A truly momentous and impressive public hearing by the Texas House Public Education Committee has just wrapped up in Austin (July 16, 2008).
I did not hear all of it. I heard State Board chairman McLeroy’s presentation and some of the questioning. Hours later I heard the witness before Steven Schafersman (Texas Citizens for Science) through [...]
Category Archives: creationism
Momentous TX education hearing
July 16, 2008 – 3:59 pm
TX House Committe testimony by Texas Citizens for Science
July 15, 2008 – 11:19 am
Testimony by Steven D. Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, is now posted at the TCS website. Here’s an overview of their recoomendations:
I urge you to take even more powers away from the SBOE. Specifically, I urge you to revise the law so that textbooks in Texas are adopted by each [...]
Wed 7/16 program in Austin on protecting science education
July 13, 2008 – 8:41 pm
Here’s a press release for a public program on the UT campus in Austin, Texas this coming Wednesday titled ‘Science Education in Texas: Keeping It Religion-free’
From a curriculum standpoint, I think that’s a mistaken emphasis. The point should be to preserve the integrity and authenticity of science curriculum. The courts can act to stop unconstitutional [...]
teaching evolution controversy debate on CNN
July 8, 2008 – 12:59 pm
Here’s a five-minute debate:
I don’t have time to comment now, so I’ll just post the clip for now.
Texas Supreme Court immunizes exorcism
July 6, 2008 – 1:05 pm
I hesitated before posting this, since it’s almost off-topic for this blog on curriculum.
Regrettably, however, exorcism is not so irrelevant to public education as we might hope, given the signing of the anti-science education law by the Louisiana Governor Jindal who also, by the way, has written a published article retelling his participation in an [...]
teaching about science and religion in the public schools
July 4, 2008 – 8:15 pm
Michael Dowd has left a comment on my previous post that I think deserves to be shared. The comment was appropriate there, but it raises a problem that’s a little different from the main focus of that post; so this new post can focus on Dowd’s own proposition.
The earlier post quoted John West of Discovery [...]
John West: U.S. evolution education is “dumbed down”
July 4, 2008 – 11:50 am
Here’s a video clip from CNN on the “Academic Freedom” bills being supported in states around the U.S. by the Discovery Institute (DI), the major proponents of Intelligent Design. The clip is seven minutes long, with a reasonable 3-minute overview followed by a 4-minute interview with Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for evolution: how [...]
AAAS resources & video on ID vs. evolution
June 30, 2008 – 6:05 pm
AAAS has a page of resources and news items on the conflicts over teaching evolution. The page now includes this five-minute video:
Exorcist Governor defends anti-science law on TV (video)
June 30, 2008 – 4:42 pm
Here’s Louisiana’s exorcist Governor on CBS Face the Nation, defending the anti-science legislation that he has signed into law.
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Here’s the transcript:
Anti-science law signed by Louisiana’s exorcist Governor
June 29, 2008 – 1:21 pm
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As suggested in a previous post here, there was some speculation that Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal might veto the new anti-science education law since, having studied Biology at Brown University, he could be expected to know the difference between what is, and what is not, the natural science that is practiced, taught, and studied as [...]
Louisiana Science Education Act - final text
June 28, 2008 – 2:18 pm
The LA site with the pdf file of the law wasn’t working when I created this post with the text pasted in below. Now it is working so now here’s a link to the official PDF version. See also the NCSE, and sources linked from my earlier post here.
Here’s the text, as posted by John [...]
La’s Bio-major Gov. signs anti-Biology law
June 27, 2008 – 5:08 pm
Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal, who was himself a Biology student at Brown University, apparently doesn’t care if Louisiana students “don’t know much about Biology” when they graduate from high school.
As reported in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Jindal has signed into law the “Louisiana Science Education Act,” that “will allow local school boards to approve supplemental [...]
like teaching Klingon in French class
June 22, 2008 – 7:57 pm
It would be more like the situation where a teacher hired to teach French in French class decides instead to mix in grammar and vocabulary from Italian (or Klingon, maybe, to make the analogy more precise — since Italian is another real language, after all), without letting students know that what they’re learning is not really French, and with state law protecting the teacher against any kind of repercussions.
TX GOP 2008 platform on Education
June 22, 2008 – 11:51 am
The Republican Party of Texas has now posted its State Party Platform for 2008.
I have also excerpted and posted here the four pages of that platform with the Preamble, Principles, and positions on Education.
As usual the Texas GOP takes interesting positions on many things, but in this post I’ll just quote their statement on “theories [...]
¿ against teaching the controversies (or “strengths and weaknesses”) ?
June 10, 2008 – 2:16 pm
While the ridicule is well deserved, I want to take exception to something possibly implied in Curmudgeon’s response, where he says that “High school students don’t know how to reach ‘their own conclusions’ about science. That’s why they’re in school! That’s why we call them students! “
ICR appeals TX decision against creationist grad degree for science teachers
June 3, 2008 – 2:43 pm
The Institute for Creation Research has announced its appeal seeking reversal of the decision by the Texas higher education board against accreditation for its distance education masters degree in “science education,” which would presumable have qualified its graduates for certification as science teachers in Texas (and, they would hope, licensing as science teachers in other [...]
Creation Science goes to China
June 3, 2008 – 1:33 pm
As the Institute for Creation Research has announced its appeal of the Texas decision not to approve its distance learning graduate degree program in science education, which would have led to accreditation of its graduates as high school science teachers in Texas, an interesting view of the Institute’s global ambitions can be seen in a [...]
