NCSE Evolution and Climate Education Update for 2013/07/05
Submitted by Peter Burns on Fri, 2013-07-05 16:20.
National Center for Science Education
(by NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch)
Dear friends of NCSE, The Next Generation Science Standards are now five for five. And Eugenie C. Scott talks about the challenges to climate education with Inside Climate News.
NGSS ADOPTION UPDATE "Five US states have adopted science education standards that recommend introducing two highly charged topics -- climate-change science and evolution -- into classrooms well before high school," reports Nature (July 3, 2013). Maryland and Vermont became the fourth and fifth states to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards, according to Education Week's Curriculum Matters blog (June 25, 2013), apparently with no reported protests over their treatment of evolution and climate change as central scientific topics. Those states join Rhode Island, Kansas, and Kentucky (where the adoption still needs to be approved by the state legislature). 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." Such groups have long attacked the teaching of evolution in the public schools.Nature notes, "In the past decade, those who oppose evolution have sought to enact 'academic freedom' laws that would allow creationism to be taught alongside evolution. Increasingly, that sort of legislation also seeks to promote criticism of mainstream climate science," and cites data provided by NCSE, which began to support climate education in 2012. Yet, as Nature observes, "Swift adoption of the guidelines has been surprising but welcome news for many supporters"; NCSE's Minda Berbeco commented, "So far, so good." What's for the future? In Kentucky, the chair of the Senate education committee is hostile to both evolution and climate education; Robert Bevins, the president of Kentuckians for Science Education, commented, "Kentucky has a love-hate relationship with science" and predicted a hard fight ahead. Elsewhere, twenty-one states are (like Maryland, Vermont, Rhode Island, Kansas, and Kentucky) lead state partners on the NGSS, committed to giving the NGSS serious consideration, and Nature reports, "At least five more states -- California, Florida, Maine, Michigan and Washington -- may take up the standards in the next few months." For the article in Nature, visit: http://www.nature.com/news/evolution-makes-the-grade-1.13318 For the post at Education Week's Curriculum Matters blog, visit: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2013/06/maryland_adopts_common_science.html For McCaffrey's article 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 article in The New York Times, visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/science/panel-calls-for-broad-changes-in-science-education.html And for the (temporary) website of Kentuckians for Science Education, visit: http://kyscied.wordpress.com/ NCSE'S SCOTT INTERVIEWED BY INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott was interviewed by Inside Climate News (July 2, 2013). "As America's debate about global warming became politicized over the past half-decade, the controversy entered a new battleground: the nation's classrooms," the introduction to the interview reported. Scott explained that NCSE detected commonalities between attacks on evolution education and the increasing attacks on climate education: "So we hitched up our pants and decided okay, we need to tackle this." Asked whether the same people are behind evolution denial and climate change denial, Scott explained, "There is a tiny bit of overlap," but emphasized that, "The similarity for us is that you have topics understood by the scientific community as being very well supported by data. And you have opposition from the public that basically arises from ideology, not from science. With evolution, the ideology is religious. With climate change, the ideology is not so much religious, but political and economic." Looking toward the future, Scott predicted that the Next Generation Science Standards -- which call for introducing climate science in the science curriculum starting in middle school -- as helping to improve the extent of climate education: "But it will take a while to trickle down." She also predicted that court cases over climate education are unlikely: while teaching creationism is unconstitutional because of creationism's religious nature, "[t]here's no constitutional protection against bad science." For the interview, visit: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20130702/qa-eugenie-scott-guardian-climate-science-nations-schools 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. -- Sincerely, Glenn Branch Deputy Director National Center for Science Education, Inc. 420 40th Street, Suite 2 Oakland, CA 94609-2509 510-601-7203 x305 fax: 510-601-7204 800-290-6006 branch@ncse.com http://ncse.com Read Reports of the NCSE on-line: http://reports.ncse.com Subscribe to NCSE's free weekly e-newsletter: http://groups.google.com/group/ncse-news NCSE is on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter: http://www.facebook.com/evolution.ncse http://www.youtube.com/NatCen4ScienceEd http://twitter.com/ncse NCSE's work is supported by its members. Join today! http://ncse.com/join
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