Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

War of the Words: Will New Missoula School Policy Make Stuff Worse?
(By Amy Linn, New West, 5-18-09)

In an effort to prevent another fracas like the one that erupted over the video The Story of Stuff, the Missoula County Public Schools board of trustees last week approved a draft of a new academic freedom policy"one that sets clear rules for teachers about how to deal with controversial issues.

Sounds innocent enough. And that’s what’s dangerous, observers say. Because there’s more to this stuff than meets the eye.

“There is a move across the country to use academic freedom policy to challenge controversial issues"mostly science issues,” says Kathleen Kennedy, the Big Sky High School biology teacher at the center of the Missoula controversy. Last October, Kennedy showed her students the hit 20-minute anti-consumerism video The Story of Stuff, which shows how wastefulness hurts the planet; today, the fallout still hasn’t ceased. And the new policy could make things worse, Kennedy and other educators fear.

“The people who would manipulate those policies are looking for any ambiguity in language or any open door,” says Kennedy. “As soon as you define things, you give people things to object to.”

The policy wars, strange as they may sound, are real and on the rise. According to education and civil liberties groups nationwide, an increasingly organized army of parents and political leaders are using seemingly innocuous academic freedom guidelines to fight the teaching of evolution, climate change, and other hot-button issues.

School policies, in other words, are at the frontlines in a battle that pits parents against teachers, liberals against conservatives, and science against religion.

Consider:
-- In March, the Texas State Board of Education adopted new science requirements mandating that students consider “all sides of scientific evidence.” According to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a nonprofit that’s spent 20-plus years defending the teaching of evolution in public schools, that type of language is adopted so that teachers can push creationist views (such as the theory that God created the Earth just 6,000 years ago) and “intelligent design,” which holds that the universe was created by an intelligent cause, not Darwin’s natural selection process.

-- The Discovery Institute, a leader of the nation’s ID movement, offers an “Academic Freedom” page on its website that tells citizens how to fight “Darwinian fundamentalists” and urges them to join a national campaign to bring ID to public schools. The group advises people to pressure school districts into adopting ID-friendly policies.

-- According to a recent CNN report, Louisiana has enacted an “academic freedom” law supported by anti-evolutionists, and pending legislation in Florida calls for an academic freedom bill that would mandate a “thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution.” Both laws were crafted in response to anti-evolutionists, who offer supporters step-by-step guides on how to fight “social justice educators” in the classroom.

-- Anti-evolutionists in recent years have also pressured school districts to use benign-looking policy words such as “balanced” and “strengths and weaknesses” to undermine the teaching of science, the New York Times reports. With these terms in place, teachers can discuss the “weaknesses” of Darwin’s theories or “balance” them with discussions about creationism.

“I don’t believe there has to be balance when it hijacks conversations about scientific fact,” as Kennedy puts it. The 11-year teaching veteran says too many students already believe that science is just an opinion. “They say ‘science is just an ideology, too.’”

Enter the Missoula imbroglio. Kennedy said she showed The Story of Stuff to her biology classes last fall to generate discussion about today’s shop-and-toss society. Mark Zuber, the parent of one of her students, objected, saying Kennedy didn’t tell students the film had a decidedly progressive bias.

After complaining to teachers and the principal, and feeling he was being disregarded, Zuber took the matter to the January school board meeting. He argued in a lengthy presentation that Kennedy violated the district’s academic freedom/controversial issues policy. Kennedy was not allowed to present evidence in her own defense. By a 4-3 vote, the board sided with Zuber.

Board members voting against Kennedy said they thought she violated school policy because she didn’t offer students a balanced discussion. Trouble is, the word “balanced” doesn’t even appear in the policy.

In the aftermath, Missoula County Public Schools Superintendent Alex Apostle formed a committee to revamp the academic freedom policy. Mark Zuber was a committee member; Kennedy was not invited, and neither was any other science teacher.

Kennedy, meanwhile, started to do research on teachers under fire and tried (unsuccessfully, she says) to give input to the policy revision committee. She also sent the science-supporting NCSE a draft of the new academic freedom policy (read it here). Louise Mead, the NCSE’s education project director, told Kennedy that Missoula’s old policy is better than the new one.

Mead said she was particularly alarmed by sentences like this one: ”The Board expects the teaching staff to “create an environment in which students are free to form judgments independently.”

“What worries me about this statement is that there is no emphasis on using logic-based reasoning to evaluate the evidence, as was clearly stated in the former policy,” Mead wrote in an email to Kennedy. “The revised policy opens the door for any view, regardless of whether it is: (1) within the state and district curriculum guidelines; and (2) generally accepted as accurate based on the evidence. It also creates a permissive environment in which the teacher is expected to accommodate all student views, regardless of whether they are grounded in reality and evidence.”

And what does Zuber think about all this?

“I was actually happy with the old policy. I never was unhappy with it,” Zuber says.

Zuber, an engineer with the Department of Agriculture, says he doesn’t object to The Story of Stuff or its environmentalist creator, Annie Leonard. “What really bothered me was that the video clearly advocated a progressive point of view,” he says. “She [Kennedy] never disclosed it to the kids.”

Zuber says he did not seek help from any conservative group in forming his arguments for the school board and says he is not opposed to teaching about controversial issues such as climate change, evolution or consumerism, for that matter.

“The misperception is that this was a censorship deal"it never was,” he continues. “I was arguing for more information to be shown, not less. Annie Leonard: she’s an absolutely unabashed advocate for her cause. The video is very well done and very effective, and she makes a lot of good points. But I think people need to present the backgrounds of the people and points of view being presented.”

On at least one thing, all sides agree: controversies like the one over Stuff are sure to happen again in Missoula and elsewhere. No policy is airtight, and schools will always be a flashpoint for political struggles.

On a positive note, however, the new policy offers important new safeguards, says Jack Sturgis, president of the Missoula Education Association, the teachers’ union. “It actually protects teachers on a broader range and protects academic freedom in the classroom,” Sturgis says. “It’s a cleaner and clearer policy than we had before.”

The policy establishes a much-needed grievance procedure that requires parents to take complaints to the teacher, the principal and, if necessary, the school superintendent, who has the final say. Perhaps even more importantly, the new guidelines"slated to win final approval in the coming weeks"allow teachers to defend themselves and explain what they did in the classroom, a luxury not afforded to Kennedy.

New or old, the rules give Kennedy no solace.

“This has been haunting me for months,” Kennedy says. “I’ve moved from trauma to just being flat out angry.

“I’ve felt like people are telling me ‘you can’t challenge the dominant culture,’” she says. “They’ve said ‘we want you to show students the other side.’ Well, we’re living the other side. It’s all around us.”

What bothers me is people insisting that "science" is open to political interpretation. Science teachers are being asked to cover opposing political viewpoints. How can children learn basic science under those conditions?

How can children learn basic science under those conditions?