Sound educating

Two cases of trying to create sound science programs for kids.

Texas: Taking wins where we can.

In the races for the two open seats on the Texas board of education, the merely conservative wackjobs beat the freakishily flaming conservative wackjobs, staving off a creationist working majority. This is progress. I probably shouldn't call it a victory, though — it just means the fight for rationality will be slightly less difficult.

Florida: Ah, conservative verbage, Academic Freedom, where you know they care for neither academics or freedom, just push there beliefs on others.

In the creation wars, we never really win one — we just shuffle the battlegrounds around. That's the case in Florida, where the committee to write the state science standards recently approved the inclusion of evolution in their standards. We cheered. This is what's supposed to happen when you get a team of competent people to put together the standards — you get results that reflect, to some approximation, the current understanding of science in our public schools.

But of course that could not stand. A group of conservative politicians are poised to meddle — they asked experts to give them the best answer, they didn't like the answer, so now they're going to pull some political strings to work out a way to ignore the answer.

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The Discovery Institute's grubby little paw prints are all over this one. That's the mission of the DI: undermining scientific expertise with propaganda and political machinations.