New Florida Bill Would Advocate Teaching of Controversial Subjects

Emily Mahoney of the Tampa Bay Times writes that a new bill by senator Dennis Baxley (R, of course) has been promoted to allow teachers to teach alternatives to evolution and climate change.

A bill that would allow school districts to teach Florida students alternatives to concepts deemed “controversial theories” — such as human-caused climate change and evolution — has been filed in the state Legislature.

The language of the bill sounds fairly unremarkable, requiring only that schools “shall” teach these “theories” in a “factual, objective, and balanced manner.” But the group that wrote the bill, the Florida Citizens Alliance, says the bill is needed because curriculum currently taught in Florida schools equates to “political and religious indoctrination,” according to their managing director, Keith Flaugh.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, said that schools need to teach “different worldviews” on issues like evolution and climate change. He asserts that textbooks now skew toward “uniformity” of thought.

“Nothing is ever settled if it’s science, because people are always questioning science,” Baxley said. “If you look at the history of human learning, for a long time the official worldview was that the world was flat. Anything you now accept as fact comes from a perspective and you learn from examining different schools of thought.”

First, a concession: I sympathize with the sponsors of the bill about the political and religious indoctrination. The Department of Education is lock-step with the DNC platform and, as such is hostile to “alternative” political views and religious expression. They tend to support every left, liberal cause that comes down the pike to the point where some teachers that I know won't be members of the national organization because they know that is where their membership money is being funneled.  This is one of very many reasons that we don't place our kids in public school. 

Secondly, though, this seems a whole lot like much ado about nothing.  While senator Baxley might want alternatives to established scientific theories taught, the text of the bill provides no language for that.  If anything, it gives teachers room to tee anti-evolutionary ideas up and knock them into the next fairway.  Climate change is a bit more sketchy.  It is a science in its infancy and, even fifteen years ago, researchers were warning of a coming big freeze (think The Day After Tomorrow, which came out in 2004).  Some still are.  There is a growing body of evidence that we are affecting the climate in some way, but it is still too early to tell how.  There is no value in cutting off debate in this arena.  The same cannot remotely be said about evolution, which now has over 150 years of supporting research behind it and is, in the minds of those who study it, almost beyond the realm of doubt. 

Meanwhile, in Florida...

NBC2 in Florida reports that a bill has been promoted in the legislature that would allow more "academic freedom" in teaching controversial subjects.  From Dave Elias:

A new bill introduced by a Southwest Florida lawmaker could give people outside the state a say in your child's education. The bill would allow school districts options when it comes to teaching evolution and climate change. It could open the door to creationism being taught in public schools. This bill is designed to give students options in the classroom.

Some say it goes too far. It even gives visitors paying sales tax a say.

Evolution versus creationism has been an ongoing debate in Florida's public schools.

“I think people should be given options on different things like that,” said Beverly Horner of Fort Myers. State Representative Byron Donalds of Collier County feels the same way. “It is important that the public is aware of what is actually in the classroom, and if there are objections to what is in the classroom, we have a process that allows for them to be remedied,” he said.

Donalds further said his bill would allow a balanced and non-inflamatory viewpoint on issues like evolution. “To me, those are code words for saying I don't like evolution,” said Brandon Haught of Citizens for Science.

Haught feels topics like climate change, which are currently taught in Florida classrooms, are in trouble. “They're trying to put some unscientific ideas into the science classroom,” Haught said.

Given the massive, overwhelming evidence for evolution, what would a “balanced” viewpoint look like?  Haught is correct.  They are trying to put unscientific views into the science classroom.  The problem is that they do not have the basic knowledge to understand that they are unscientific.  This is why lawmakers ought to stay out of the science classroom. 

Florida Evolution Bill

A “strengths and weaknesses” bill has been proposed in the Florida statehouse aimed solely at evolution. The Orlando Sentinel reports:

A bill filed in the Florida Senate would require a “critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution,” and some scientists fear it will open the doors for another heated evolution debate in Florida.

The bill, SB 1854, was filed by Sen. Steve Wise, R-Jacksonville, who has seemed mostly focused on his merit-pay plan for teachers this year.

The Florida Citizens for Science, an advocacy group that argues in favor of teaching evolution and better science instruction overall, says such bills are just an attempt to undermine lessons on evolution.

It notes that Wise filed a similar, and unsuccessful, bill in 2009, and has spoken in favor of “Intelligent Design,” an argument that an “intelligent cause” better explains living things than evolution by natural selection.

Well, at least someone was honest about why one of these bills is being drafted. Usually, they are promoted as fostering “critical thinking” in science, when really the people involved just want evolution gone. They just don't have the honesty to say that.

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Textbook Trouble in Florida

In the first of three articles on the subject, the Orlando Sentinel reported on some trouble that a science textbook publisher has found itself in. In the September 30 paper, Leslie Postal wrote:

The publishers of a marine-science textbook that critics say contains pro-creationism material has agreed to remove two offending pages from editions sold to Florida schools, state officials said.

An advisory group, made up mostly of educators, that reviewed the book on CD-ROM last week recommended that "Life on an Ocean Planet" be approved only if the pages were cut, a participant said.

The Florida Department of Education said the publisher has agreed. Current Publishing, in California, did not respond to a request for comment.

The second article, which ran later the same day, also by Postal, had a bit more information about the controversy:

The book, Life on an Ocean Planet, was one of 22 reviewed by a group (made up mostly of educators) asked to recommend high school life sciences materials. The two participants I spoke with said the book stood out because of those two pages, which seemed intent on misinforming students or rehashing discredited ideas.

Both said that book was in stark contract to the others they reviewed –most for various high school biology courses . The other textss [sic], they said, were top-notch and dealt with evolution head on, as required under Florida’s new science standards. The Florida Department of Education said last week that the book’s publisher had agreed to remove the pages that raised red flags, but I never heard back from Current Publishing to confirm that.

In the third article, which ran October 4,the textbook company, Current Publishing, defended their position. Postal writes:

The criticized “sidebar” passages in a marine science textbook proposed for Florida high schools were meant to be a “critical thinking exercise for students” and not a way to undermine the teaching of evolution, said a vice president with Current Publishing, the text’s publisher.

The textbook Life on an Ocean Planet was developed for Florida’s marine science courses in 2005 and revised recently to meet the state’s new science standards, said Dean Allen, the company’s vice president and general manager.

The book doesn’t attempt to mislead or undermine the teaching of evolution, he insisted.

The odd thing about all three stories in the Sentinel is that no part of the sidebar information is either extracted or referenced. Those reading the story have no idea what was in the sidebar that was offensive. For that we have to go to the NCSE, which replicates the sidebars. They write:

The sidebar makes a variety of historical and scientific errors. For example, it claims that in the Origin of Species "Darwin proposed that life arose from nonliving matter"; it equates microevolution with genetic drift; and it contends that selective breeding demonstrates genetic drift. Moreover, although the sidebar acknowledges that "the vast majority of biologists (probably more than 95%)" accept evolution, it also airs, without attempting to debunk, a variety of creationist claims (which are attributed to unnamed "skeptics"). Among these claims: that the fossil record "does not contain the many transitional species one would expect," that "evolution doesn't adequately explain how a complex structure ... could come to exist through infrequent random mutations," that transitional features could not be favored by natural selection, and that "the hypotheses that ... chemicals can lead to abiogenesis are highly debatable."

It is difficult to believe that some of the committee that wrote the textbook did not put these passages in on purpose in the hopes that they would not be noticed. The bullet points in the sidebar are ID "talking points" and are straight out of the "academic freedom" playbook championed so heavily by the Discovery Institute. It would also be naive to think that this is not the only place they will show up. The bad thing here is that the writers of the textbook should have known better. The good thing is that the misinformation was caught.

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