Update Sept. 1, 2008. Since people are still finding their way to this post, I need to add that the compromise noted here has been swept away by subsequent developments. In chronological order, see
Texas ELAR standards debacle (evolution next?)
TX School Bd member seeks replacement of Bd chair
Bradley: Teachers “got spanked” by Texas Bd. of Ed.
Momentous [...]
Proponents of “Intelligent Design” continue trying to portray their efforts as a struggle for civil rights, as in this amusing post touting Ben Stein as “the Rosa Parks of Darwin Skeptics.”
Something from Mara Sapon-Shevin that I think is worth sharing (posted here with her permission):
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008
From: Mara Sapon-Shevin
To: Tony Whitson
Hi Tony, Yes, I know this story and tell it as about responsive, differentiated instruction, although “tactful teaching” is a nice reframing! I talk about the swim instructor knowing (and all that implies) [...]
A study reported last month in Science is being discussed around the blogosphere under titles like “Testing boosts memory, study doesn’t,” and “Testing, not studying, makes for strong long-term memories.”
I think the 2½-page published report of the study itself makes for an excellent item to “test” students’ (I’m thinking now of grad students in education) [...]
In the March 4 Texas primary contest, where Huckabee’s campaign might have benefited anti-evolution challengers for the state board of education, those challengers were defeated by the (pro-science) incumbents:
The potential Huckabee effect on teaching evolution is now getting the attention I was calling for in an earlier post here. As reported now by Time Magazine,
Another one of those reports. You know the drill. Half of students surveyed did not answer the correct half-century for the Civil War. Etc. See
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.27576,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
The Corpus Christie area Caller-Times reports on how the teaching of evolution may be affected by the GOP primaries next week.When asked “How do you think the Texas school system will be influenced by the debate between creationism and evolution?“
This program will be re-run this weekend:
Upcoming Schedule
Sunday, April 13, at 9:30 AM EDT
Sunday, April 13, at 2:00 PM EDT
=======================
This weekend I heard the talk by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California, given February 15, 2008, and aired this weekend on CSpan2/BookTV (where it might be re-aired in [...]
From physics, we know about magnetic fields, gravitational fields, electrical fields, and other fields of physical force.
If curriculum is the semiosic activity or course of experience in which human being comes to form, then curriculum theory and curriculum studies must be concerned with the fields of semiosic forms guiding the formation of human persons, [...]
On the Wired blog, Brandon Keim reports:
The Florida Board of Education officially upheld evolution yesterday.
The board didn’t quite mean to do that, of course. In a 4-3 vote, the Board accepted a proposed curriculum that replaced all references to evolution with the phrase “the scientific theory of evolution.” In so doing, the board inadvertently made [...]
ScienceDaily (2008-02-16) — Texas’ public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act, directly contributes to lower graduation rates, according to new research. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation — a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, Latino and English-as-a-second-language students.
The study [...]
At The Hive of Lost Memories, a post on “the evolution of grocery bags” provides a superb example of exaptation, from outside the realm of biological evolution:
Plastic or paper? I first heard of the question after a couple of days of my arrival to the United States when I was out with my brother [...]
Turnout for Huckabee, who supports Chuck Norris in promoting use of the Bible as a textbook in the public schools, could have an impact on State School Board elections that most of us outside of Texas don’t even know about.
For anybody interested in the source, it’s in Augustine’s book The literal meaning of Genesis (where Augustine explains that Genesis does not literally mean what “literal” Creationsists claim that it means).
An article on ars technica (”New Florida state standards spark nonscientific backlash“) includes several links to helpful sources for keeping up on developments in Florida.
An overview on the Texas standards developments can be found in two articles at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Evolution’s status may be debated by state board, and Proponents want `intelligent [...]
Judging from the website, we can expect this movie to be an extraordinary example of the propaganda technique known as the Big Lie. The movie apparently hammers away at a few claims of monstrous misdeeds by the “neo-Darwinists,” with one fabricated example after another.
