless because each has been molded by different local forces on each continent.
“Our work supports the notion that regional populations have adapted in a variety of ways, some shared, some not, to the selective pressures they encountered as they dispersed from the ancestral African homeland some 80,000 years ago,” said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago.
The authors of the new study are Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues Joseph Pickrell and Graham Coop. It was published online last month in Genome Research. It is the first to look for signals of selection in DNA samples gathered by the Human Genome Diversity Project.
We are grateful to TFN Insider visitors who say our blog has rapidly become an important news resource on issues ranging from science and science education to defending separation of church and state and religious freedom in Texas. So we were extra pleased to see Texas State Board of Education member David Bradley, R-Beaumont Buna, following along with TFN Insider at last month’s board debate over new public school science standards.
Check out Mr. Bradley’s computer screen. As a member of the board’s anti-science, creationist bloc, Mr. Bradley may not agree with the Texas Freedom Network on much, but he clearly knows where to go for good information.
Oh, good gravy. State Rep. Betty Brown, R-Terrell, is making national news for suggesting Asian voters in Texas take new names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.” At a Texas House committee hearing on a voter identification bill Wednesday, Brown told a representative of OCA, an organization for Asian Pacific Americans (here’s a link to the Houston chapter):
Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here? … Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?
What good does it do to put a Chinese story in an English book? You learn all these Chinese words, OK. That’s not going to help you master … English. So you really don’t want Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them. Why should you take a child’s time trying to learn a word that they’ll never ever use again?
He then added that some words — such as chow mein — might be useful to know.
Our friends at NCSE have been wonderful national partners in the campaign for sound science education in Texas for many years, including during the adoption of new biology textbooks here six years ago. And they are continuing to battle efforts by creationist pressure groups to dumb down science education in states across the country. Check out the show.
As you know, lawmakers have filed a slew of bills that would rein in the authority of the Texas State Board of Education. Next week one of the most important bills will get a hearing in the Senate Education Committee.
Senate Bill 2275 by Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo, would strip the state board of authority over approving curriculum standards and textbooks (among other things). The bill would shift that authority to the state’s education commissioner. It also requires the commissioner to establish teams of educators and content experts to develop standards and review textbooks for approval.
Beck is also an admirer of James Dobson, who founded the religious-right group Focus on the Family. Beck brought Dobson on to his show a while back to talk about prayer in schools, declaring that some people “want to remove God from America entirely.” Across the bottom of the screen was a caption reading, “Progressives want to remove God from America.” (That surely must come as a shock to the tens of millions of people of faith in America whose political views are, in fact, progressive.)
We suppose having a sense of humor is important when elected officials are turning your state into a national laughingstock. Religion Dispatches offers a shocking photo of the rare “dog-cat” that Texas State Board of Education member Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, must have been talking about during the recent debate over teaching about evolution. Mercer has argued that the absence of transitional animals like a “dog-cat” and a “cat-rat” is proof that evolution is a fraud. Humor aside, Lauri Lebo’s accompanying article is an excellent review of what happened in Texas. She even gets board Chairman Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, to once again argue that science should include supernatural explanations.
(M)y impression from reading about it is that it was not a step forward but rather a step backward. Of course, all science needs to be skeptical. It’s hard to be against skepticism. But when you get into the domain of promoting particular views about the basis for skepticism of evolution, and those views are not really valid, then I think we have a problem. I think we need to be giving our kids a modern education in biology, and the underpinning of modern biology is evolution. And countervailing views that are not really science, if they are taught at all, should be taught in some other part of the curriculum.
I can tell you there are people on the SBOE who vilify public education as the work of the devil. And I wonder how they can have a sincere interest in advancing the education of our school-age children with an attitude that public education is an evil entity. So I believe that this represents a very logical and tangible alternative to what we currently have.
The current session of the Texas Legislature has seen an unprecedented number of bills filed that would remove or otherwise rein in the authority of the embarrassment that the state board has become. The Senate Education Committee this morning heard testimony on one such bill – Senate Bill 2275 – that would remove the SBOE’s role in adopting textbooks and curriclum and transfer it to the state’s education commissioner. Sen. Kel Seliger, a Republican from Amarillo, authored the bill with two other Republican and one Democratic senator, clear evidence that exasperation with the state board crosses party lines.
The hearing this morning featured a parade of witnesses (including TFN President Kathy Miller) testifying to the state board’s unfair processes, divisive ideological history and outright ineptitude. The speakers represented diverse subject areas ranging from science to language arts to mathematics. Nearly all were critical of the highly-politicized, convoluted process of adopting curriculum and textbooks that had done damage to their respective disciplines.
But the most interesting comments at the hearing came from committee members themselves, most of whom seemed very receptive to the bill. Sen. Seliger was especially persuasive in responding to Republican Sen. Dan Patrick’s questions about the reasons for this bill, explaining in detail the failure of the current process to properly respect the work of teachers and subject-area experts. Then came a devastating indictment of the board from Republican Sen. Averitt that perfectly summarized the case against the board:
Every once in a while you’ll find an instance where an elected body is diverted from their prescribed mission, and the prescribed mission here is to provide the best educational materials to our school children. And I’ll tell you my experience with the State Board of Education has been nothing but the worst case or example of partisan bickering and fighting, Republicans and Democrats alike.
The full transcipt of Sen. Averitt’s speech in the Senate Education Committee appears after the jump.
The Texas House of Representatives today is taking up the state’s budget bill. Yesterday the Texas Freedom Network sent out the following Action Alert:
Upcoming House Budget Debate Will Include Critical Votes on Stem Cell Research and Vouchers
Two crucially important issues will be debated when the Texas House of Representatives takes up the state budget (SB 1) starting this Friday. Lawmakers need to hear from Texans like you encouraging them to do the right thing — and letting them know we are watching their vote on these issues. These could be the most important votes on these issues this session.
Please take a moment to call your own state representative, and ask her or him to:
- NO on all amendments to SB 1 that would ban funding for stem cell research in Texas.
- OPPOSE VOUCHERS by voting YES on any amendment that would prohibit the use of any state funds to pay private school tuition.
(Click hereto find contact information for your representative.)
And after you call, contactVal or Judiein our Outreach Office to let them know how your representative responded. This information is extremely helpful as we try to keep track of where House members stand on these issues.
Background information and simple talking points appear below to help you prepare for your call. This is our chance to slam the door on vouchers this session, as well as send a strong message that Texas will not close its doors to promising medical research that provides hope for so many.
Stem Cell Research
Background: The budget bill approved by the Senate last month included a rider banning public funding for embryonic stem cell research in Texas.
Why should lawmakers oppose adding this funding ban to the House budget bill?
- Controversial policies like this should be fully debated in stand-alone legislation — not attached to the state budget bill and passed without proper consideration.
- Experts believe embryonic stem cell research provides the most hope for those who suffer from many debilitating and incurable diseases.
- Supporting stem cell research is good for Texas, good for business and good for science. As a home to highly respected medical institutions like M.D. Anderson in Houston, Texas has long been a leader in innovative medical research and treatments. Stem cells offer a new frontier for Texas medical researchers.
- Already scientists are leaving Texas to work in states that are not hostile to this groundbreaking research.
Vouchers
Background: Two years ago, House members overwhelming voted to prohibit the use of state funds to pay private or religious school tuition (127-8). The same amendment has been proposed this year. A clear prohibition in the budget would end the possibility of any voucher schemes in the coming biennium.
Why should lawmakers vote for an amendment banning public funding for private school vouchers?
- Vouchers drain needed funds from our neighborhood public schools.
- Lawmakers should focus on properly funding and supporting public schools that educate all Texas kids.
The Texas House has just voted 122-22 to bar any public funding for private school voucher schemes in the next state budget. We just released the following statement from Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller:
“We saw schemes to drain money from public schools to pay for vouchers divide this Legislature for more than a decade. Just four years ago, the voucher lobby came within a handful of votes of passing such a scheme in the House. Now we’ve seen Texas House members overwhelmingly reject vouchers for two straight sessions, and we commend them for it.
The message is clear: vouchers are about as popular in Texas as a panicked skunk at a church picnic. Now our lawmakers should focus on providing the resources our neighborhood schools need to provide a quality public education for all Texas schoolchildren.”
The religious right in recent years has repeatedly argued that embryonic stem cell research isn’t sound science and has been a waste of time and money. Last week, for example, the Family Research Council once again argued that embryonic stem cell research “has not successfully treated a single person for any disease.” In testimony before Congress less than two years ago, David Barton of the Texas-based group WallBuilders also argued that such research hadn’t led to any cures. Just last month the Christian Coalition of America claimed that there have been “zero successes in human embryonic stem cell research.” Of course, politicians and far-right pressure groups in this country have put numerous obstacles in the way of this promising medical research.
British scientists have developed the world’s first stem cell therapy to cure the most common cause of blindness. Surgeons predict it will become a routine, one-hour procedure that will be generally available in six or seven years’ time. The treatment involves replacing a layer of degenerated cells with new ones created from embryonic stem cells.
This development offers new hope to millions of people who suffer from age-related macular degeneration.
Professor Peng Khaw, director of the Biomedical Research Centre at Moorfields and the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, added: “This shows that stem cell therapy is coming of age. It offers great hope for many sufferers around the world who cannot be treated with conventional treatment.” He added: “All my patients say to me is, ‘When will this stem cell treatment be ready? I want it now’.”
On a related note, the Texas House passed its version of the state budget early Saturday (April 18) morning. The House budget does not include the Senate’s proposed ban on public funding for embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. (That ban could also prevent even privately funded ESC research at publicly funded facilities.) A House-Senate conference committee will now hammer out a compromise budget. Opponents of ESC research will likely work to put the funding ban in the final state budget.
The Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research Graduate School has filed its long-threatened lawsuit against Texas’ commissioner of higher education, Raymund Paredes, and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Last year the coordinating board rejected the ICR’s application to offer master’s of science education degrees in Texas. The board said the ICR — which argues that the concept of biblical creation is backed by science while evolution is not — failed to meet required academic standards. (Well, yeah.)
According to the complaint (available here), the ICR is charging that the coordinating board Dr. Paredes are working to
perpetrate viewpoint discrimination and censorship, inter alia, in violation of the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the 14th Amendment (and in violation of other laws), especially as the 14th Amendment is recognized as applying to the constitutional rights of free speech (including academic speech and religious speech), freedom of the press (including freedom from “prior restraint” censorship of academic speech associated with freedom of the press), freedom from viewpoint discrimination (as well as content discrimination), free exercise of religion, freedom of association, freedom from hositility toward religious viewpoints), freedom from arbitrary and abusive governmental discrretion, freedom from anti-accommodational evolution-only-science enforcement policy practices, freedom from unequal protection (especially in academic “evolution-only-science-credentialing” politics that act like a government-controlled “titles of nobility” monopoly scheme in postsecondary Science Education), and reputation injuries, etc.
You can read the whole complaint for yourself, but here are some excerpts:
Texas State Board of Education member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, is crowing about the state’s new science standards in her April edition of The Cargill Connection (an e-mail newsletter). Ms. Cargill is thrilled that the standards require that students learn “all sides” of scientific evidence regarding evolution. She and other creationists on the board have made it clear they will use that standard to pressure publishers to include phony, long-discredited arguments against evolution in new science textbooks up for adoption in Texas in 2011.
Then Ms. Cargill notes a series of her amendments to the standards that the board approved:
I labored for months seeking input from science educators and experts before offering over twenty amendments for the elementary TEKS. All of these passed! Our young students will study the planets (they had been omitted), experiment with simple machines like pulleys, and make predictions using weather maps.
What?!? Those evil, liberal, education-establishment heathens! Why, they were even trying to HIDE THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM’S PLANETS FROM OUR KIDS!
Good grief. Did Ms. Cargill honestly think students wouldn’t be learning about the planets in their science classrooms? Really? Yes, we can almost hear the publishers: “Teaching about the planets is just sooo boring. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. A lot of them are just gassy blobs anyway. What else is there to say? So we figured science teachers wouldn’t notice or particularly care if we left them out of the textbooks.”
Thankfully, Ms. Cargill rode to the rescue. Of course, she also succeeded in eliminating from the standards the scientific consensus that the universe is nearly 14 billion years old. So kids will learn about the planets but better not ask how old they are.
It’s unusual for the Senate to reject a governor’s appointment. Even so, state lawmakers aren’t happy with a state board that has become increasingly dysfunctional (and embarrassing) since the Bryan dentist’s elevation to chairman. The board has disregarded established procedures, ignored state law, defied the Legislature and lurched from one “culture war” battle to the next. Most recently, of course, Chairman McLeroy led the board in opening the state’s science curriculum to creationist attacks on evolution, wildly declaring: “I disagree with all these experts! Somebody has to stand up to these experts!”
The Nominations Committee will meet 30 minutes after the Senate adjourns for the day on Wednesday. The hearing, which will include testimony on other nominations as well, will be in the Senate chamber at the Capitol. Those who want to testify can register at the hearing.
Want to share your opinion about Chairman McLeroy with the committee but can’t come to Austin to testify? Click here for the committee’s Web page. Then click on each member’s name for contact information.
It is obvious now that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is basing his hopes for re-election next year mostly on winning over the far-right wing of the Republican Party. (That’s the same wing that wrote the 2008 state party platform. You can read that classic example of extremism here.) If Gov. Perry can win the GOP nomination, he figures he’ll win the general election fairly easily in a Republican-leaning state.
So with an expected challenge for his party’s nomination from U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the governor has raced to the extremist fringes. In addition to sharpening his attacks on reproductive rights for women, Gov. Perry has rejected federal aid for the unemployed, revived the racially poisoned “states rights” rhetoric of the segregationist right from the 1950s, and even suggested that Texas could and might one day secede. And this week he’s once again pow-wowing with fundamenalist pastors at a closed-door confab in Austin.
The Senate Nominations Committee considers the appointment of Don McLeroy as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education today, probably late this afternoon or early evening. Here are some questions we would love to see members of the committee ask Chairman McLeroy.
1. Please explain why you think, as you have been quoted saying, “scientific consensus means nothing.”
2. You have been quoted saying, “I disagree with all these experts. Somebody has to stand up to these experts.” Do you think you understand science better than scientists? Better than the Nobel laureates who addressed their concerns about the board’s action?
4. During the recent adoption of new science curriculum standards, why did you refuse to allow science experts to review and advise the full board about the wisdom (or lack thereof) of amendments that challenged the broad, mainstream scientific consensus on evolution, global warming and the age of the universe?
5. Do you think challenging established, mainstream science in Texas public school classrooms will help or hurt the ability of Texas to attract science-related industries that would bring high-paying jobs to this state? If not, why not? Will it help or hurt the ability of children to get admitted into and succeed in the nation’s best colleges and universities? If no, why not?
6. Why did you vote last year for a language arts standards document that your board allies patched together the night before the board’s final vote and then slipped under hotel room doors of other board members? Why did you vote to throw out nearly three years of work by teachers and education specialists?
We wonder what Chairman McLeroy’s answers to these questions might be. Do you? What questions would you like senators to ask?
The Senate Nominations Committee is considering Don McLeroy’s appointment as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. Gov. Rick Perry appointed McLeroy as chairman in July 2007, after the last legislative session. The Senate now has the chance to confirm or reject McLeroy’s appointment.
4:55 – Dr. McLeroy, a Bryan dentist, is now before the Senate Nominations Committee. The committee will ask him questions about his role as Texas State Board of Education chairman and then take testimony from others wanting to speak out his appointment.
5:01 – Dr. McLeroy is defending the state board’s role in the curriculum and textbook adoption process. The Legislature is considering a slew of bills — including Senate Bill 2275 — that would strip the board of that authority. Dr. McLeroy argues that the state board has ensured that Texas has better curriculum standards.
5:05 – “We have much better textbooks because of the process of going through the State Board of Education.” Really, Dr. McLeroy? Will we have better science textbooks if they teach junk science because you reject evolution and want publishers to do the same?
5:07 – Dr. McLeroy calls the science curriculum revision “phenomenal” and praises the “compromise” standards adopted.
5:16 – Dr. McLeroy is crowing about the state board’s rejection of a mathematics textbook in 2007. The board, in fact, violated state law in rejecting the textbook. The law requires the board to approve textbooks that meet curriculum standards, are free of factual errors and meet manufacturing standards. The textbook met all of those, but the McLeroy majority rejected it without giving a reason. Dr. McLeroy later said the vote “set a precedent” for how the board could pressure publishers on other textbooks.
5:31 – Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, is now asking Dr. McLeroy questions. “Is it your mission on this board to take all students in the state of Texas down the path of your religious beliefs?”
5:33 – McLeroy: My purpose has never been religious indoctrination.
5:34 – Sen. Shapleigh asks about a previous statement by McLeroy that only “orthodox” Christians — like him — on the state board had opposed biology textbooks that didn’t challenge evolution.
5:34 – McLeroy: I also complimented other board members as fine Christians. He’s missing the point of the question: if McLeroy’s opposition to evolution in science classrooms has nothing to do with religion, then why would he say only “orthodox” Christians oppose biology textbooks that challenge evolution?
5:36 – Sen. Shapleigh asks about McLeroy’s beliefs about evolution. McLeroy acknowledges that is is his personal belief that Earth is only 6,000 years old.
(Senate Nominations Committee) Chairman Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, said McLeroy’s nomination is on shaky ground because he might not be able to get the required two-thirds vote from the Senate.
Democratic senators Kirk Watson of Austin and Eliot Shapleigh of El Paso challenged McLeroy over his leadership during a number of controversial Board of Education decisions, including the recent adoption of new science curriculum standards that critics say undermine the teaching of evolution.
Shapleigh said he plans to have McLeroy separated from the others when his nomination comes up on the Senate floor so that it could be debated and voted on individually.
Opposition to Senate confirmation for Don McLeroy as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education appears to be hardening. Yesterday, Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, and Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, grilled McLeroy during a grueling hearing that lasted more than two hours. Both senators deserve hearty thanks from parents and other supporters of strong public schools for their efforts to expose the extremism that has turned the state board into a dysfunctional, deeply politicized mess.
According to the Houston Chronicle, Senate Nominations Committee chairman Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, thinks it could be difficult to get the necessary 21 votes (of 31 senators) for confirming McLeroy. Says Jackson:
“I’ll leave that up to the Senate. They have lots of people go through. The Senate will work that out.”
Ratcliffe then asked if the governor has been contacting senators and urging them to confirm McLeroy’s nomination. Gov. Perry’s answer seems to indicate that he’s not:
“I have 1,500 different appointees a year. We appoint them. They go through the process. That’s the way it’s always worked.”
It looks like the chances that McLeroy will win Senate confirmation are beginning to crumble. Well, if so, then what? The question will be whether the governor appoints a new chairman who puts the education of Texas children ahead of personal agendas and divisive politics.
Big news from the Texas Capitol: the Texas House of Representatives has just passed a constitutional amendment (HJR 77) and enabling legislation (HB 2037) that would transfer authority over the Permanent School Fund from the State Board of Education to an appointed Permanent School Fund Management Council. The author of both is state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin. This is another indication of lawmakers’ growing dissatisfaction with the state board. TFN President Kathy Miller has released the following statement:
This was an overwhelming, bipartisan vote for competence and common sense. Taxpayers have a right to expect that people who manage billions of their dollars for our kids’ education actually know what they’re doing. We hope the Senate will join the House in approving these critical measures for transparency and responsibility.
Both measures now go to the Senate. If HJR 77 passes the Senate, voters must approve the constitutional amendment.
Worried about the spread of swine flu? Wendy Wright from the far-right group Concerned Women for America thinks the alarm is all just part of a conspiracy by the Obama administration. Wright charges that the administration declared a “state of emergency” not to make it easier for the government to respond to outbreaks of swine flu in this country. No, she says, the real reason is to promote the nomination of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Some people think that declaring a state of emergency about the flu was a political thing to push the Sebelius nomination through. If there’s even a hint that [Department of Homeland Security] is manipulating the health situation to push a political appointee through, well, it almost defies imagination that they’d be willing to that.
If Wright wants to hear something that “defies imagination,” perhaps she should listen to her own whacked-out drivel. Far-right groups like CWA have been mounting a huge attack opposing the Senate confirmation of Sebelius, whose pro-choice views have made her the right’s newest devil. But the Obama administration is using concerns about swine flu to get her confirmed? Good heavens. Talk about paranoia.
According to the prophets, most will flock to this remarkable man as the proverbial moths to the flame. They will be drawn to his warmth and light only to be destroyed by his fire. Has this epoch moment arrived? Is the greatest conspiracy of all time unfolding before our eyes?
The brewing Republican civil war between religious extremists and traditional conservatives is heating up. Now Texas State Board of Education member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas is sharply criticizing extremists who attacked her and fellow conservative Republicans during the recent debate over public school science curriculum standards.
Ms. Miller is denouncing “ultra-religious extremists” who attacked board members for voting against a requirement that students learn phony “weaknesses” of evolution in their science classrooms:
The three Reagan Republicans on the board, myself, Bob Craig & Pat Hardy, became targets of a particularly false smear campaign from a group of anti-science Republican fundamentalists sending threatening calls and e-mails.
In a clever and misleading “sound bite” argument, the Intelligent Design/Creationists were determined to insert religious discussion into the science curriculum of millions of Texas schoolchildren by forcing educators to teach “weaknesses of Evolution” … which deliberately confuses “hypothesis” with scientific theory.
Ms. Miller’s anger at the smear campaign that targeted her, Craig and Hardy is understandable. As TFN Insider has noted, creationist pressure groups viciously attacked the three, even calling their religious faith and personal morals into question. See here and here for examples.
Now bring in the children and latch the door. This could get ugly.
Our friends at Soulforce and Atticus Circle have launched an innovative — and much-needed – project to foster thoughtful discussion between faith communities and activists for gay and lesbian civil rights.
Between May 17 and June 28, 2009, groups of LGBT and allied people around the country will attend worship services at a church of their choice – a church that is not welcoming and affirming of openly LGBT members and guests. Each group will wear a lapel button that reads “gay? fine by me.”
Details about upcoming training sessions and how to participate in a “Sundays of Solidarity” event are available here. Listen to Rev. Paul Dodd of Austin explain the need for more honest, civil dialogue between the gay and lesbian community and congregants in churches that oppose LGBT rights.
The Texas Senate Nominations Committee this evening approved all nominees considered at last week’s hearing — except for Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education. Far-right pressure groups have targeted Senate offices with calls and e-mails in support of McLeroy’s confirmation, but opponents in that chamber still appear to have the votes to reject it on the floor. As a result, committee Chairman Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, seems prepared to leave McLeroy’s confirmation pending for now. Without Senate confirmation, the nomination will be considered rejected at the end of the session on June 1.
The confirmation of State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy is dead in the water, Sen. Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, said Thursday.
Jackson, chairman of the Senate Nominations Committee, said McLeroy will be left pending in committee because there is enough opposition on the floor of the Senate to block his confirmation, which requires approval of two-thirds of the senators.
Having done what they could to muck up the state’s science curriculum standards, fringe right-wingers on the Texas State Board of Education are now moving to politicize the social studies curriculum for public schools. Texas Freedom Network just sent out the following press release:
The Texas State Board of Education is set to appoint a social studies curriculum “expert” panel that includes absurdly unqualified ideologues who are hostile to public education and argue that laws and public policies should be based on their narrow interpretations of the Bible.
TFN has obtained the names of “experts” appointed by far-right state board members. Those panelists will guide the revision of social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools. They include David Barton of the fundamentalist, Texas-based group WallBuilders, whose degree is in religious education, not the social sciences, and the Rev. Peter Marshall of Peter Marshall Ministries in Massachusetts, who suggests that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were divine punishments for tolerance of homosexuality.
In 1977, the Texas Legislature created the Sunset Advisory Commission to identify and eliminate waste, duplication, and inefficiency in government agencies. The 12-member Commission is a legislative body that reviews the policies and programs of more than 150 government agencies every 12 years. The Commission questions the need for each agency, looks for potential duplication of other public services or programs, and considers new and innovative changes to improve each agency’s operations and activities. The Commission seeks public input through hearings on every agency under Sunset review and recommends actions on each agency to the full Legislature. In most cases, agencies under Sunset review are automatically abolished unless legislation is enacted to continue them.
The Sunset review process would give the Legislature the opportunity to decide, after the commission’s recommendation, whether to make any changes to the state board’s authority. If during this session lawmakers don’t strip the board of its authority over curriculum and textbooks, for example, they could do so when the board comes up for Sunset review.
If it passes the House, HB 710 will head to the Senate. Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, is carrying the companion bill, Senate Bill 513.
Texas State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy has argued repeatedly that natural selection — he calls it ”unguided natural processes” – doesn’t account for the diversity of life today. He also insists that understanding evolution isn’t really important to the study of the biological sciences.
(U)nraveling all of this flu’s mysteries will take time. But, using the lens of Darwinian evolution, certain aspects are starting to come into focus. For one thing, it’s clear that the virus, which originated in Mexico, is most virulent in that country. The 1,000 or so reported Mexican cases have been either fatal or severe enough to require hospitalization. But because of natural selection, the strains spreading across the world are milder.
According to evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald of the University of Louisville, human influenza is usually a mild to moderate disease because it depends on host mobility to spread. The U.S., Canadian and New Zealand teenagers on their spring breaks did not sit in hospitals with the very sick and dying; they mingled with people who were sneezing and coughing but walking around, riding subways, perhaps going to the beach or dancing in nightclubs. People don’t start being really infectious until they show symptoms, and whatever symptoms those people had must have been mild enough to remain out in public. The strains sent out around the world were, by definition and necessity, milder than the most lethal strains.
Orent writes that understanding evolution helps health specialists and researchers predict what will happen in the future with this and other diseases. And, she says, understanding natural selection’s role in evolutionary processes helps us put what’s currently happening in perspective.
People died in Mexico because they were close to the epicenter of the disease, to the probable emergence of lethal strains from crowded pig breeding. But natural selection’s corrective action is swift and predictable: The strains spreading across the world are milder.
At his Senate confirmation hearing on April 22, Texas State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy once again rejected the expertise of hundreds of scientists, including Nobel laureates, who called on the board not to dumb down the public school science curriculum on evolution last month. Chairman McLeroy insisted, however, that he has a second cousin (a graduate student, no less) who told him understanding evolution really isn’t that important. (You’ll hear McLeroy’s discussion of his cousin at about the 1:50 mark. McLeroy’s questioner, Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, wasn’t buying this nonsense, of course.)
IMPORTANT:Do not assume that McLeroy’s confirmation in the Senate is dead. Political fortunes can shift from day to day, and that’s particularly true in the legislative process. We expect horse-trading on a variety of issues will intensify in this final month of the 2009 legislative session.
Contact your state senator and tell him or her you want a State Board of Education chairman who will put the education of schoolchildren ahead of his own personal and political agendas.
No matter where you live, join the Texas Freedom Network and support our work for sound science, quality public education, religious freedom and civil liberties.
Mocking the stone age science at the Texas State Board of Education has now gone viral — late-night comedians have the rest of the country laughing at us. Bill Maher de-pantsed the governor on last Friday’s episode of his HBO series Real Time with Bill Maher.
He [Perry] appointed a creationist to head the Texas State Board of Education, which is shocking. Texas has a board of education?!?
Ouch.
And Maher surely speaks for scientists everywhere when he scolds Texas politicians who had a sudden come-to-science moment last week when confonted with the outbreak of swine flu.
You can’t crap all over Darwin and stem cell research and global warming, then come crawling back to science when you want Tamiflu.
Watch the whole embarrassing segment (warning: Maher’s language is colorful).
This is Membership Week at Texas Freedom Network. Since its founding by Cecile Richards in 1995, TFN has worked to defend religious freedom, protect individual liberties and promote quality public education for all families. Many other organizations focus on specific issue areas in fighting the radical right in this state. We are honored to stand with them all in support of the mainstream values that have been under attack. But TFN remains the only broad-based organization in Texas dedicated to fighting back against the religious right’s corrosive influence over public policy — from the Capitol to the State Board of Education and beyond.
We hope you will take the opportunity this week to join TFN and support our work. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s true: we can’t do our work without the support of people like many of you who come to this blog, read our Daily News Clips, contact lawmakers and do so many other things to help make Texas a better place for all our children. If you haven’t done so already, please consider joining TFN or renewing your membership today by clicking here.
UPDATE: As Lee notes in his comment below, the House didn’t get to HB 710 on Monday. It’s on the House supplemental calendar for today (Tuesday, May 5).
Here’s another of the apparently countless reasons why one shouldn’t rely on the far-right Free Market Foundation Focus on the Family-Texas for information. Free Market says it is circulating a flier on the floor of the Texas House calling for representatives to oppose House Bill 710 when it comes up for a vote today. HB 710 by Rep. Patrick Rose, D-Dripping Springs, would make the Texas State Board of Education subject to periodic review by the Sunset Advisory Commission. We haven’t seen the flier, but we wonder if this factoid from Free Market’s blog made it on there (as it did in a Free Market alert to the group’s e-mail list earlier today):
This bill requires the State Board of Education to be subject to “Sunset Review”, which is a form of periodic review where a group of 10 elected officials and 2 unelected officials review state agencies and have the ability to abolish such agencies.
If HB 710 passes, the SBOE would be the only elected body to be subject to Sunset Review.
A couple of our readers have pointed to an example of how the debate over science education has divided conservative ranks. Joel Walker is a candidate for the local school board in College Station, home of Texas State Board of Education chairman Don McLeroy. While we can’t endorse Mr. Walker’s candicacy, we found his perspective on science education refreshing. If you want to read a self-described conservative Republican’s defense of sound science education, check this out.
Excerpts:
The proponents of ["intelligent design"] are generally careful to avoid explicit religious language, and often cast themselves as the protectors of science, innocuously seeking to probe the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolutionary biology and big-bang cosmology in an open minded manner. Certainly science embraces skepticism, but there is a deep flaw in the vision of science which is being advocated. Skepticism in the face of a preponderance of evidence is only unreasonable doubt.
Admitting some few exceptions, the considered verdict on these matters among active researchers in the relevant fields is settled, with a statistical weight approaching unanimity. It is inappropriate to ask our high school students to sit in their judgment; we must first simply educate them as to what has been learned. Surely the ultimate truths of science are not up for, nor are ever settled by, a vote of men. As a practical matter however, the science standards of our state are up for vote once each decade. An entrenched mindset bordering on reflexive antipathy to the opinions of our most distinguished scholars has no place on our State Board of Education.
That is the title of a new screed by SBOE Rep. Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio. According to Mercer, the Senate is blocking the nomination of Don McLeroy as board chair not because his tenure has been an unmitigated disaster, but because McLeroy is – you guessed it – a Christian.
It is official; conservative Christians are unqualified and need not apply. It happened at the Miss USA Pageant and then at the Nominations Committee of the Texas State Senate.
(First of all, Mercer deserves credit for coming up with the most apt comparison to date for the level of intellectual debate at the Texas SBOE — a beauty pageant. The uninformed, vapid discourse at the board resembles nothing so much as a room full of beauty pageant contestants confidently asserting opinions on politics or world affairs. And both ellicit similar snickers and groans from the audience.)
But on to Mercer’s primary contention. Let’s unpack this a bit. Mercer and other self-described social conservatives on the board have regularly and vigorously insisted that their actions are NOT religiously motivated. Mercer does it again here:
As is obvious to all, there are zero references to faith, religion, creation, or intelligent design in the newly adopted Science standards.
But he goes on to insist that McLeroy is being attacked because of his faith! So senators should support McLeroy because he’s a good Christian?
Mercer wants it both ways here. He wants to drape McLeroy in the mantle of Christianity, holding him up as a Christian freedom fighter who is “willing to clearly and calmly state and stand by [his] Christian beliefs.” But should anyone follow up with the obvious question about whether McLeroy or the board is attempting to use their authority to advance personal beliefs in public policy, Mercer cries “religious discrimination” and slanders those who oppose McLeroy as God-haters. (It is “atheists and secular humanists” who are attacking him!)
The mere fact that it is ONLY the most extreme voices on the religious right that have ridden to McLeroy’s — and the SBOE’s — defense is instructive. The silence from mainstream academics, professional educators and moderate lawmakers is deafening.
CORRECTION: The House approval of HB 710 this evening was on second reading. The House must pass it on third reading, probably tomorrow, to send it to the Senate. Even so, tonight was a very important step forward. Edited post follows:
Defying far-right pressure groups that flooded Capitol offices with misleading calls and e-mails, the Texas House has just approved on second reading House Bill 710, which would make the State Board of Education subject to periodic review by the Sunset Advisory Commission. The vote was 74-68, and the House must pass it on third reading to send it to the Senate.
The House earlier this session passed HJR 77 and HB 2037, which would take control over the Permanent School Fund from the state board and put it in the hands of finance professionals. In addition, the House has passed HB 772, which would require the state board to broadcast video and audio of its meetings live over the Internet so that taxpayers can watch board members do their work.
Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller released the following statement after this evening’s House vote:
“The House this session clearly seems intent on bringing transparency, accountability and expertise to education policy because the state board has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for all three. Parents and other taxpayers have a right to expect swift action from the Senate on these kinds of common-sense, good-government bills.”
We can’t decide if this is sad or funny. Watch Congressman Mike Pence, R-Indiana, squirm during his appearance yesterday on MSNBC’s Hardball when host Chris Matthews asks him directly whether he accepts evolution.
After several unsuccesful attempts to evade the question or change the subject, Matthews nails him:
I think that you’re afraid to say [that you accept evolution] because your conservative constituency might find that offensive.
While Pence’s clumsy obfuscation will not win him praise in the science community, he has positioned himself well to be named an “expert reviewer” by the Texas State Board of Education when we adopt new biology textbooks in two years.
Will Republican legislators ever find the courage to get off their knees when they get pressure from far-right groups? Not today, it seems.
Just yesterday the Texas House approved on second reading House Bill 710, which would have made the Texas State Board of Education subject to periodic review by the Sunset Advisory Commission. That vote was 74-68. But the House just voted down the measure on third reading, 71-73. Only one Republican crossed the aisle to vote for HB 710.
The vote came after religious conservatives — rallied by a virtual “who’s who” of right-wing pressure groups — bombarded House offices with e-mails and phone calls opposing this common-sense bill. That pressure campaign didn’t surprise us — far-right groups have been thrilled that the state board is controlled by ideologues who keep dragging public schools into the culture wars. But the vote should be terribly disappointing for parents and other taxpayers who are tired of extremists using the State Board of Education as a playground for promoting ideological agendas.
Texas Freedom Network has just sent out the following Action Alert:
Time and again over the last three years, Chairman Don McLeroy and the far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) have demonstrated their willingness to push an extremist agenda and sacrifice quality public education at the altar of partisan politics. Yet unbelievably, Gov. Rick Perry has nominated McLeroy to a second term as chair.
The decision currently before the state Senate — to confirm or deny McLeroy’s appointment — is a clear referendum on the outrageous antics of the State Board of Education. If he is allowed to continue as chair, SBOE members will see a green light for continuing their damaging pattern of ignoring the law and disregarding experts and teachers.
This is our chance to send a strong message to the board that “enough is enough.”
What Can You Do?
The Senate Nominations Committee has left SBOE Chairman Don McLeroy’s confirmation pending, and it’s important for EVERY SENATOR to hear that McLeroy is the wrong choice to lead the State Board of Education. (Click here to find your Senator.)
Why Does It Matter? Religious-right pressure groups, including the Texas chapter of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and the Texas Pastor Council, have unleashed a flurry of calls urging legislators to support the SBOE. And their calls are having an effect. We have heard from senators that they are swamped with calls demanding McLeroy’s confirmation. Further, earlier today the House reversed a previous vote and rejected HB 710, a common-sense measure that would have put the State Board of Education under periodic review by the Sunset Advisory Commission. This change of heart is obviously a capitulation to pressure from far-right groups.
Now it is time for mainstream Texans to weigh in. Not hesitantly. Not in small numbers. The almost 5 million children in Texas who attend public school deserve a quality education, and they will not get it as long as the McLeroy-led board drags our schools into the culture wars.
Please call your senator TODAY and urge her or him to oppose Don McLeroy’s confirmation as chair of the SBOE. And ask everyone you know who cares about public schools to do the same.
This isn’t a partisan issue. Whether your senator is a Democrat or Republican, it’s important to call or e-mail that office. It’s past time for legislators to put the education of our children ahead of party loyalty and political agendas.
Texas State Board of Education member Terri Leo, R-Spring, apparently has decided that she is the arbiter when it comes to deciding who is a good conservative. In telling the Christian-right Web site OneNewsNow.com that she opposes legislative efforts to rein in the state board’s authority, she says:
[B]ack in 2003, conservatives on the State Board of Education lost most of the battles — and we didn’t go over and whine and seek legislative go-a-rounds or end-a-rounds. You know, we just went to work and elected three more conservatives and [now] the Board is almost evenly balanced. There’s [sic] seven conservatives out of 15 board members. We do not have a majority.
Of course, Ms. Leo doesn’t acknowledge that one of those seven is the board chairman, who sets the agenda and controls the debate. Moreover, those seven have often succeeded in gathering at least one or two votes from other board members on key issues the last two years. How they have succeeded in doing so is an open question — for now.
But this sentence in Ms. Leo’s response really stands out: “There’s [sic] seven conservatives out of 15 board members.” Just seven conservatives? Really?
Texas State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy, R-College Station, has been making the rounds of Senate offices this week with a lobbyist from Free Market Foundation Focus on the Family-Texas. The two are trying to turn the tide on McLeroy’s endangered confirmation for another term as board chairman. We hear from one Capitol office that McLeroy is telling folks he believes his confirmation hopes have been resuscitated.
Perhaps that’s just empty bravado before the gallows. But we are concerned that Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst has yet to assign to committee a constitutional amendment that would strip the state board of its authority over the Permanent School Fund. With elections looming next year, is Lt. Gov. Dewhurst looking to curry favor with social conservatives who support the state board? Is he also working now to win McLeroy’s confirmation? News reports have indicated that McLeroy’s confirmation is dead. But as we’ve said before: don’t assume anything in the last month of a legislative session.
Thanks very much to all who have taken the opportunity during this Membership Week to join or renew your membership with the Texas Freedom Network. The response to this special membership drive has been phenomenal. If you haven’t done so already, please click here to join TFN or renew your membership today.
We oppose Barton’s appointment to the panel because he lacks the academic credentials to qualify by any stretch of the imagination as a social studies “expert.” His personal religious beliefs are irrelevant, as is the faith of each individual appointed to the social studies panel.
Barton’s college degree is in religious education, not history or another field in the social sciences. He works for no institution of higher education. He’s simply a smooth-talking political hack who distorts history in the service of an ideological agenda.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry will be one of the speakers at an annual gathering of the religious right September 18-20 in Washington, D.C. The so-called “Values Voter Summit” is sponsored by far-right groups like the Family Research Council, American Family Association and Focus on the Family. The event brings together politicos and celebrities to spend three days railing against abortion, gay folks and the nation’s alleged slide into socialism. News of Gov. Perry’s appearance hardly comes as a surprise. With his re-election battle looming next year, he continues to court his religious-right base at every opportunity.
There will also be plenty of fringe-right politicos, including U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn, to help burn sinners at the stake. In case the name is unfamiliar to you, Rep. Bachmann is the Minnesota congresswoman who blames swine flu Democrats, claims President Obama and some members of Congress are “anti-American,” argues that science shows human activity is not contributing to global warming, and wants Americans “armed and dangerous” in opposition to President Obama’s policies.
Do you know young folks who want to advocate for responsible sexuality education in Texas? The Texas Freedom Network is now accepting applications for our 2009 Summer Summit Activist Training. The summit will be in Austin June 12-13, and participants must be ages 15-24. The application deadline is May 26.
Participants will learn how to get involved in local school districts to promote sexuality education that emphasizes abstinence while also including medically accurate information on responsible pregnancy and disease prevention. They will also learn strategies for motivating their peers and encouraging them to join the cause.
Why is this so important? Texas has among the nation’s highest rates of teen births and sexually transmitted infections. Yet a recent TFN Education Fund report revealed that Texas classrooms are perpetuating a “conspiracy of silence” that robs young people of the reliable information they need to make responsible life decisions when it comes to sexuality and health. Even worse, the information students do receive is often grossly distorted or simply wrong.
The Summer Summit will be held at the University of Texas campus in Austin and is free for participants. Participants will stay at a private dormitory on the edge of campus, and adult chaperones will be present throughout the event.
The level of paranoia on the far right is off the scale. Today Cathie Adams, head of Texas Eagle Forum, sent out an e-mail blast attacking legislation that would create a workgroup to develop recommendations for integrating health and behavioral health services in Texas.
[Texas Eagle Forum] stopped a similar bill the last two sessions because it would have required physicians to screen / analyze your mental health each doctor visit. It is now more dangerous than ever with the federal government taking up nationalized / rationed health care. Texans must not surrender our mental and physical health to a socialist State that President Obama is striving toward.
Huh? House Bill 2196 is authored by Rep. Vicki Truitt, R-Keller, in the House and sponsored by Sen. Robert Deuell, R-Greenville. These two conservative Republicans are somehow trying to undermine freedom by wanting to study how mental health services might be useful in treating patients who present with physical ailments? (Never mind, of course, Ms. Adams’ attacks on President Obama as a closet socialist. That’s standard fare these days on the far right.)
Research indicates that people with serious mental illness are more likely than those without mental illness to have poor physical health and face premature death due to untreated and poorly managed medical conditions, such as cardiovascular, pulmonary, and infectious diseases.
In addition to the unacceptable human cost associated with untreated medical conditions and premature death, people with mental illness and other chronic conditions are the greatest users of health services and emergency room care. Evidence demonstrates that integrated health care improves access to and service outcomes for persons with or at-risk for mental illness. Establishing a workgroup in Texas focused on improving integrated health care is of primary importance.
Texas Freedom Network has no position on this bill — it’s not one of the issues we monitor. But we wonder how traditional conservatives take folks like Ms. Adams seriously anymore. Really.
The Internal Revenue Service has ruled against a complaint filed by the Texas Freedom Network asking whether a tax-exempt, nonprofit foundation improperly sought to mobilize conservative pastors for partisan electoral purposes beginning in 2005. In January 2008 we asked the IRS to investigate whether the Houston-based Niemoller Foundation improperly engaged in partisan political activity on behalf of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s re-election in 2006. You can read our press release at the time here and supporting documents here.
The focus of the complaint was Niemoller’s funding of six “Pastors’ Policy Briefings”in 2005 (and a seventh to celebrate the governor’s inauguration in January 2007) hosted by an entity called the Texas Restoration Project. (You can read about the Texas Restoration Project in a TFN Education Fund report here, pages 13-16. ) We also asked whether Niemoller had improperly helped distribute political propaganda in support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, a measure Texas voters approved in 2005.
On Friday the Texas Senate passed legislation that requires live video and audio Webcasts of State Board of Education meetings. House Bill 772 by state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, is the only bill that focuses on the controversy-plagued state board to have now passed both the House and Senate. Currently, Texans can follow board meetings only by audio on the Web, although legislative proceedings — committee meetings and well as House and Senate floor action — have been available to voters by live video streamed over the Internet. Many supporters of HB 772 hope video Webcasting will help voters learn more about how the state board crafts education policy for Texas public schools. If Gov. Rick Perry signs the bill, the Webcasting requirement will take effect Sept. 1 of this year.
Other SBOE reform legislation is still languishing in committee. HB 2037 and HJR 77 (a constitutional amendment) would shift authority over the Permanent School Fund from the state board to an appointed board of finance professionals. Both measures, also authored by Rep. Howard, have passed the House but are now sitting in the Senate Education Committee. Committee Chairwoman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, has scheduled neither for a public hearing or vote. Sen. Shapiro also hasn’t set Senate Bill 2275 for a committee vote. SB 2275 — with three Republican and two Democratic co-authors in the Senate — would strip the state board of its authority over setting curriculum standards and adopting textbooks.
The Senate Nominations Committee is still sitting on the confirmation of Don McLeroy, R-College Station, as chairman of the state board. Word is that Senate Democrats remain almost solidly opposed to his confirmation and have been joined privately by at least a few Republicans. If the Senate doesn’t confirm McLeroy by the end of the session on June 1, Gov. Perry will be forced to name another chairman. Unfortunately, that chairman would not be subject to confirmation until the Senate is again in session. Barring a special session, the Senate will not be back in Austin until January 2011.
Ever wonder how a widely used math textbook could illegally promote “New Age religion”? If not, you clearly don’t share the same wild imagination as creationists in Texas do.
Mr. Mercer portrays himself, Chairman McLeroy and their allies on the board as champions of reform doing battle with “education bureaucrats and lobbyists” — “educrats,” he calls them. Among the “victories” he points to in this “reform” campaign are the board’s rejection of a mathematics textbook two years ago and the adoption of new curriculum standards for language arts and science.
Texas Freedom Network is sending out the following Action Alert. Please forward this link to anyone interested in supporting responsible sex education.
More than decade of stubborn commitment by policy-makers to failed abstinence-only programs in Texas schools have had disastrous consequences:
Texas ranks third in teen births and first in multiple births to teens.
Parenthood is the top reason teen girls drop out of school.
Teen pregnancy cost Texas taxpayers $1 billion in 2004.
A number of promising bills were filed this legislative session to respond to this appalling situation, but as the legislative session draws to a close, it appears they have all been blocked by abstinence-only supporters who are satisfied with the status quo. On Monday, however, several lawmakers will make a final push to respond to the epidemic of teen births in our state and improve sex education in Texas classrooms. But they need our help.
The Texas House is taking up important legislation on Monday that could help ensure Texas teens learn responsible information on pregnancy and disease prevention. The House will consider Senate Bill 283 by Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound. Sen. Nelson’s bill strengthens the requirement that every school district in Texas have an active School Health Advisory Council that provides community and parental input regarding policies on health education, including sex education.
TFN supports this responsible bill by Sen. Nelson. We are also supporting key amendments that would specifically improve sex education in public schools. You can help pass these amendments by contacting your local legislator immediately and through the vote on Monday.
Support the amendment by Rep. Castro to require that sex education be medically accurate.
Fact: 41% of Texas school districts teach factually incorrect information in sexuality education instruction.
Support the amendment by Rep. Villarreal to prevent materials from discouraging condom and contraceptive use by teens who are sexually active.
Fact: 40% of Texas school districts include medically inaccurate information that discourages young people from making responsible decisions to prevent pregnancy and disease.
Support the amendment by Rep. Strama to require school districts to provide parents with written notice about the content of the district’s human sexuality instruction.
Fact: Polls have shown that up to 90% of Texans want abstinence-plus information about contraception and disease prevention included in sexuality education, but 96% of Texas schools don’t provide that information.
Support the amendment by Rep. Castro to require School Health Advisory Councils (SHACs) to have at least 5 members.
Fact: 81% of school districts surveyed in 2008 could not produce any SHAC recommendation on sexuality education instruction despite the fact that the law requires SHACs to provide community and parental input in district decisions regarding human sexuality instruction.
Please contact the TFN outreach office and let us know what you’re told by your House representative’s office. You can e-mail tfn@tfn.org or call Val or Judie at 512-322-0545 on Monday.
UPDATE: The House has postponed action on SB 283 until Wednesday. Keep up your calls and e-mails to House offices in support of responsible sex education.
Having made a fetish out of failed abstinence-only programs that lie to students, far-right pressure groups are also lying directly to voters. Texans for Life Coalition has sent out an e-mail blast that employs more lies in its reckless campaign to keep teens ignorant. The group includes ridiculous claims that amendments under consideration in the Texas House today would “outlaw abstinence-only sex ed,” “censor information about limitations of condoms and contraception,” “promote birth control as a health benefit,” “refer students to Planned Parenthood,” and “promote recreational and gay sex.” (If all else fails, drag homosexuality into it, right? You can almost feel the hate from these people.)
Such nonsense. We told you yesterday what the amendments would do. They would require that information taught about human sexuality and pregnancy and disease prevention be medically accurate. Abstinence-only programs would no longer be able to exaggerate failure rates of condoms and other forms of contraception to discourage their use. School districts would be required to tell parents what they’re actually teaching about human sexuality. And local School Health Advisory Councils would have to be structured to provide local community and parental input on health education issues in school districts.
The rate of teen pregnancy in Texas is among the highest in the nation, yet this state has received more federal abstinence-only funding than any other. In the face of this epidemic of teen pregnancy and soaring rates of sexually transmitted diseases, more than 9 in 10 school districts teach nothing about pregnancy and disease prevention except abstinence-only-until-marriage. And abstinence-only programs are plagued with gross factual errors, lies and stereotypes. This nonsense can’t continue. Ignorance and lies won’t protect our kids.
EARLIER UPDATE: Now the Plano-based Free Market Foundation Focus on the Family-Texas is attacking the amendments, claiming that they would require “so-called ‘medically accurate’ information.” “This determination is left to persons who have an agenda,” they say. Actually, the amendment on medically accurate information lists seven agencies and professional organizations for verifying information: the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Infectious Diseases Societyof America and the American Psychological Association. They do have an agenda, of course: keeping Americans healthy.
The lies from far-right pressure groups continue to pile up, don’t they? They threw truth out the window long ago.
It’s very important that supporters of responsible, medically accurate sex education in public schools keep calling their Texas House members. Texas Freedom Network is sending out the following Action Alert:
Far-right pressure groups – like James Dobson’s Focus on the Family affiliate in Texas – have launched a “fear and smear” campaign against proposals to help ensure teens learn medically accurate information on responsible pregnancy and disease prevention. That campaign has already led the Texas House to postpone action until Wednesday on Senate Bill 283. The bill would strengthen the role of School Health Advisory Councils in developing policies on health education in local school districts.
Why would anyone oppose common-sense amendments to that bill requiring schools to teach medically accurate information, inform parents about what those schools are teaching students and ensure effective community input on sex education policies?
The answer is simple: lobbyists for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are basing their opposition on ideology, not facts. Here are just some of the lies lawmakers are hearing: the amendments would “outlaw abstinence-only sex ed,” “censor information” about contraceptive failure rates and “promote recreational and gay sex.” These blatant falsehoods are outrageous!
We Need Your Help!
Don’t let far-right groups pressure lawmakers into backing down on ensuring that Texas teens get the medically accurate information they need to make important life decisions and protect themselves from pregnancy and disease. It’s critical that you TAKE ACTION to counter the far right’s reckless and dishonest campaign.
Contact your Texas House representative and ask him or her to support these amendments to SB 283:
Support the amendment by Rep. Joaquin Castro to require that sex education be medically accurate according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Fact: 41% of Texas school districts teach factually incorrect information in sexuality education instruction.
Support the amendment by Rep. Michael Villarreal to prevent materials that wildly exaggerate failure rates to discourage condom and contraceptive use by people who are sexually active.
Fact: 40% of Texas school districts include medically inaccurate information that discourages young people from making responsible decisions to prevent pregnancy and disease.
Support the amendment by Rep. Mark Strama to require school districts to provide parents with written notice about the content of the district’s human sexuality instruction. Don’t parents have a right to know?
Fact: Polls have shown that up to 90% of Texans want abstinence-plus information about contraception and disease prevention included in sexuality education, but 96% of Texas schools don’t provide that information.
Support the amendment by Rep. Joaquin Castro to require School Health Advisory Councils (SHACs) to have at least 5 members. Isn’t community input important?
Fact: 81% of school districts surveyed in 2008 could not produce any SHAC recommendation on sexuality education instruction despite the fact that the law requires SHACs to provide community and parental input in district decisions regarding human sexuality instruction.
You can find the name and contact information for your House representative here. Tell your representative that Texas ranks third in teen births, first in multiple births to teens, and that the teen birth rate is rising. Having a baby is the top reason teen girls drop out of school. And teen pregnancy cost Texas taxpayers $1 billion in 2004. Public schools should emphasize the importance of abstinence AND tell students the truth about how to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
Please contact the TFN outreach office at tfn@tfn.org to let us know that you have taken action so that we can track our progress.
Texas Monthly’s Burkablog is reporting that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, has given up trying to include a ban on public funding for embryonic stem cell research in the state budget. Patricia Kilday Hart writes that Ogden announced this morning that a House-Senate conference committee “couldn’t come to a consensus” on whether to include the ban. So it’s out.
This is a huge victory for supporters of responsible medical research that gives hope to families struggling with debilitating medical conditions like Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, spinal cord injuries and cancer. Last month we called on supporters of stem cell research to call their House representatives and help keep Ogden’s ban out of the House’s version of the state budget. And you came through! The House refused to include the ban, and House negotiators on the conference committee also stood firm against it.
Ogden’s ban would have been a disaster for responsible and promising medical research. Although the state currently does not fund embryonic stem cell research, Ogden’s ban would have threatened even privately funded research at publicly funded facilities. Moreover, it would have discouraged medical researchers from coming to Texas and encouraged those already here to leave.
This victory helps restore hope for so many families struggling with serious medical conditions that are currently incurable. TFN will continue to support those families by opposing efforts to ban or limit embryonic stem cell research in Texas.
During the recent debate over science curriculum standards in Texas, State Board of Education member Ken Mercer argued that science hadn’t found transitional fossils that would back up the science of evolution. He demanded to know why scientists couldn’t show him a “dog-cat” or a “cat-rat,” for example.
It made no difference that some of the state’s most respected scientists — some of the world’s most respected scientists — were telling the board that there were countless examples of transitional fossils. Moreover, they argued, genetic evidence for evolution was even more solid.
They were met by skepticism and not a little derision by Mr. Mercer and other creationists on the board.
Now European scientists are pointing to yet another transitional fossil — although not quite Mr. Mercer’s ‘dog-cat’ — that creationists will ignore. From CNN:
Scientists hailed Tuesday a 47-million-year-old fossil of an ancient “small cat”-sized primate as a possible common ancestor of monkeys, primates and humans.
Scientists say the fossil, dubbed “Ida,” is a transitional species, living around the time the primate lineage split into two groups: A line that would eventually produce humans, primates and monkeys, and another that would give rise to lemurs and other primates.
An Associated Press story about the same finding quotes researchers who believe another fossil found in China provides far better evidence of a transitional species in the early monkey-ape-human ancestral line.
In any case, the point here is that the evidence for evolution is clear and abundant. Scientists repeatedly have pointed that out. But evidence for willful and determined ignorance on the Texas State Board of Education has also been clear and abundant. Some board members themselves have repeatedly pointed that out by their own words and actions.
In a surprise meeting on the Senate floor, the Senate Nominations Committee in Austin has just approved the appointment of Don McLeroy as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. It appears that McLeroy’s supporters plan to bring his confirmation to the full Senate early next week. Confirmation will require a two-thirds vote.
Committee Chairman Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, had said he would not bring up McLeroy’s confirmation for a vote in committee unless he thought there were enough votes to get it in the full Senate. We don’t know at this point whether opposition from nearly all Democrats and some Republicans has softened, but the signs are alarming.
Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller has released the following statement:
“If the Texas Senate genuinely cares about quality public education, they will reject as state board chairman a man who apparently agrees that parents who want to teach their kids about evolution are monsters. And we’ll see whether senators really want a chairman who presides over a board that is so focused on ‘culture war’ battles that it has made Texas look like an educational backwater to the rest of the country.”
The Texas House failed today to pass a measure that would require information in public school sex education classes be medically accurate. Texas Freedom Network sent out the following press release:
Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller decried today’s failure by the Texas House to require that public schools teach only medically accurate information in sex education classes.
An amendment requiring that information in sex ed classes be medically accurate was blocked by a point of order claiming that the measure was not germane to Senate Bill 283. Yet SB 283 sets meeting and reporting requirements for School Health Advisory Councils, which advise local school boards and administrators on health education instruction, including sex education. Moreover, the House had just unanimously passed an amendment to the same bill requiring that districts notify parents about the content of sex education instruction in their schools.
“It’s absurd for lawmakers to hide behind parliamentary tactics so they can avoid requiring that students get medically accurate information in their sex education classes,” Miller said. “No wonder a teenager gets pregnant every 10 minutes in Texas. Grownups in the Texas House are scared to even talk about how to prevent it.”
Texas ranks third in the nation in teen births and first in multiple births to teens. The Texas Department of State Health Services reports that a teen in Texas gets pregnant every 10 minutes.
The point of order came after an intense three-day campaign by opponents of the “medically accurate” amendment who instead support abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Abstinence-only supporters falsely claimed that the amendment would “outlaw abstinence-only ed,” “censor information” about contraceptive failure rates, and “promote recreational and gay sex.”
“What could possibly be wrong with giving our kids medically accurate information from the Centers for Disease Control or the American Academy of Pediatrics instead of discredited ideological diatribes about birth control and disease prevention?” Miller said. “That’s what this amendment would have done. But today we found out that at least in Texas, the same old ‘culture war’ lies and distortions are still enough to stop even discussion about common-sense approaches to ending the epidemic of teen pregnancy and STDs. Today ignorance won out over truth, and Texas teens will pay the price.”
In February the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund released a report from two Texas State University health education professors that showed more than 9 in 10 Texas school districts teach virtually nothing about pregnancy and disease prevention except abstinence until marriage. The study also found factual errors in abstinence/sex education materials from more than 40 percent of districts.
Outrageous claims in an effort to win Senate confirmation of Don McLeroy as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education reveal once again how vicious and dishonest the far right can be. As we reported Wednesday, the Senate Nominations Committee has forwarded McLeroy’s nomination to the full Senate for a vote (probably next week). Here’s what we’re seeing in right-wing blogs and e-mails:
TFN was shocked — shocked! — t0 learn who stabbed these teachers in the back by leaking the incomplete standards to a political pressure group. None other than our old friend and embattled board chairman, Don McLeroy.
Another early hint of trouble brewing in the Texas State Board of Education’s revision of social studies curriculum standards: attacks on minority contributions to American history and society. And once again Chairman Don McLeroy, R-College Station, is right in the middle of the brouhaha.
How can he possibly be serious? Not satisfied with the two absurdly unqualified ideologues already appointed to a so-called “expert” review panel for new public school social studies curriculum standards, Texas State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy wants another that could be even worse. And he has been lobbying other board members hard to make that appointment.
TFN Insider has learned that McLeroy wants to appoint to the panel Allen Quist, a Minnesotan whose politics are so extreme that he suffered a humiliating landslide defeat in his bid for the Republican nomination for governor of his home state in 1994. If Quist is an “expert” in anything, it’s not in social studies. It’s in promoting the nation’s divisive “culture wars”
Quist originally made a name for himself as a radical anti-abortion crusader who opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest. In his 1980 book The Abortion Revolution, Quist even compares abortion to Hitler’s murder of millions of Jews.
A renewed effort by Texas legislators to put the State Board of Education under Sunset review fizzled this past weekend under pressure from Senate leaders. It appears that Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, had rounded up enough Democratic and Republican votes to add the requirement to House Bill 1959 (which deals with various other agencies under Sunset review). Sen. Ellis’ amendment didn’t allow for the abolishment of the SBOE — it simply provided for a one-time review of whether the board works efficiently and performs as expected by taxpayers and the Legislature. But Senate leaders stepped in and blocked Sen. Ellis’ effort on Saturday.
Similar legislation that would have put the SBOE under periodic review by the state’s Sunset Advisory Commission failed in the House last month. HB 710 got preliminary approval on second reading but failed to win final passage the next day when Republican leaders made its rejection a required demonstration of party loyalty. (The SBOE currently has a 10-5 Republican majority.)
Another bill to rein in the SBOE’s authority, Senate Bill 2275, has failed to get out of committee even though three Republican senators are co-authors. And legislation to shift management of the Permanent School Fund from the SBOE to professionals who know what they’re doing is also growing mold while it sits in the Senate Education Committee.
So we wonder: why have Republican leaders put party politics ahead of the interests of Texas schoolchildren?
Word is that Don McLeroy’s name is on the list of nominees distributed to state senators in Austin today. That means his confirmation as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education could come up for debate and a vote as early as this afternoon, although it’s more likely tomorrow.
We know that far-right groups have been bombarding Capitol offices with phone calls and e-mails in support of McLeroy’s confirmation. Make sure senators know that mainstream Texans are fed up with seeing our public schools dragged into the nation’s divisive culture wars. If you haven’t done so already, please ask your senator to oppose McLeroy’s confirmation. Tell your senator that this vote is a referendum on whether the Senate wants a state board chairman who promotes his own personal and political agendas ahead of the interests of Texas schoolchildren and their families. You can find your senator’s name and contact information here. Then please let us know what you hear from your senator’s office by e-mailing tfn@tfn.org.
During the recent debate over evolution and science curriculum standards in Texas, a favorite source for “quote mining” by State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy was work by the late Stephen Jay Gould. McLeroy did his twisted best to portray Gould — who was one of the country’s most respected evolutionary biologists — as an evolution skeptic.
As McLeroy stumbled his way through one distorted quote after another from Gould, we watched our friends from the National Center for Science Education sigh and slowly shake their heads. So it’s with great satisfaction that we learn the news that Genie Scott, NCSE’s executive director, has been awarded the Stephen Jay Gould Prize by the Society for the Study of Evolution.
The Prize ”recognizes individuals whose sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life in the spirit of Stephen Jay Gould.”
Genie and the other folks at NCSE have been invaluable resources and allies for TFN during the recent curriculum debate and when the state board adopted new biology textbooks in 2003. They are not only smart and determined defenders of science — they are also wonderful friends and colleagues in our common efforts to promote sound science education for Texas schoolchildren.
This was so completely predictable, wasn’t it? The religious right is exploding in expected fury at President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court. Nevermind that the first President Bush appointed Sotomayor as a federal disrict judge. The religious right was determined to oppose any Obama nomination, whomever he chose (although Republicans have some difficult choices ahead).
Rick Scarborough, head of Texas-based Vision America, is one of the first religious-right pooh-bahs to jump on the war wagon:
At age 54, Sotomayor could be a member of the United States Supreme Court for the next 20 years — or longer. As a dedicated liberal, we know her views on abortion, gay marriage and reverse- discrimination — whether or not she’s ruled directly on these issues.
That much power simply can’t be bestowed by a compliant Senate. This nomination must be stopped dead in its tracks. Sonia Sotomayor isn’t a ‘centrist,’ she’s a disaster at every level.
We’ll keep an eye on what other other Texas religious-righters have to say about the nomination. But there is little doubt that we’ll see an avalanche of righteous indignation intended to stir up the base (and open wallets for donations).
Embattled State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy has finally found a defender in the Texas Senate. Sort of. In a story on KUT radio this morning, Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, gave something less than a full-throated endorsement of McLeroy’s competence as board chairman:
You’re talking about a chairman and a chairman’s ability to manage a meeting. I have had absolutely no indication that he hasn’t done a good job.
But the accuracy of this claim aside, is this really the best argument McLeroy’s defenders can muster — that he can manage a meeting? What a spectacularly low standard for a position that wields significant influence over the curriculum for 4.6 million schoolchildren (not to mention a multi-billion dollar Permanent School Fund).
If that’s all you’ve got, Sen. Nelson, we respectfully suggest that the state of Texas can do better by its children.
We just got word that Senate Nominations Committee Chairman Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, has given a 24-hour notice on the confirmation of Don McLeroy as Texas State Board of Education chairman. That means we could finally see the long-awaited debate and vote on McLeroy’s controversial appointment Thursday afternoon.
So we decided to offer another example of McLeroy’s contempt for experts and educators. You will recall that McLeroy voted in 2008 to throw out nearly three years of work by teachers and curriculum specialists on new language arts standards. Teachers were appalled, but the esteemed dentist had his own ideas about how to teach students to read and write.
The House Public Education Committee then called a hearing to discuss what in the world was going on with the state board. McLeroy testified at the July 2008 hearing and offered a variety of explanations, including this rather odd one:
A lot of the teachers during public testimony that we had during the public hearings was overwhelming for the workgroup document. I mean, 99 percent of the time, I think. . . . We got a lot of input from teachers. The ones that were the most vocal, by far, I would say ninety, like I say, 99 percent were, uh, I was opposed to. (July 16, 2008, approx. 35:30 mark)
And so he voted against all those teachers. Not only that, he backed a document that was patched together overnight by his board cronies and slipped under hotel doors just an hour before the final vote. And what of the teachers who actually work in the classroom? Who cares, right?
This is yet another of the many examples of why McLeroy’s tenure as chairman has been a disaster for public education in Texas. And it’s another example of why the Texas Senate should reject his confirmation as chairman.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has signed the only State Board of Education bill to make it out of the Legislature this session. House Bill 772 by state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, requires video and audio Webcasts of state board meetings. The bill takes effect in September of this year.
It’s good that Texas voters will now be able to watch the circus that passes for education policy development at the state board. But it remains deeply disappointing that Republican legislators have let far-right groups and party leaders pressure them into killing other bills that would bring concrete reform to the board and how it conducts business.
Confirmation of Don McLeroy as Texas State Board of Education chairman is indeed on the list of pending nominations for the Senate today. When today’s nominations come to the floor, expect a motion to sever — or remove — McLeroy from the list of other nominees. That will allow the Senate to consider his confirmation separately. You can watch the Senate live on the Internet here. TFN Insider will also be providing updates (and live-blogging, if possible).
2:50 p.m. – It looks like the Texas Senate is about to begin discussion of nominations, including Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education. You can watch the Webcast here or follow along on TFN Insider.
2:55 - Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, moves to sever McLeroy from the nominations list. The request is granted, and the Senate now votes to confirm the entire nominations list except for McLeroy.
2:57 – Sen. Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, chairman of the Senate Nominations Committee, rises to speak for McLeroy. Sen. Jackson basically reads through McLeroy’s resume and then moves for his confirmation.
3:00 – Sen. Van de Putte rises to speak against McLeroy’s confirmation. She notes that she is calling for the rejection of a nomination for the first time in her legislative career: “He’s a decent man. He’s a good man. My opposition to his position as chair has nothing to do with this man of faith and this man, I think, of internal courage and this veteran. My opposition to the chairman of our State Board of Education has to do with his management and leadership style. . . . We’ve been amazed by the divisiveness and the dsyfunctionality of the board.”
3:03 – Sen. Van de Putte: Under McLeroy’s leadership, the state board “has become the laughingstock of the nation.”
3:06 – Sen. Van de Putte goes through a long list of problems that have plagued the state board under McLeroy’s leadership, including divisive “culture war” battles, official actions in violation of state law and disregard for the work of educators and specialists.
The Texas Senate today failed to confirm Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education. The 19-11 vote fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for confirmation. Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller is releasing the following statement:
“Watching the state board the last two years has been like watching one train wreck after another. We had hoped that the Legislature would take more action to put this train back on the tracks, but clearly new leadership on the board was a needed first step. The governor should know that parents will be watching closely to see whether he chooses a new chairman who puts the education of their children ahead of personal and political agendas.”
Rumors about whom Gov. Rick Perry will choose to replace McLeroy as board chairman have been abundant. The state Constitution appears to direct the governor to act immediately to choose a new chairman, but the next board meeting isn’t until July.
Regardless of the governor’s selection for the next chair of the board, our work is not done. With your support, TFN will continue leading the charge for sound education standards, ideology-free textbooks and the best interests of Texas school children.
(f) If an appointee is rejected, the office shall immediately become vacant, and the Governor shall, without delay, make further nominations, until a confirmation takes place. If a person has been rejected by the Senate to fill a vacancy, the Governor may not appoint the person to fill the vacancy or, during the term of the vacancy for which the person was rejected, to fill another vacancy in the same office or on the same board, commission, or other body.
Gov. Rick Perry presumably will choose a fellow Republican to serve as chairman, and that appointee won’t be subject to Senate confirmation until the next time the Legislature is in session. Dallas Republican Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, who served as chairman for two terms ending in 2007, is not eligible to head the board again until 2011. (See Sec. 7.107 of the Texas Education Code.)
Eligible board Republicans include David Bradley of Beaumont Buna, Barbara Cargill of The Woodlands, Cynthia Dunbar of Richmond, Terri Leo of Spring, Gail Lowe of Lampasas and Ken Mercer of San Antonio — all members of the McLeroy faction. The two remaining Republicans are Bob Craig of Lubbock and Pat Hardy of Fort Worth.
The new board chairman will preside over the revision of social studies curriculum standards and the adoption of language arts and possibly science textbooks in the next two years. So any opinions on whom Gov. Perry will (or should) choose?
Far-right groups have consistently and recklessly blamed religious discrimination for the Senate’s failure to confirm the nomination of Don McLeroy as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education.
Don McLeroy’s opponents admitted he was “fair,” but simply did not like his Biblical worldview.Please thank him for his courageous service as SBOE chairman and encourage him to continue to stand for righteousness in the public square.
The message has been sent — if you have sincere religious beliefs, you need not apply to be chair of the State Board of Education.
Even state Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, suggested that people would see McLeroy’s failure to win confirmation as evidence of a “religious test” for office.
This all is nonsense. As senators who voted against his confirmation repeatedly said, McLeroy is a good, decent man. No one attacked McLeroy’s “Biblical worldview.” His religious beliefs weren’t at issue.
Simply put, McLeroy’s chairmanship failed students, their families and other taxpayers. He has sided with board members who callously disregard the work and advice of teachers, specialists and academic experts. (Examples here and here.) His board failed to adopt and stick to processes that allow for open and informed debate of public policies regarding education. (Example
From science to sex education and issues like private school vouchers, religious freedom and civil liberties, the Texas Freedom Network is engaged on numerous fronts in defending mainstream values against the religious right in Texas. We are fortunate to have the help of a dedicated band of student interns to help us here at the office, at the Capitol and at the State Board of Education. In addition to our regular internships, TFN also sponsors a “Legislative Academy” every two years for students interested in learning more about public policy advocacy and the legislative process. This year we have six hard-working, dedicated interns in our Lege Academy program. We thought you might like to hear from one about her experiences, Mary Tuma. Mary is a senior fellow in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin:
