NCSE Weekly Update

From the National Center for Science Education weekly update, June 14, 2013

KANSAS ADOPTS NGSS

The Kansas state board of education voted 8-2 to accept the Next Generation Science Standards on June 11, 2013, despite protests over their treatment of evolution and climate change as central scientific topics. According to the Lawrence Journal-World (June 11, 2013), Ken Willard, a member of the board, complained in a lengthy prepared statement that “both evolution and human-caused climate change are presented in these standards dogmatically,” adding that the standards amount to “little more than indoctrination in political correctness.” Willard, along with John Bacon, voted against the adoption.

But science educators at the meeting spoke in support of the NGSS.  Julie Schwarting, president of the Kansas Association of Biology Teachers, was quoted in the Journal-World as saying, “When I first read the NGSS, I was very excited to see it was just a clear description of what I’ve been striving toward for the past 10 years.” Cheryl Shepherd-Adams, a physics teacher who also serves as vice president of Kansas Citizens for Science, was quoted by the Associated Press (June 11, 2013) as saying that with the NGSS, “I can concentrate on teaching processes—teaching kids how to think like scientists.”

A petition signed by over 2500 Kansans organized by Climate Progress urged the adoption of the NGSS particularly because of its treatment of climate change, telling the board, “Our students deserve a 21^st[-]century science education, and that includes learning about climate change.” After the board’s vote, Fred Heeren, who presented the Climate Progress petition to the board, told the Associated Press, “Climatology and climate change should be prioritized because of the condition of the world and because of our contribution to a changing climate.”

The NGSS, as NCSE’s Mark McCaffrey explained at LiveScience (April 5, 2013), are a new set of state science standards based on the National Research Council’s A Framework for K-12 Science Education and developed by a consortium including twenty-six states. When they were released in their final version, The New York Times (April 9, 2013) observed, “The climate and evolution standards are just two aspects of a set of guidelines containing hundreds of new ideas on how to teach science. But they have already drawn hostile commentary from conservative groups critical of mainstream scientific thinking.”

Kansas is the second state to adopt the NGSS, following Rhode Island, which adopted the NGSS on May 23, 2013, according to Education Week’s Curriculum Matters blog (May 24, 2013), with no apparent controversy.  Kentucky’s state board of education unanimously voted to accept the NGSS on June 5, 2013. Although there were complaints about the NGSS’s treatment of evolution and climate change in Kentucky, none were aired at the board’s meeting. The adoption still needs to be approved by committees in the state legislature, according to the Curriculum Matters blog (June 12, 2013).

For the Lawrence Journal World story, visit:

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2013/jun/11/state-board-approves-new-science-standards/

For the Associated Press story (via SFGate), visit:

http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Kan-school-board-approves-new-science-standards-4594375.php

For the Climate Progress petition, visit:

http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/kansas-state-board-of

For McCaffrey’s discussion of the NGSS at LiveScience, visit:

http://www.livescience.com/28512-science-standards.html

For the NRC’s Framework, visit:

http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13165

For the story in The New York Times, visit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/science/panel-calls-for-broad-changes-in-science-education.html

For the two posts on Education Week’s Curriculum Matters blog, visit:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2013/05/science_standards_win_ok_in_fi.html

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2013/06/kansas_board_votes_to_adopt_co.html

And for NCSE’s previous coverage of events in Kansas, visit:

http://ncse.com/news/kansas

“DEMOCRACY AND SCIENCE”

Barbara Forrest, Philip Kitcher, and Michael Ruse are among the scholars contributing to a symposium on “Democracy and Science” published in the journal Logos—which seeks to foster a critical dialogue on modern politics, culture, and society—and available on-line.

Forrest, in “Rejecting the Founders’ Legacy: Democracy as a Weapon Against Science,” compares “the Founders’ enthusiasm for science with Republicans’ current animosity toward it,” concentrating on her home state of Louisiana and the successful campaigns to undermine the teaching of evolution there. Kitcher, in “Plato’s Revenge: An Undemocratic Report from an Overheated Planet,” argues that “our current misconceptions about democracy, and about what a commitment to democracy requires of us, interfere with the global political discussions we so urgently need” in the face of global climate change.  And Ruse, in “Democracy and Pseudo-Science,” urges tolerance for pseudoscience—but emphasizes that “tolerance about people’s beliefs does not extend to letting this sort of stuff [creation science] be taught in science classrooms in state-supported schools.”

Forrest, a member of NCSE’s board of directors, is Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University. Kitcher and Ruse, both members of NCSE’s Advisory Council, are Professors of Philosophy at Columbia University and Florida State University, respectively.

For the issue of Logos featuring “Democracy and Science,” visit:

http://logosjournal.com/

A PREVIEW OF CREATION

NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview of Adam Rutherford’s Creation:

How Science is Reinventing Life Itself (Current/Penguin, 2013). The preview consists of chapter 3, “Hell on Earth,” in which Rutherford describes the early geology of the earth—“a picture of the Hadean earth is crucial to understanding the wild natural laboratory in which life contrived to be born”—and reviews the history of scientific work on the origin of life from Charles Darwin to Stanley Miller—

“Miller’s iconic experiment follows in the direct scientific lineage of Darwin’s warm little pond.”

Writing in the Guardian, Nick Lane praised Creation as “a brave and unusual book. Brave in its title and subtitles; unusual in its central conceit. It is two books in one, linked as the twin pillars of creation, natural and manmade—which calls for some delicate juggling of content. It is brave in this content, too: Rutherford is dealing with big questions, and he does not shy away from difficult and at times unfashionable material—from cell theory and entropy to the mechanics of DNA replication. And yet his writing is accessible and clear throughout.”

For the preview of Creation (PDF), visit:

http://ncse.com/book-excerpt

For information about the book from its publisher, visit:

http://www.us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781617230059,00.html

And for Lane’s review in the Guardian, visit:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/06/creation-origin-life-rutherford-review

Thanks for reading. And don’t forget to visit NCSE’s website— http://ncse.com—where you can always find the latest news on evolution and climate education  and threats to them.

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