Texas Public Schools Are Teaching Creationism

[ashling]

An investigation into charter schools’ dishonest and unconstitutional science, history, and “values” lessons.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/01/creationism_in_texas_public_schools_undermining_the_charter_movement.html

A Texas charter school group has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement.
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.

The opening line of the workbook section declares, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
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.

[longship]

1. Zack Kopplin is an incredible person.

He's going to go places quickly. Indeed, he already is doing just that.

[stg81]

2. WTF

[Tyrs WolfDaemon]

3. I worry about the schools in Texas

It seems like we are always hearing more bad stuff from them every few days.

A little over a decade ago, I was at UT and had a TA'ship for one of the Intro Geo Courses. I got to hear some weird stuff that the kids had been taught before heading to college and I also got to see the lack of certain skills that the kids should have gotten in elementary school.

I shit you not, I had a guy in one of the lab sections that didn't know how to use a ruler.

During a different semester I TA'd the intro class meant for engineers (all that meant was that they got some different texts and a little more focus in certain topics). At least that semester they all knew how to use a ruler, but they didn't seem to know how to do simple math without a calculator.
(I wish I had a wolf face-paw smiley)


I fear for our future.