88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Dismissing Darwin
Records show teachers and school board members conspiring to teach creationism in public school science class.
By Zack Kopplin
Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo. Photos courtesy Office of the Governor/State of Louisiana; James Shepard, Alex Beynon, Sanjeev Beekeeper/Flickr; Louisiana House of Representatives
calling for the repeal of this law, officially known as the Louisiana Science Education Act, and tens of thousands of people have signed petitions against it over the past four years, but so far we’ve failed. Louisiana teachers can still bring religion into public school science classrooms, legally.
The Louisiana State Legislature has voted to keep this law despite repeated challenges, in part because it has a fig leaf: No one has managed to demonstrate what is going on inside Louisiana classrooms. In 2013, as I was testifying before the Louisiana Senate Education Committee in support of a bill to repeal the law, Sen. Conrad Appel, the committee chairman, asked me, “Do you have any evidence of school districts or individual schools that are physically teaching creationism?”
There has been plenty of evidence, but it hasn’t been direct. For example, inTangipahoa Parish, in 2011, school board member Brett Duncan requested that guidelines be developed “for the review of supplemental materials to be used by teachers for discussing evolution, creationism, and intelligent design.” That same year a pupil progression plan (an outline of what a school district intends to do that year) for Terrebonne Parish said that under the creationism law, teachers will “deliver facts for both arguments”—both evolution and creationism.
Gov. Bobby Jindal was asked about this law by NBC’s Education Nation and said, “I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism.” That is in fact why he signed the law.
But none of this was enough. I couldn’t name a single teacher who was teaching creationism. “You talk about a back door [to teaching creationism],” Appel said. He told me that I had no evidence “that indicates such a back door is actually being used.” The Senate Education Committee voted against the repeal.
“I just want to get this message out there that Louisiana doesn’t support or promote the teaching of religious doctrine in the classroom,” Appel said. “Period.”
Yet in the fall of 2013, at Negreet High School, in Sabine Parish, teacher Rita Roark insulted the religion of C.C. Lane, a Buddhist student in her sixth-grade science class. Roark told the class that evolution is a “stupid” theory that “stupid people made up because they don’t want to believe in God.” Roark’s science tests included a fill-in-the-blank question that said, “ISN'T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _____________ HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and students were expected to write in “LORD.”
When confronted with these episodes, Appel said he didn’t believe that they had happened because Louisiana’s creationism law allows them.
Now I have evidence that it’s not just one teacher. I have evidence that religion, not science, is what’s being taught systematically in some Louisiana school systems. I have obtained emails from creationist teachers and school administrators, as well as a letter signed by more than 20 current and former Louisiana science teachers in Ouachita Parish in which they say they challenge evolution in the classroom without legal “tension or fear” because of pro-creationism policies. I’ve found the back door.
* * *
Courtesy of theOuachita Parish School System
I requested a copy of the teacher-signed letter from the Ouachita Parish School Board. The first signature is from Robert Webber, the superintendent of Ouachita Parish Schools, but the school system’s lawyer, Elmer Noah, told me that the letter was not a “school board document” and that the school system didn’t possess it. “I object to your characterization of the document as a public record,” he said.
Noah told me that Darrell White, a retired military judge from Baton Rouge, had the last remaining copy of the letter. When I called White and asked him for a copy, he said he wasn’t willing to do an interview and hung up on me.
I had met White four years earlier at a hearing of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to approve new biology textbooks for Louisiana schools—books that included evolution. Standing at the witness table, White held a cane in one hand and with the other was shaking a shirt that read, “natural selection.” According to White, it was the same as the shirt that Columbine murderer Dylan Klebold had worn (Eric Harris, not Klebold, actually wore the shirt), and teaching evolution would lead to a “Columbine-style shooting” in the schools of Baton Rouge.
White, a lifetime member of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, has spent years trying to connect evolution to the Columbine massacre. In a 2006 article for the creationist site Answers in Genesis, he proclaimed that Charles Darwin should be “dubbed the patron saint of school violence.”
White is one of the most influential conservative power brokers in Louisiana. He helped found the Louisiana Family Forum, a right-wing lobbying group that is so well-connected that the New York Times described Jindal as “practically one of the family.” He is also the Louisiana coordinator for American Vision, a “Biblical Worldview Ministry” and hate group, whose leader, Gary DeMar, calls for the execution of “sodomites” and “abortionists and their parents.”
White is the reason that creationism can be taught in Louisiana public schools. In April 2006 he organized a meeting in West Monroe, a city in Ouachita Parish, to inform teachers about intelligent design. “A judge from Baton Rouge will speak on Intelligent Design,” wrote Cynthia Osborne, a curriculum coordinator for the Ouachita Parish School System, in an email to her science teachers. “Please inform any teachers they are invited to attend.”
White’s website. Ouachita’s policy states that teachers are allowed to “review, analyze, and critique in an objective manner the scientific strengths and weaknesses” of theories that “may generate controversy (such as biological evolution).” The Monroe News Star reported that during the school board meeting, one member, Red Sims, said he thought that evolution meant “that people came from monkeys. … I hope they won't be teaching that.”
While promoting creationism in Ouachita, White discovered an important ally: Assistant Superintendent Frank Hoffmann. He had presented White’s policy to the school board and told members that teachers would have “academic freedom to teach both sides of controversial subjects such as evolution.” In 2007, Hoffmann was elected the Louisiana House of Representatives.
Rep. Hoffmann took Ouachita’s creationism policy statewide. Along with state Sen. Ben Nevers, he sponsored the Louisiana Science Education Act, aka the creationism law. This law allows teachers to use “supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories,” including evolution and global warming. Like the Ouachita policy it’s based on, this law is a back door to teach creationism.
Records show teachers and school board members conspiring to teach creationism in public school science class.
By Zack Kopplin
Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo. Photos courtesy Office of the Governor/State of Louisiana; James Shepard, Alex Beynon, Sanjeev Beekeeper/Flickr; Louisiana House of Representatives
calling for the repeal of this law, officially known as the Louisiana Science Education Act, and tens of thousands of people have signed petitions against it over the past four years, but so far we’ve failed. Louisiana teachers can still bring religion into public school science classrooms, legally.
The Louisiana State Legislature has voted to keep this law despite repeated challenges, in part because it has a fig leaf: No one has managed to demonstrate what is going on inside Louisiana classrooms. In 2013, as I was testifying before the Louisiana Senate Education Committee in support of a bill to repeal the law, Sen. Conrad Appel, the committee chairman, asked me, “Do you have any evidence of school districts or individual schools that are physically teaching creationism?”
There has been plenty of evidence, but it hasn’t been direct. For example, inTangipahoa Parish, in 2011, school board member Brett Duncan requested that guidelines be developed “for the review of supplemental materials to be used by teachers for discussing evolution, creationism, and intelligent design.” That same year a pupil progression plan (an outline of what a school district intends to do that year) for Terrebonne Parish said that under the creationism law, teachers will “deliver facts for both arguments”—both evolution and creationism.
Gov. Bobby Jindal was asked about this law by NBC’s Education Nation and said, “I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism.” That is in fact why he signed the law.
But none of this was enough. I couldn’t name a single teacher who was teaching creationism. “You talk about a back door [to teaching creationism],” Appel said. He told me that I had no evidence “that indicates such a back door is actually being used.” The Senate Education Committee voted against the repeal.
“I just want to get this message out there that Louisiana doesn’t support or promote the teaching of religious doctrine in the classroom,” Appel said. “Period.”
Yet in the fall of 2013, at Negreet High School, in Sabine Parish, teacher Rita Roark insulted the religion of C.C. Lane, a Buddhist student in her sixth-grade science class. Roark told the class that evolution is a “stupid” theory that “stupid people made up because they don’t want to believe in God.” Roark’s science tests included a fill-in-the-blank question that said, “ISN'T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _____________ HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and students were expected to write in “LORD.”
When confronted with these episodes, Appel said he didn’t believe that they had happened because Louisiana’s creationism law allows them.
Now I have evidence that it’s not just one teacher. I have evidence that religion, not science, is what’s being taught systematically in some Louisiana school systems. I have obtained emails from creationist teachers and school administrators, as well as a letter signed by more than 20 current and former Louisiana science teachers in Ouachita Parish in which they say they challenge evolution in the classroom without legal “tension or fear” because of pro-creationism policies. I’ve found the back door.
* * *
Courtesy of theOuachita Parish School System
I requested a copy of the teacher-signed letter from the Ouachita Parish School Board. The first signature is from Robert Webber, the superintendent of Ouachita Parish Schools, but the school system’s lawyer, Elmer Noah, told me that the letter was not a “school board document” and that the school system didn’t possess it. “I object to your characterization of the document as a public record,” he said.
Noah told me that Darrell White, a retired military judge from Baton Rouge, had the last remaining copy of the letter. When I called White and asked him for a copy, he said he wasn’t willing to do an interview and hung up on me.
I had met White four years earlier at a hearing of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to approve new biology textbooks for Louisiana schools—books that included evolution. Standing at the witness table, White held a cane in one hand and with the other was shaking a shirt that read, “natural selection.” According to White, it was the same as the shirt that Columbine murderer Dylan Klebold had worn (Eric Harris, not Klebold, actually wore the shirt), and teaching evolution would lead to a “Columbine-style shooting” in the schools of Baton Rouge.
White, a lifetime member of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, has spent years trying to connect evolution to the Columbine massacre. In a 2006 article for the creationist site Answers in Genesis, he proclaimed that Charles Darwin should be “dubbed the patron saint of school violence.”
White is one of the most influential conservative power brokers in Louisiana. He helped found the Louisiana Family Forum, a right-wing lobbying group that is so well-connected that the New York Times described Jindal as “practically one of the family.” He is also the Louisiana coordinator for American Vision, a “Biblical Worldview Ministry” and hate group, whose leader, Gary DeMar, calls for the execution of “sodomites” and “abortionists and their parents.”
White is the reason that creationism can be taught in Louisiana public schools. In April 2006 he organized a meeting in West Monroe, a city in Ouachita Parish, to inform teachers about intelligent design. “A judge from Baton Rouge will speak on Intelligent Design,” wrote Cynthia Osborne, a curriculum coordinator for the Ouachita Parish School System, in an email to her science teachers. “Please inform any teachers they are invited to attend.”
White’s website. Ouachita’s policy states that teachers are allowed to “review, analyze, and critique in an objective manner the scientific strengths and weaknesses” of theories that “may generate controversy (such as biological evolution).” The Monroe News Star reported that during the school board meeting, one member, Red Sims, said he thought that evolution meant “that people came from monkeys. … I hope they won't be teaching that.”
While promoting creationism in Ouachita, White discovered an important ally: Assistant Superintendent Frank Hoffmann. He had presented White’s policy to the school board and told members that teachers would have “academic freedom to teach both sides of controversial subjects such as evolution.” In 2007, Hoffmann was elected the Louisiana House of Representatives.
Rep. Hoffmann took Ouachita’s creationism policy statewide. Along with state Sen. Ben Nevers, he sponsored the Louisiana Science Education Act, aka the creationism law. This law allows teachers to use “supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories,” including evolution and global warming. Like the Ouachita policy it’s based on, this law is a back door to teach creationism.
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