On Teaching Creationism in Texas

Take a look at this AP video shot in Portsmouth, New Hampshire of Rick Perry speaking to a boy and at the same time answering his mother’s questions.

You get that? Rick Perry actually told the boy that both Creationism and Evolution were taught in public schools.

Politifact rates this claim as false, but I take exception to that.

Now it is true that the state’s school board just went through that exercise as its young Earth Creationist members struggled to add Creationist notions to the state curriculum. As close as they could come to doing that is the recommendation that students look at all theories “from all sides.”

Assuming that one such side is the Intelligent Design side, this opens the door, at least, to teaching Creationism in Texas public schools.

So that seems to justify what Perry claimed, in a small way at least.

But here is the thing. I know for a fact that, here in Texas, if a high school biology teacher is deeply religious, and believes in the Biblical story in Genesis, that teacher will devote instructional time to the Creationist point of view.

Even if it isn’t in the curriculum.

So getting back to Perry’s claim that both Creationism and Evolution are taught in Texas public schools, I’d have to agree. Perry made a simple affirmative statement, not qualifying as to whether this was sanctioned by state standards.

The trouble is, and Perry is extremely good at doing this, the way he said it makes it sound like Texas’s curriculum standards call for doing just this.

Creationists Are at it Again in Texas

Texas’ State Board of Education has taken up the matter of Evolution vs. Creationism again today in a hearing to decide on supplemental materials for the state’s science curriculum. Barbara Cargill, the board’s religious evangelical ex-biology teacher who ascribes to a young Earth creationist creed will head up the discussion.

About the only positive thing you can say about Cargill is that she is an EX-biology teacher and is no longer infringing on the religious beliefs (or non-religion) of her students with her own interpretation of cosmology.

The Texas Freedom Network is there in their usual place live blogging the meeting. Their position has been clear from the beginning that any reference to the pseudoscience known as Creationism or Intelligent Design should be eschewed by the state, and not be made a part of the state’s curriculum. Robert Scott, the Education Commissioner has come out with a set of recommendations on which materials should be adopted, and the TFN has given that set its blessings. Now it is up to the SBOE to either accept those recommendations or to go out into the ether and try to ram through its own conservative agenda.

This seems less likely than in the past. Apparently  the successor to Cynthia Dunbar, Republican Marsha Farney, has proven to be a thorn in the sides of the evangelical bloc, and has reduced the former bloc of seven uberreligious votes to 6 (in Cargill’s own words, there are only 6 “true Christians” on the board now).

It should be interesting to watch. In the past, the boards foray into wackydom has been famously dealt with in other states with laws being passed to avoid any materials approved by Texas’ SBOE. Whether sanity has actually won the day in the state school board remains to be seen.

With this bunch, always expect the worse.

Louisiana Rejects Teaching Creationism in Public Schools

You’ve got to be kidding.

As an educator, I know that when a teacher tries to relocate from Louisiana to Texas they are seriously scrutinized. Louisiana, says the common wisdom, simply doesn’t hold a candle to the level of instruction that takes place in Texas’ classrooms. Its teachers, are not exactly responsible for this, it’s the system that they are forced to teach within.

Enter stage left: the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education this week rejected the critiques of evangelical Christians that demanded that evolution be taught as one of several explanations for speciation. That evolution is merely yet another attempt to make sense of scientific observation. This week they rejected all of these arguments and adopted a science textbook whose sole explanation for “the story of life” is in evolutionary theory.

The Louisiana Coalition for Science, a more focused lobby group, but similar to Texas’ Texas Freedom Network, released the following statement on this coup:

“We are pleased and proud that the board has done the right thing. As a result, students in Louisiana public schools will have the most current, up-to-date information about biology, including the theory of evolution, which is the strongest explanation of the history and development of life on Earth ever constructed.”

More current, I might add, and more up-to-date than students in neighboring Texas will receive now or in the future.

Texans take note: Louisiana has taken the lead here in the deep South and is forging on ahead of you and your school system.

At some point, I expect, Texas teachers, especially biology teachers, will have to be seriously scrutinized if they ever decide to move to Louisiana in order to ply their trade. Because if you are trained to say that evolution is merely a theory that is on par with the theory that Earth, the universe and all life was created on a 6-day creation schedule, and this soon followed by a catastrophic flood that destroyed the dinosaurs, you tend to lose your edge.

And your brains tend to turn to mush.

SBOE Religious Reactionaries Lose Another Vote

It’s nice when truth and goodness wins out over darkness and ignorance, isn’t it?

Today, coming off of the 7-7 tie that dealt a death blow to the “strengths and weaknesses” phraseology that would require biology teachers to ask students to evaluate evolutionary theory based on observations and evidence, its kindred, the “sufficiencies and insufficiencies” phraseology met with a similar fate.

So it would appear that Texas was ready to go full speed ahead toward adoption of state curriculum standards for the next 10 years, and adopt them they did, with a 13-2 vote.

Honestly, from all of the attention that it got, you would think that biology, and the unit on evolution, was the only science taught in Texas. They spent that much time on this. That despite the fact that standards needed to be adopted for a whole host of other science disciplines.

But then, no one is challenging any of Newton’s Laws. That despite the fact that Einstein poked huge holes in these “Laws of Nature” a century ago.

But since the Genesis story did not deal with quantum mechanics, or so I hope, the Texas State Board of Education won’t be going there any time in the near or distant future.

So now that the state school board has acted, and will now move on to social studies (do rightwing evangelicals believe that the Holocaust occurred? I forget) we will now watch the drama transplant itself in the Texas Legislature, that august body of experts in the area of population genetics and speciation.

Because now that the SBOE has failed to carry out the neoconservative evangelical agenda, it falls to State Rep. Wayne Christian.

A man who takes his surname far too seriously.

State Rep. Christian has introduced HB 4224, a bill that does the work of what the state school board just voted to omit. The bill amends Section 28.0037 of the Texas Education Code to read, in part, like this:

“(b) Instructional elements for scientific processes: the student uses critical thinking and scientific problem solving to make informed decisions. The student is expected to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.”

It goes further, of course.

“…no student in any public school or institution shall be penalized in any way because he or she subscribes to a particular position on scientific theories or hypotheses.”

Now this sounds all well and good to religious evangelicals, who don’t want Johnny to get a bad grade just because he mouthed off in class that what teacher just said about fish crawling out onto the land was all wrong.

But perhaps Rep. Christian didn’t quite think this completely through, do you think?

After all, there is no wording to the effect that the position that the student ascribes to must specifically deals with Darwinism, speciation or the descent of man, or whether the student ascribes to a position antithetical to specifically those ideas.

In fact, the sky is the limit on what scientific theory the student may ascribe to, and in no way may the teacher give the student a failing grade because of that.

So this means that a student may ascribe to the position of Aristotle, that an object that is placed in motion by violent force remains in motion by the impetus that the violent force invests in the object, and that the object comes to rest in the object’s natural place when all of the impetus in it is used up.

What the heck, what was good enough for 1800 years’ worth of scholars should be good enough for Texas’ science students, huh?

The heck with Newton and Galileo, what did those guys have that Aristotle didn’t?

Oh, Newton invented calculus?

Heck, forget that. Calculus is hard.

Hats off to State Rep. Wayne Christian, our Texas Science Scholar of the Century.

Evolution Issue in Texas Education Gets a Preliminary Vote

As advertised, the Texas State Board of Education met today, and will return tomorrow to finalize votes on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills document for science instruction in that state. In a preliminary vote, a vote to see where everyone is on returning the “strengths and weaknesses” terminology in the state’s science curriculum, the motion to add the language back in failed in a tie 7-7 vote.

The rules call for a simple majority. Lacking that, the motion failed.

Video is courtesy of KXAN.

Now one thing that the video did not explain was where that 15^th vote was, who it is, and what will come of the final vote tomorrow. That information can be found at the Dallas Morning News.

To wit:

“A final vote will occur on Friday, but the outcome is not expected to change. One board member who was absent – Democrat Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi – will participate in Friday's meeting by video conference from Houston. She has already stated her opposition to the requirement backed by social conservatives.”

Now it is my tradition not to hope for too much, especially when it comes to going up against the rightwing religious evangelicals in Texas. But did I just glimpse a dim light at the end of a long, dark tunnel?

National Center for Science Education Has a You Tube Home Page

This is an appropriate time to spread the word that the National Center for Science Education, an organization that has been at the forefront in defending the teaching of evolution in public schools, now has a You Tube home page.

An appropriate time because starting on Thursday, March 26^th, the Texas State Board of Education will meet once more to finalize the Science TEKS that will govern how science will be taught in Texas’ public schools, and more importantly, what demands will be delivered to the publishers of science books so that Texas, a huge school textbook customer, will adopt their textbooks in the upcoming adoption cycle.

To what end you would ask. Why would the NCSE do this just now?

Well, for one thing, I as an interested party in science education have had to depend upon the kindness of strangers to provide first- or second-hand coverage of what transpires at these board meetings. People who “live-blog” the meetings. People who provide snippets of conversation through audio recordings.

But at the NCSE’s You Tube home page, you have one-stop shopping.

The NCSE has a very complete recording of the testimony of one of their own at a recent SBOE meeting. Dr. Genie Scott gave testimony on inclusion of the “strengths and weaknesses” argument in the Science TEKS, especially as found in the Biology curriculum vis-à-vis the teaching of evolution. It also shows her fielding questions from creationist and non-creationist board members alike.

It also shows Don McLeroy’s comments at the meeting, showing how by waving publications about, shouting who cites whom in them, McLeroy arrives at disingenuous conclusions that no one but another creationist would come to.

One part of this last set of videos has been “pulled” by You Tube, leaving the rest of us to speculate on whom had it pulled and why.

So if you want to go and watch our state school board in action, I suggest perusing the small library of videos there.

I, for one am enlightened, but not really surprised.

“Sowing Atheism” On Don McLeroy’s SBOE Recommended Reading List

In preparation for next week’s “final showdown” on the teaching of evolution in Texas public schools (honestly, I thought the final showdown took place in 1925 in Tennessee), Texas State Board of Education chairman and avowed young-Earth creationist, Don McLeroy, has a new book that he’d like the 15 members of the Texas school board to take a look at before they render a final vote on the wording that will set in stone for the next ten years how evolution will be taught in Texas public schools.

At issue is the “strengths and weaknesses” doctrine whereby students are asked to make educated judgments on how well, or how poorly a scientific theory, or even a scientific principle is supported by scientific evidence and observation.

A task that would daunt a university graduate student, let alone an 8^th grader whose agility in text messaging far outpaces his astuteness in the area of evaluation of scientific theory.

“Strengths and weaknesses” was voted out of the curriculum by a bare majority back in January, when the board last met to discuss this issue.

Nevertheless, McLeroy is bent on educating his flock, and help them see the light, by recommending that they read the book, Sowing Atheism: The National Academy Of Sciences’ Sinister Scheme To Teach Our Children They’re Descended From Reptiles as we see here. And they don’t even have to buy the book. They can download the entire book on .PDF, much to the dismay of Amazon.com which is trying to sell it to make money for its stockholders by hawking the book for $12.95.

I’ve read parts of this book. It was written with the chief intent of refuting the 2008 National Academy of Sciences book Science, Evolution, and Creationism. A book, they say, that has been sent “to every public school principal and every science teacher in America” (I’m still waiting for my copy). Sowing Atheism has lots of inflammatory statements in it. Here are but a few:

“These are farmers of darkness, plowing into the minds of our children, planting their poisonous seeds of elitist atheistic evolution. Their deception is so systematized, so interwoven with bits of truth, that it is difficult for unwary readers to see with immediate clarity the false syllogism which animates the entire content of the NAS book.”

“The Greek word translated as stupid is moron, where we get our word for a mentally dull and sluggish person. In my judgment, only morons—more than 11,500 [Christian pastors] morons in this case—could sign a letter maintaining that the “timeless truths of the Bible” are compatible with the billions of unpredictable aberrations of evo-atheism. What do these apostate morons celebrate at their Sunday services, the lies about humanity’s origins told by Moses, Jesus, and Paul?”

“Indeed, the NAS hierarchy pushes its evo-atheistic religion in the classroom with “ferocity,” and with a zeal that’s hardly matched in Christianity. We can’t properly call them evangelical, however, because that word comes from the Greek eu-angellion, meaning literally, well-message, more commonly, good news. Teaching children or adults that they are descended from reptiles is never good news. We should call evo-atheists mal-angelical, because it accurately describes what they’re doing: spreading hopelessly bad religious news.”

Now here is what I hope. I hope that the 15 members of the Texas school board take Don McLeroy’s suggestion to heart, and read this book from cover to cover. I couldn’t this morning because I am working with an empty stomach. But I want them to read the book and get out of it what I have been able to get from it. That this attempt by McLeroy and others of his ilk is nothing more than a naked assault on science by evangelical Christians. An action that completely supports, in the opposite sense, the whole point of Chapter 7 of the book that McLeroy recommends.

This effort to change how science is taught in Texas, specifically how evolution is taught, is nothing more than an assault on the “Establishment clause” of the 1^st Amendment to the US Constitution. An attempt to bring the Christian religion back into the public school system.

And we all have Don McLeroy to thank for pointing this out by recommending this book.

Bill Would Exempt the Institute for Creation Research from State Regulation

Acting as a surrogate for Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior of the World, State Rep. Leo Berman (R - Tyler) has filed HB 2800. This bill would execute what could be termed a cosmic end-around. A Machiavellian move to make is easier for students of “Creation Science” to receive their Master’s degrees in Science, and allow them to teach their brand of science in a school.

How to do this is simple in the extreme.

The Texas Education Code, an instrument that is used to promote quality education in Texas, regulates the efforts of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to do the following (from Subchapter G Sec. 61.301):

“It is the policy and purpose of the State of Texas to prevent deception of the public resulting from the conferring and use of fraudulent or substandard college and university degrees; it is also the purpose of this subchapter to regulate the use of academic terminology in naming or otherwise designating educational institutions, the advertising, solicitation or representation by educational institutions or their agents, and the maintenance and preservation of essential academic records. Because degrees and equivalent indicators of educational attainment are used by employers in judging the training of prospective employees, by public and private professional groups in determining qualifications for admission to and continuance of practice, and by the general public in assessing the competence of persons engaged in a wide range of activities necessary to the general welfare, regulation by law of the evidences of college and university educational attainment is in the public interest. To the same end the protection of legitimate institutions and of those holding degrees from them is also in the public interest.”

To this end State Rep Berman seeks to incur such a “deception of the public” by filing HB 2800 which would exempt from the oversight of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board any “non-profit institution” that

• “does not accept state funding of any kind”
• “does not accept state-administered federal funding”
• “formed as or is affiliated with or controlled by a nonprofit corporation or nonprofit unincorporated organization” and
• “offers bona fide degree programs that require students to complete substantive course work in order to receive a degree from the institution”

That is, any private educational organization like the one described above may confer any kind of advanced degree it wants to without any kind of regulation or oversight by a Texas educational governing body.

This, friends and neighbors is educational deregulation writ large.

Why would he do such a thing? Why would State Rep Berman open up his state to any fly-by-night organization to confer educational degrees within its boundaries, solely because no government dollars go to support it?

Because the fly-by-night organization that State Rep Berman wants to help out is the infamous Institute for Creation Research, a privately funded organization that seeks to promote the pseudoscience of Creationism, where adherents, and it is a belief system, claim that Earth is 10,000 years old, Noah’s flood and all of the Genesis stories actually happened.

And they can by God prove it.

With science.

A very odd form of science that requires one to believe that something has occurred and then set out to prove, with science, that it did. That is, science education using the Scientific Method, but written backwards.

A science that, by the way, a minority of Texas State Board of Education members adhere to.

Now my guess is that this bill of Berman’s will suffer from neglect and die long before this seemingly endless legislative session ends in May. After all, the state legislature has so many pressing issues on its plate, like Voter ID, getting rid of the illegal immigrants, and preserving everyone’s 2^nd Amendment rights that they just won’t have time to deal with this one.

Thank God.

It’s a Tie: Jesus 1 Darwin 1

Things seem to have split down the middle in yesterday’s wrangle at the Texas State Board of Education confab in Austin, where it met to vote on amendments to the 3^rd draft of Chapter 112 of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills document. That document can be found here.

In what seems to have become a miraculous turn of events, the forces for Jesus and The Creator of the Universe seem to have suffered a setback, as the board voted and rejected two proposed amendments to return the “strengths and weaknesses” clause to the document.

A team of teachers and education experts have worked long and hard to come up with 3 drafts of a proposed document that will set the stage for public school science instruction as well as what actually gets written in science textbooks. In the documents 3^rd incarnation, Line 3A was stripped from each and every science discipline included in Chapter 112 of the TEKS.

In the draft currently in force, approved in 1998, this language is found:

“(3) Scientific processes. The student uses critical thinking and scientific problem solving to make informed decisions. The student is expected to:

(A) analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information;”

In the 3^rd draft we see this language in the high school document:

“(3) Scientific processes. The student uses critical thinking, scientific reasoning and problem solving to make informed decisions. The student is expected to:

(A) analyze and evaluate scientific explanations, using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing;”

Clearly, the phrase “as to their strengths and weaknesses” was deleted. The group deleted this phrase in a nod to the 21^st century and the Supreme Court which has already ruled that creationism and intelligent design may not be taught in a science classroom. The “strengths and weaknesses” phrase was seen by the TEKS science committee as one that promotes the teaching of those two proscribed dogmatic ideologies that are nothing less than an attempt to teach religion in public school as science.

And yesterday, in two separate motions, two evangelical members of the school board sought to restore this language to the document.

An attempt that was narrowly defeated twice.

So it will not be part of the Texas science curriculum for students to evaluate Darwin’s theory of natural selection as to whether it adequately explains a known fact – that evolution occurs.

But they had to throw a bone to the vanquished, I think.

In a separate and very narrow challenge to evolutionary theory, the board voted 9 to 6 to include a phrase in the biology curriculum that specifically deals with species evolution.

In the 3^rd draft’s section 43 (Biology) Line 7 reads like this:

(7) Science concepts. The student knows evolutionary theory is a scientific explanation for the unity and diversity of life. The student is expected to:

(A) identify how evidence of common ancestry among groups is provided by the fossil record, biogeography, and homologies including anatomical, molecular, and developmental;

I guess this language was too strong and forceful for board chairman, Republican evangelical dentist Don McLeroy. He wanted the following idea added to water down what appears to be some factual certainty:

“…evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of scientific theories about common ancestry of different species.”

But at least he is getting away from the word “weakness.”

And at least they are being a little more intellectually honest by including this phrase as a direct attack on these scientific disciplines, rather than putting in every section of the document a “strength and weakness” phrase in some sort of attempt at looking even-handed, when an attack on evolutionary theory was the intent all along.

Besides, I always thought that the developmental evidence for the evolution of the phyla, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was a little hokey.

Texas School Board Set to Strike a Blow for Jesus

Here in the Bible Belt, in Texas, where people still cling to their guns and their Bibles, we have a religious war brewing.

A Jihad for Jesus, if you will.

The war is set to be fought in the meeting room of the State Board of Education, where 15 school board trustees are getting set to vote on whether to include an infamous phrase in each and every section of the state’s science curriculum.

Specifically, we are talking about the “strengths and weaknesses” clause. One requirement that is in the current curriculum, in examination of scientific theories holds that students should be able to “analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.”

This clause is cut and pasted into every section of Chapter 112 of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills that can be found at the TEA website here.

On its face it appears that the board wants Texas public school students to engage in higher level thinking where they evaluate the validity of scientific theory.

You know, like the Theory of Relativity, or the Kinetic Theory of Matter.

But in reality, the clause is really only meant to be used in one discipline, and really in one theory within that discipline.

Specifically, biology, and the “Theory of Evolution.”

Yes, the clause is there specifically to ensure that students would question the strengths and weaknesses of that theory, even though it is presently included as line 3A in every section of the chapter.

This is a fairly blatant attempt at appearing to be even-handed, even though whenever the clause is debated, only Darwin’s theory comes up.

And not Einstein’s Theories, or Superstring Theory.

Now here is the rub. Even though that clause has been in the TEKS for 10 years now, teachers generally ignore it.

And for good reason. Most science teachers that I am aware of are themselves not equipped to question the validity of scientific theories. This is really the stuff of ivory tower science, not something that can be adequately discussed in K-12 classrooms.

Why then, if teachers are not really qualified to question scientific theories, does the school board think that children are?

The truth is, they aren’t and that is where it gets really interesting. If teachers and students alike cannot make use of “scientific evidence and information” to evaluate a theory’s strengths and weaknesses, who can?

Answer: textbook authors.

See? It’s not about higher level thinking, it is about reading someone else’s evaluation of a theory and memorizing it for later regurgitation. That’s about as low as you go as far as complexity and quality of cognitive domains.

But what is really and truly insidious is that when textbook authors are required to include in their scientific discussion an evaluation of validity, it opens up the possibility of inclusion of analyses and opinions made in the past that have been offered and subsequently rejected.

But without some rather sophisticated knowledge that lies far beyond graduate school, students and some teachers have no way of knowing this.

Knowing, for example, that natural selection had nothing to do with the Cambrian speciation explosion, yet that event is held up as evidence that natural selection is a weak theory because it cannot explain the event.

Knowing, for example that evolution per se is not the theory in question. That “Darwin’s Theory” is not the “Theory of Evolution.” “Darwin’s Theory of Evolution” is a misnomer. Those words are shortened from the title of Darwin’s book “On the Theory of Evolution by Means of Natural Selection.” There is no real argument that evolution has not taken place. Evolution is a biological principle, not a theory. A biological principle simply states what happens. A theory attempts to explain how a phenomenon happens, not whether it does.

So it looks to me like the Texas State Board of Education is getting ready to really downgrade the quality of science education by making outlandish demands of textbook authors to lie, essentially, to young readers.

And quite frankly, this is not a state issue, it is a national one. Publishers have little desire to create multiple versions of a textbook, ones that are individually written to suit the demands of individual states. Texas, as it turns out, is a huge textbook customer so what is written for Texan tastes also get shipped to states with lower textbook demands. So what the Texas Board demands of publishers will have an effect on the quality of science education across the country.

So despite the fact that Bush and the Texas Mafia have made a sudden exit from the national scene, Texas keeps on giving the finger to the nation through its religious reactionary school board.

I am thinking of founding a new national organization: “Americans for the Secession of Texas.”

I bet I can get a pretty big membership list.

Texas Board of Education Reconsiders Evolution

Coming on the heels of a Florida state school board decision to place in their curriculum the notion that Evolution was merely a theory, Texas’ State Board of Education is reconsidering its stance on the teaching of Evolution in Texas’ public schools.

The occasion is the board’s task to rewrite the state’s curriculum 10 years after its 1998 adoption of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills or TEKS.

On November 19th the board met in a public hearing to hear testimony on the teaching of Evolution in public school, an occasion that was live blogged here.

It should come as no surprise that Texas’ state board of education contains several members from the religious right that have an agenda to suppress the teaching of evolution in public schools in favor of their preferred theory in use, the one called Intelligent Design.

That is, God did it. Did it all.

Now the fact that other state boards of education have taken this on, and have had their members voted out of office doesn’t faze the Texas board. Not in the least. These creationist school board members know that they have the backing of a strongly religious Texas population.

For now.

To get a feel for what they are attempting to do, take a look here, at the second draft of the high school science TEKS that was posted a week before the public meeting.

I’ll tell you what the first thing I looked at was after reading the link in the title to this posting. §112.43.c(3)A.

Here is what it says in the adopted 1998 document:

“analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information;”

This little gem was placed there by the religious right members of the board in 1998 to use as a wedge in the years to come to encourage students to challenge scientific principles and theories, and pressure textbook publishers into making equivocal statements on scientific knowledge.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at this document at the TEA website, which lists challenges to biology content in a high school biology textbook published by Glencoe.

The challenges were lodged by the Discovery Institute a supposed nonpartisan institute that promotes the conservative evangelical agenda. They make heavy use of §112.43.c(3)A. For example.

“Because of its factual errors and lack of information, the text does not enable students to “analyze, review, and critique” this scientific explanation as to its “strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information” (TEKS 112.43c(3)A). ”

Now what does the science curriculum team propose to do with this infamous section? Delete it and combine it with draft version 1 of section (3)B. It is proposed that (3)A now say this:

“analyze and evaluate strengths and limitations of scientific explanations including those based on accepted scientific data, and evidence from students’ observations, experiments, models, and logical statements;”

So in place of “weaknesses” we have “limitations.”

This, I suppose, is in response to the scientific community’s objection that “strengths and weaknesses” is not a valid scientific concern. As in what these guys say.

So by entirely dropping the word “weaknesses” the state board thinks it has the problem solved. But I just checked my thesaurus. “Limitation” is a synonym for “weakness.”

So it’s still there, only better hidden than it once was.

They just don't get it do they? For the same reason that there are no weaknesses in evolution, there are also no limitations. A scientific theory or a biological principle cannot and should not be “evaluated” based on its weaknesses, nor on its limitations. This isn’t even science.

It’s Sunday School.