Texas Public Schools Are Teaching Creationism
Wow...here I am complaining about events in Russia and Nigeria etc. and look what goes on in one of our biggest states
An investigation into charter schools’ dishonest and unconstitutional science, history, and “values” lessons.
Illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker
When public-school students enrolled
in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they
will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma”
and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told
that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age
of the Earth. These are all lies.
The more than 17,000 students
in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in
their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were
“pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history
textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a
“surrogate husband.”
Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but
it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement
and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of
church and state.
Infiltrating and subverting the charter-school movement has allowed
Responsive Ed to carry out its religious agenda—and it is succeeding.
Operating more than 65 campuses in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana, Responsive Ed receives more than $82 million in taxpayer money annually, and it is expanding, with 20 more Texas campuses opening in 2014.
Charter schools may be run independently, but they are still public
schools, and through an open records request, I was able to obtain a set
of Responsive Ed’s biology “Knowledge Units,” workbooks that Responsive
Ed students must complete to pass biology. These workbooks both overtly
and underhandedly discredit evidence-based science and allow
creationism into public-school classrooms.
A favorite creationist claim is that there is “uncertainty” in the
fossil record, and Responsive Ed does not disappoint. The workbook cites
the “lack of a single source for all the rock layers as an argument
against evolution.”
I asked Ken Miller, a co-author of the Miller-Levine Biology textbook
published by Pearson and one of the most widely used science textbooks
on the market today, to respond to claims about the fossil record and
other inaccuracies in the Responsive Ed curriculum. (It’s worth noting
that creationists on the Texas State Board of Education recently tried,
and failed, to block the approval of Miller’s textbook because it teaches evolution.)
Courtesy of the George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress
“Of course there is no ‘single source’ for all rock layers,” Miller
told me over email. “However, the pioneers of the geological sciences
observed that the sequence of distinctive rock layers in one place
(southern England, for example) could be correlated with identical
layers in other places, and eventually merged into a single system of
stratigraphy. All of this was established well before Darwin's work on
evolution.”
The workbook also claims, “Some scientists even question the validity
of the conclusions concerning the age of the Earth.” As Miller pointed
out, “The statement that ‘some scientists question,’ is a typical way
that students can be misled into thinking that there is serious
scientific debate about the age of the Earth or the nature of the
geological record. The evidence that the Earth was formed between 4 and 5
billion years ago is overwhelming.”
Another Responsive Ed section claims that evolution cannot be tested, something biologists have been doing for decades.
It misinforms students by claiming, “How can scientists do experiments
on something that takes millions of years to accomplish? It’s
impossible.”
The curriculum tells students that a “lack of transitional fossils”
is a “problem for evolutionists who hold a view of uninterrupted
evolution over long periods of time.”
“The assertion that there are no ‘transitional fossils’ is false,”
Miller responded. “We have excellent examples of transitional forms
documenting the evolution of amphibians, mammals, and birds, to name
some major groups. We also have well-studied transitional forms
documenting the evolution of whales, elephants, horses, and humans.”
Photo by Yan Li/Creative Commons
Evolution is not a scientific controversy, and there are no competing
scientific theories. All of the evidence supports evolution, and the overwhelming majority of scientists accept the evidence for it.
Another tactic creationists often use is to associate evolution with
eugenics. One Responsive Ed quiz even asks students, “With regards to
social Darwinism, do you think humans who are not capable should be left
to die out, or should they be helped?”
“They imply that the control of human reproduction and the
abandonment of people who might be ‘left to die’ are elements of
evolutionary theory,” Miller said. “This is false, and the authors of
these questions surely know that.”
Outright creationism appears in Responsive Ed’s section on the
origins of life. It’s not subtle. The opening line of the workbook
section, just as the opening line of the Bible, declares, “In the
beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
Responsive Ed’s butchering of evolution isn’t the only part of its
science curriculum that deserves an F; it also misinforms students about
vaccines and mauls the scientific method.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The only study linking vaccines to autism was exposed as a fraud and has been retracted, and the relationship has been studied exhaustively and found to be nonexistent.
But a Responsive Ed workbook teaches, “We do not know for sure whether
vaccines increase a child’s chance of getting autism, but we can
conclude that more research needs to be done.”
On the scientific method, Responsive Ed confuses scientific theories
and laws. It argues that theories are weaker than laws and that there is
a natural progression from theories into laws, all of which is
incorrect.
The Responsive Ed curriculum undermines Texas schoolchildren’s future in any possible career in science.
Dan Quinn, the communications director for the Texas Freedom Network,
a watchdog organization that monitors the religious right, said, “These
materials should raise a big red flag for any parent or school
administrator. It's bad enough that they promote the same discredited
anti-evolution arguments that scientists debunked a long time ago. But
the materials also veer into teaching religious beliefs that the courts
have repeatedly ruled have no place in a public school science
classroom.”
When it’s not directly quoting the Bible, Responsive Ed’s curriculum
showcases the current creationist strategy to compromise science
education, which the National Center for Science Education terms “stealth creationism.”
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching creationism is unconstitutional. In the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case,
Judge John Jones III ruled in federal district court that intelligent
design is still creationism and equally unconstitutional.
To get around court rulings, Responsive Ed and other creationists
resort to rhetoric about teaching “all sides” of “competing theories”
and claiming that this approach promotes “critical thinking.”
In response to a question about whether Responsive Ed teaches
creationism, its vice president of academic affairs, Rosalinda Gonzalez,
told me that the curriculum “teaches evolution, noting, but not exploring, the existence of competing theories.”
Bringing creationism into a classroom by undermining evolution and “noting … competing theories” is still unconstitutional.
What’s more, contrary to Gonzalez’s statement, teaching about
supernatural creation in the section on the origins of life is doing far
more than noting competing theories.
In a previous Slate column
on the Texas textbook wars, I explained that Texas’ current science
standards were designed to compromise the teaching of evolution. The
standards require teachers to “analyze, evaluate, and critique”
evolution and teach “all sides” of evolution to encourage “critical
thinking.” These requirements are a back-door way to enable teachers to
attack evolution and inject creationism into the classroom. If teachers
are questioned on their materials, they can shift the responsibility for
what they’re teaching onto the state.
I asked Gonzalez if these science standards played a role in Responsive Ed’s curriculum on evolution, and her answer was yes.
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