Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

Prince Charles talks to his plants at Highgrove.

Prince Charles talks to his plants at Highgrove.

Overturning the Texas School Board Madness? It's Possible
(Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D., The Huffington Post, September 15, 2010)

In the circus that is the Texas State Board of Education (SBoE), no act has become more troubling than that of incumbent Ken Mercer. Mercer is, after all, the person who has defended the SBoE's attack on evolution by writing, in an op-ed piece in the San Antonio Express News, the following bizarre sentence: "For example, have you ever seen a dog-cat, or a cat-rat?"

In fact, I'm certain you haven't seen a "dog-cat" or a "cat-rat." But then again, evolutionary theory doesn't predict that such hypothetical organisms would ever exist. Such details aren't going to get in Mercer's way, though.

Mercer is up for reelection to his District 5 seat on the SBoE, and he's campaigning on his role in the Board's decisions to attack evolution last year, to rewrite history this year and to protect third graders from a popular mathematics textbook two years ago. At every turn, Mercer sees religion playing the dominant role -- even in basic mathematics education! Although the math text was used successfully in many districts across the state to improve student performance, Mercer bought the argument offered by Educational Research Analysts, described by the Dallas Morning News as "a Christian conservative group." Educational Research Analysts offered the following in-depth criticism of Everyday Math: "Replacing standard algorithms with haphazard searches for personal meaning unconstitutionally establishes New Age religious behavior in public school Math instruction." [Emphasis in the original]

Mercer's opponent, Rebecca Bell-Metereau, is not shy about voicing her opinions about Mercer's positions. In an interview with me last week, Bell-Metereau, referring to Mercer's "dog-cat" absurdity said, "Such ignorance is almost staggering. It shows that he's discussing the issues at such a level of nonsense." She went on to lament that "it's like arguing with a five-year-old about the tooth fairy."

And that's where Bell-Metereau's argument comes up short. "Arguing with a five-year-old" about the tooth fairy or anything else means that although they both have something to say, Mercer has refused to engage his opponent in any formal debate. In fact, he's opting to boycott the September 28 debate being sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Mercer is hiding behind the advice of Texas Republican party chair Steve Munisteri who recommended he skip the debate because the League of Women Voters is "unsuitable and unqualified to serve as a neutral, non-partisan debate sponsor." The League of Women Voters?

Bell-Metereau, an English professor at Texas State University at San Marcos, is a thoughtful candidate who is troubled by both Mercer's positions and the SBoE's actions. She believes that if there's some turnover on the Board, with people like herself replacing extremists like Ken Mercer, the Board will be able to revisit some of the egregious curricular decisions made in recent years.

This is her first attempt at electoral politics, and she's running, in part, because she's upset with the Board's consistent refusal to respect expert opinion. Past Board chair and creationist Don McLeroy made the case against expert opinion clearly and succinctly at a Board meeting during the evolution fiasco. Rather than rebutting the data offered by experts on evolution, he simply ranted. "I disagree with these experts," McLeroy said. "Somebody's gotta stand up to experts."

Mercer stands fully-behind McLeroy and went so far as to claim that his non-reappointment to the chair's position by the Texas Senate was due to McLeroy being a Christian. In a bizarre comparison, Mercer compared McLeroy to Carrie Prejean, the Miss USA contestant who spoke out against homosexuality during her beauty pageant interview. As I said above, Mercer believes religion plays a dominant role in every aspect of Texas politics.

Rather than relying on experts, Mercer seems content to permit citizens to decide on scientific ideas. He regularly notes that his constituents often write to him about what should be taught in the curriculum. Bell-Metereau likens this way of deciding curricular content to permitting people "to vote on what time it is. The Board is not doing its duty if they're just reflecting the opinions of their constituents" rather than offering Texas school children a world class education or even a nominally adequate one.

Beyond the obvious craziness, Bell-Metereau sees some very troubling similarities with the SBoE's attack on science and its attack on social science. In both cases, she argues, the Board has opted to remove the material that provides the context for meaningful study. As the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky has said, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Remove evolution as the centerpiece of biological evolution and students are presented merely with a random collection of facts. Within the social science curriculum, the Board has opted, in Bell-Metereau's words, to include "a random list of thinkers," rather than provide a context for learning. She argues that memorizing names of people associated with the Enlightenment is very different from learning what the Enlightenment is all about. Speaking about both science and social science, she laments that "without a context, you can't explain and predict. Education should teach people how the world works."

Voters in Texas's 5th District have the opportunity to put an end to the embarrassing and anti-intellectual actions that have diminished education across the state, and that's an opportunity that will likely impact text book choices around the rest of the United States. I, for one, hope that they opt to do just that by replacing Ken Mercer's madness with Rebecca Bell-Metereau's thoughtfulness.

As the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky has said, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

TEXAS UPDATE

Quote:

Overturning the Texas School Board Madness? It's Possible
(Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D., The Huffington Post, September 15, 2010)

She went on to lament that "it's like arguing with a five-year-old about the tooth fairy."

Voters in Texas's 5th District have the opportunity to put an end to the embarrassing and anti-intellectual actions that have diminished education across the state, and that's an opportunity that will likely impact text book choices around the rest of the United States. I, for one, hope that they opt to do just that by replacing Ken Mercer's madness with Rebecca Bell-Metereau's thoughtfulness.

Shakespeare has great lines. "But they all have mothers" for example. That's a great line.

Finding an SBOE Balance: District Roundup
(BY LEE NICHOLS, The Austin Chronicle, September 16, 2010)

At least a minimal level of change on the State Board of Education was guaranteed last December, when District 10 board member Cynthia Dunbar announced she would not run for re-election. But the SBOE's conflicts have been about ideology, not individual candidates – the concern for moderates and progressives around Texas is whether seats can be taken back from the fundamentalist bloc that holds seven of the 15 slots on the board. In that battle, the anti-fundamentalist fight could be seen as having taken two steps forward and one step back – and one of those forward steps is uncertain.

District 9: The forward step that appears to be a lock is in District 9 (Central East Texas–College Station up to Red River). In the Republic­an primary, moderate Thomas Ratliff used both his well-known name – his father is popular former Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff – and the antics of the incumbent to take down former SBOE Chair Don McLeroy. McLeroy, a Bryan dentist who believes the Earth is only 6,000 years old, became the poster boy for creationist dogma and lost his chairmanship when more than a third of the state senators refused to confirm his renomination by Gov. Rick Perry. Ratliff's race against McLeroy was hard-fought, but enough Repub­licans were sufficiently embarrassed by McLeroy to give Ratliff the win, by just 402 votes of the 116,204 cast. Ratliff now faces only Libertarian Jeff McGee and Green Paul Cardwell in November. Unless the radical right makes a stunning rally behind McGee, Ratliff is as good as seated.

District 10: The less certain progress was made in Dunbar's stepping down, followed by her handpicked successor's defeat in the primary. That defeat still leaves uncertainty – a win by Democrat Judy Jennings would thrill progressives, but a victorious Republican Marsha Farney will be good news only if her "Common Sense Conservative" motto actually translates into sensible votes; thus far, she hasn't firmly rejected fundamentalist ideology.

District 12: The likely step backward was the primary defeat of Geraldine "Tincy" Miller (north suburban Dallas) – one of only three Republicans on the board who defended the teaching of evolution and rejected creationism (the others were Lubbock's Bob Craig and Weath­er­ford's Patricia Hardy). Miller was taken down by George Clayton, a Dallas Independent School District administrator, who's a bit of a cipher. While his dislike of "teaching to the test" – the overemphasis on standardized testing that plagues Texas schools – is encouraging, science teachers must have cringed when he told the Dallas Observer, "It's an impossibility to talk about evolution without mentioning creationism." The defeat was stunning – according to the Texas Tribune, Clayton spent a mere $1,788 on the campaign, against Miller's $54,685 and her tenure dating back to 1984. That tiny bit of cash netted him almost 52% of the vote. Only Libertarian Amie Parsons now stands between Clayton and the SBOE.

District 3: Another seat that's a question mark: Democrat Rick Agosto (San Antonio down to the Valley) was always considered an unreliable swing vote, sometimes siding with the fundamentalists at crucial moments. Amid charges that he had business relationships with companies seeking contracts from the board, he decided not to run for re-election. Democrat Michael Soto, a Trinity University literature professor, appears likely to replace him, although Republican Tony Cunningham drew a respectable number of votes in the primary.

District 5: This conservative district (the Hill Country, including southern Travis County) seems likely to re-elect conservative ideologue Ken Mercer over Democratic educator Rebecca Bell-Metereau.

A Dictionary of the English Language
From Wikipedia.

Published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language.

There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to about £230,000 as of 2010. Johnson took nearly nine years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. Remarkably, he did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy out the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his life.

Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary, 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who labored under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time".

"Where Webster found fault with Johnson, Joseph Worcester saluted him ... In 1846 he completed his Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language. He defended Johnson's work, arguing that 'from the time of its publication, [it] has been, far more than any other, regarded as the standard for the language'."

Notwithstanding the evolution of lexicography in America, "The Dictionary has also played its part in the law, especially in the United States. Legislators are much occuped with ascertaining 'first meanings', with trying to secure the literal sense of their predecessors' legislation ... Often it is a matter of historicizing language: to understand a law, you need to understand what its terminology meant to its original architects ... as long as the American Constitution remains intact, Johnson's Dictionary will have a role to play in American law."

.......it should not pass unobserved, that he has quoted no author whose writings had a tendency to hurt sound religion and morality.

Recognizing good results
(Dale McGowan, The Meming of Life Blog, September 14, 2010)

I wanted to blog the process of confronting non-science in the science classroom in part to lay out a few basic principles for parents to consider. Situations vary, so principles are better than a script.

My particular situation took place in a top-ranked high school in a top-ranked district with a (mostly and so far) sane and competent school board that is in the U.S. South (Georgia) but not really (Atlanta).

Thanks to a recent surge in business transplants, the area is surprisingly diverse, including an impressive worldview mix. School administrators here tend to be smart and responsive. The Fordham survey puts the relatively new Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) for science in the top tier nationally. By the time we began our exchange, my son was no longer in this teacher’s class.

Some of these mattered more than others. If I had less reason to trust the good sense of our school and district administrators, for example, I might have wielded the double-edged saber of GPS and Kitzmiller more strongly from the start. And if I had reason to believe serious incursions of religion into the science curriculum were a more endemic issue in this district — as it is, I have reason to believe otherwise — I might have used this opportunity to build a further-reaching case.

Instead, I tried to apply just enough pressure to wake the principal to a possible liability time bomb in his midst, to let that time bomb know that the clippers are now poised over his red wire, and to get myself connected to existing efforts to keep good science in our classrooms.

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So some principles, IMO, for approaching this kind of situation:
--Check with your child before taking any action that might impact him or her;
--Keep the right goal in mind: good science in the classroom;
--Do your homework (NCSE, Kitzmiller, district policy, state standards);
--Assume the best for as long as possible;
--Approach the teacher first — in person if possible;
--Make sure your tone doesn’t become the issue;
--Focus on a single question if possible;
--Move up the ladder by step if necessary;
--Approach administrators as allies (and remind them why);
--Recognize that not all good resolutions are clear-cut.

Every once in a while, i think it's a good idea to stop by and thank Wandel for the yoeman's work he does to keep us informed.

By an interesting coincidence I have just seen John Smith's new advert for their Extra Smooth light beer.