An investigation into charter schools’ dishonest and unconstitutional
science, history, and “values” lessons.
The opening line of the workbook section
declares,
“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
This from
Slate:
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.
 |
| Texas charter school group connected to the
creationist movement. |
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.)
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.
One piece of campaign literature
from the front-runner in the Texas governor’s race shows a gun and a Bible.
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...
