sounds of science

Sounds of Science

In a story that has been echoed across the country, the St. Petersburg

Times has a piece on the chilling effect creationism has on education

in Florida.

Sometimes, Allyn Sue Baylor doesn't teach evolution in her science

class, even though the state requires it. She knows of other

teachers who duck the issue, too.

They fear a backlash.

"There are cases when parents have gotten really upset," said

Baylor, who teaches at Palm Harbor Middle School in Pinellas

County. "It's scary. You can lose your job."

It is even too dangerous to talk about:

[T]he St. Petersburg Times attempted to contact more than 50

science teachers in the Tampa Bay area and beyond. Most did not

respond.

A science supervisor in one district suggested teachers may be

gun-shy given recent headlines. A spokeswoman in another district

told principals to instruct their teachers not to talk to a Times

reporter.

The passage of the proposed standards may be one possible resolution

of the problem:

Would the proposed standards, which include the word "evolution,"

make teaching the subject any easier?

On the one hand, some say, teachers would be less likely to avoid

the subject because their students would be tested on it on the

high-stakes Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. ...

On the other hand, if more teachers teach more evolution, classroom

conflicts might increase.

"Eventually, you'd see less (conflict)," said Jason Wiles, who

manages the Evolution Education Research Center at McGill

University in Montreal, "The more students understand about

evolution, the less likely they are to reflexively reject the

scientific evidence."

But David Campbell, a Clay County teacher, who is a member of the

committee that helped write the draft science standards and who

opposed his home county school board's anti-evolution resolution notes

that the teachers who skip evolution do so out of fear. And they have

an unwitting ally:

They get away with it because "virtually no one complains when a

teacher does not teach evolution," said Randy Moore, a University

of Minnesota professor who has edited several science education

journals. "There is not an outcry for, 'Teach us evolution.'"

So it you really care about science education, find out what your

local schools are teaching -- really teaching -- and if they don't

measure up, make as much noise as the anti-science crowd does.

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# posted by John Pieret @ 10:32 AM

Comments:

Hi John,

that's really scary. Ok, it's the Bible Belt, but still *scary*.

What a pyrrhic victory...

Is that new or is that behavior something which was already known ?

I do not know if you know it yet,

but the Wilfried Laurier University

in *Canada*....look for yourself

http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/bigots-at-wilfrid-laurier-univers

ity.html

# posted by Anonymous TSK : 5:39 PM

Is that new or is that behavior something which was already known ?

It's been known for some time. There were the surveys mentioned in the

article:

A 1999 survey of biology teachers in Oklahoma, for example, found that

12 percent wanted to omit evolution and teach creationism instead. A

similar survey in Louisiana found that 29 percent of biology teachers

believed creationism should be taught, while in South Dakota, it was

39 percent.

As an interesting aside, Don Aguillard, the student who was one of the

plaintiffs in the Edwards v. Aguillard case, was coauthor of the

Louisina survey.

In many ways, the brief period between Sputnik, when science became an

anti-communist imperative, and the re-animation of the religious right

in the 80s was the anomally. After the Scopes trial evolution was

removed from most grade and high school textbooks as too

controversial.

There is more information on this problem at the NCSE site.