An earlier post here includes a video with this line from Ben Stein (whose movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which purports to “document” a truth-and-evidence-defying regime of “neo-Darwinist orthodoxy” dogmatically supressing an abundance of evidence against evolution, was cited to that end by creationist members of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) in their [...]
Category Archives: Education Law & Policy
Obama team’s support for portfolio assessment
October 23, 2008 – 5:56 pm
Thanks to Checker Finn’s shop (where they’re not wild about this), we have this news:
Tuesday morning on the Diane Rehm Show … Obama staffer Melody Barnes expressed her candidate’s openness to using portfolios to assess student achievement under No Child Left Behind .
I don’t have time to blog more now ( I’m turning around my pre-service [...]
Teaching evolutionary life science in Florida (NYTimes)
August 24, 2008 – 9:53 am
Amy Harom has a great piece in the August 23, 2008 New York Times on a Florida teacher engaged in teaching evolutionary life science to a high school class that includes religiously committed skeptical students. The article is unusual in looking at the issues as matters of curriculum, requiring knowledgeable responses by educators, and not [...]
DI’s legal eagles & the “Academic Freedom” legislation
August 18, 2008 – 1:37 pm
Commenting on an earlier post, Ed Darrell writes:
It seems quite clear that whoever drafted the law has very little experience in drafting laws, and less experience in trying to carry out such laws.
From a press release by the Louisiana Coalition for Science, we learn that
DI senior fellow and legal advisor, Gonzaga University law professor David [...]
Louisiana anti-science law: 3 questions, 1 suggestion
August 17, 2008 – 10:48 pm
The Sensuous Curmudgeon has been providing yoeman service keeping us all posted on developments in Louisiana with the immanent implementation of Louisiana’s new “science education” law. From him we learn, for example, about the scheduled meeting Tuesday, August 19, of the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).
I have a suggestion (below) for [...]
TX Ed Agency defense in evolution case
August 16, 2008 – 12:08 pm
The Texas Education Agency [TEA] has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by Chris Comer, who lost her job as the TEA’s top science education specialist after forwarding an email announcement of a talk by Barbara Forrest. ‘a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, a co-author of “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse” and [...]
U.C. wins ACSI case
August 12, 2008 – 3:48 pm
In a decision dated August 8, 2008, a federal district court in California has thrown out a lawsuit brought by the Association of Christian Schools International against the University of California, in which the ACSI argued that the University’s refusal to approve some of the Christian schools’ courses violated First Amendment guarantees to freedom of [...]
Momentous TX education hearing
July 16, 2008 – 3:59 pm
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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.
Texas GOP: NCLB “a massive failure, should be abolished”
June 22, 2008 – 12:06 pm
Although my previous post highlights what the Texas 2008 Republican Platform says about “Theories of Origin,” the biggest headline in the Education pages of that platform is surely their statement that
The No Child Left Behind Act has been a massive failure and should be abolished.
Recall that this law was George W. Bush’s signature piece of [...]
