Science education improves gradually over time
From our vantage point in the ivory tower, it can be tempting to assume that only a handful of school districts still fail to teach children about the lynchpin of modern biology, the theory of evolution. Yet, despite several adverse court rulings and eighty years of progress since the famed Scopes “monkey trial” marked a low point in Americans’ esteem for Darwinism, the intellectual rigor of science education in many states still leaves something to be desired. Far from evolving into higher and better forms, science curricula seems to take one step backward for every two steps forward. With the decentralization of education in the United States, improvement often must take place at the state or even local level. Progress is slow. But in the past few years it seems that scientists may have gotten the upper hand.
Evolution of an Agenda
As Professor Lawrence Lerner of California State University likes to quip, creationists continually evolve, and that the selective pressure is always judicially imposed. The first legal defeat for the anti-evolution forces was a unanimous 1968 Supreme Court decision, which invalidated a state ban on the teaching of evolution. In 1987, a more conservative Court voted 7-2 to strike down a state requirement that schools teach creationism alongside evolution. In response to these decisions, the anti-evolutionists formulated an allegedly new theory called “Intelligent Design,” which, in 2005, a federal court in Pennsylvania held just as constitutionally objectionable as its ancestors. Robert Luhn, communications director for the National Center for Science Education, told the HPR that the key has always been to convince the courts that a policy is “of a religious nature.” Biblical literalism, creation science, and Intelligent Design have all been found, in their turn, to be motivated by religious convictions. The anti-evolutionists had to develop a new, even subtler strategy.
Their current approach is to call for schools to “teach the controversy.” Gone is the tendency to “ignore evolution and wish it would go away,” said Lerner. It has been replaced with a plea to “look at all the strengths and weaknesses” of the evidence. The trouble is that this is a Trojan horse, designed to instill doubt in evolution when none really exists, at least in the scientific community. As Luhn astutely pointed out, while there are a couple scientists who support the “strengths and weaknesses” movement, they are outweighed hundreds of times over just by the number of pro-evolution scientists named Steve. He has the list to prove it.
Local Battlegrounds
Despite its legal setbacks, the anti-evolution movement is by no means defeated — or, to be more precise, the pro-science forces are far from triumphant. According to data from the National Center for Science Education, only twenty-four states received an “A” or a “B” for their treatment of evolution as of 2005, an increase of four since the beginning of the decade. Yet, the number of failing states stayed constant at twelve over those five years. One factor in this recalcitrance is the difficulty of mandating curriculum from afar. Even if a statehouse sets new standards for science education, it is a “long way to the country schoolhouse,” said Lerner. And even if a school district uses textbooks that include evolution, there is no guarantee that its teachers are teaching it. The NCSE keeps track of “hundreds” of local anti-evolution incidents, like a teacher who, according to Luhn, taught creation science in his biology classroom for 20 years before anybody complained.
In Louisiana, a local anti-evolution incident actually made its way into state law. When Quachita Parish adopted a “strengths and weaknesses” policy in 2006, its provisions drew the interest of the Louisiana Family Forum, a group co-founded by religious-right kingpin Tony Perkins. The Forum’s proposed statewide equivalent, passed last year, allows teachers to use supplementary materials that call into question the validity of evolution; the materials (books, textbook addendums, and DVDs) are provided by the same religious-right groups that helped to write and pass the law, according to Barbara Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University.
Following the passage of the Louisiana law, anti-evolution bills have been introduced in state legislatures with some regularity, but so far with no success. They are opposed by what Lerner calls “ad hoc” groups of teachers, academics, and other science-lovers; over 200 Iowa professors signed a petition calling for the rejection of a recent anti-evolution bill in the Iowa House, which subsequently died in committee. Forrest told the HPR that it took a good deal of planning and fortune to pass the Louisiana law; the Louisiana Family Forum “had to wait until they got their ally [Bobby Jindal] as governor,” and they had to strike in his first year, when he had a conservative legislature and the traditional honeymoon period. Such uniformly favorable circumstances may not be replicable in many other states.
Furthermore, even religious and conservative local leaders have a good secular reason to oppose anti-evolution efforts: according to Luhn, biotech companies prefer to locate in areas with scientifically literate populations, and may be turned off by “a populace coming out of schools thinking evolution didn’t occur.” In fact, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology announced it would not host its 2011 annual meeting in New Orleans — opting instead for the notoriously conservative Salt Lake City — because of the former’s new anti-evolution law. Of course, it bears remembering that even states that refuse to pass anti-evolution bills may yet be full of school districts and individual schools that are failing to properly teach evolution.
Possible Adaptations
Standardized testing may offer one path to better science education, but it is no panacea. The No Child Left Behind Act emphasized statewide testing, but if students perform poorly on certain subjects — as they might well do if their schools continue to fail to teach evolution — the states often find it easier to change the tests than the schools. A national standardized test that included evolutionary theory might therefore go a long way towards promoting better science education. Of course, states tend to covet their control over public school curricula. On a national level, then, perhaps the most that can be done to aid the cause of science is to set an example. Luhn hopes that President Obama’s scientific appointments, such as Energy Secretary Steven Chu, will raise awareness about science and convince the public of its importance to our ability to compete.
Of course, students do not even have to rely on science teachers or public figures to teach them about evolution. Indeed, it seems that natural history museums might be picking up some of the slack left by lackluster science education. Ellen McCallie, deputy director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, told the HPR that museums serve the essential role of demonstrating the factual basis for evolution. “We’re not asking people to believe in evolution,” McCallie said. “We’re providing the evidence for it.” The impact of informal educational institutions like museums, aquariums, and zoos may be impossible to measure, but they undoubtedly contribute to the understanding of evolutionary ideas.
Punctuated Equilibria
Despite dogged persistence and continued adaptation by anti-evolutionists, the overall trend still favors better science education. The fact that state legislators trying to follow Louisiana’s lead have universally failed should be taken as a sign that progress is in fact taking place. The outcome of a recent battle within the Texas State Board of Education is telling. The board’s conservatives tried and failed — by one vote — to reinstate language calling on teachers to cover evolution’s “strengths and weaknesses,” language which had been tentatively struck down as recently as this January by the same margin.
Yet, while they lost the biggest battle, the conservative faction was able to insert their preferred language in some more specific topics. The new science policy in the state of Texas requires teachers to address, for instance, the “sufficiency or insufficiency of natural selection to explain the complexity of the cell.” As in nature, so in the American classroom: evolution remains painfully slow.