Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House is moved to complain about the declining understanding of science in our country, which is a good start. Waking up the wingnuts to the fact that science is doing poorly in the US is a good thing, far better than the usual science denial we get from that side of the political divide. However, he takes exception to the idea that a good part of the blame belongs to the religious and to the far right. Instead, he blames the failure on schools run by Democrats.
It goes without saying that those school systems — mostly located in large cities and the rural south — don’t need a belief in God to keep them from understanding evolution. All they need is local government (run by Democrats for the most part) to run the schools so incompetently that students can graduate while lacking the scientific fundamentals.
All I can say is Moran obviously has not read the paper.
It does a deeper analysis of the data than you’d guess from just the ranking in the table. They looked for correlates to the failure to appreciate evolution, and the strongest predictors were 1) belief in a personal god, and 2) affiliation with the conservative wing of the Republican party. This isn’t my interpretation: it’s what the data in the paper indicates, and the authors conclude by naming “transformation of traditional geographically and economically based political parties into religiously oriented ideological coalitions” as the source of a major problem. Moran is simply ignoring the results of the research to invent a scapegoat, these imaginary public schools run by Democrats.
Let’s take a look at these problematic school districts. Dover: dominated by Republicans who led them down the ruinous creationist path, voted out and replaced by Democrats who ended the debacle (note that many of those Democrats were Republicans who changed party affiliation to run against the creationist clowns; this paper does not say all Republicans are idiots, only that the far right wing is). Kansas: does anyone seriously believe that Kansas schools are dominated by left wingers? The state school board is a Republican shop, and what the recent election did was put moderate Republicans into the election over far right wing nuts. Texas: a big state that unfortunately dictates the content of science textbooks nationwide, and it is a constant struggle there to keep the Republicans of the radical religious right from gutting our textbooks further. Is Terri Leo a Democrat, do you think? How about Mel Gabler?
The public schools are an awful mess, underfunded, struggling to make ends meet, and it is true that many inner city schools are so pinched and decrepit that it’s difficult to teach anything, let alone sophisticated subjects like upper-level biology. Blaming that on Democrats is absurd, though, when in every case I’ve encountered it isn’t the Democratic members of the school boards who are rising up and demanding that we cut out evolution, or sex ed, or international baccalaureate programs, or whatever latest bit of reality offends them. It isn’t Democrats who led the charge for the dead-on-arrival NCLB act. I agree that we desperately need to improve public school education, but to claim that the party that most reliably works to do just that is to blame for failings imposed on it by the party that wants to abolish public school education is absurd.
Now I’m not making a blanket assumption that Democrats always have been and always will be the best leaders of education. I suspect that one reason there’s very little anti-evolution activity by Democrats is because of that polarizing ideological divide mentioned above: the strong anti-evolution sentiment on the Republican side drives many Democrats to be anti-anti-evolution, even if they aren’t any more aware of the scientific evidence. But I’m afraid that all of the most vocal opposition to the teaching of evolution has come from the religious right and from Republicans, two labels that are becoming increasingly inseparable.
One last bit of logic to counter Moran’s claim that the fault belongs to our
public school system. The data in the Miller et al. paper clearly points to religiosity and right-wing political affiliation as strong predictors of anti-evolution sentiment. If the actual source of that sentiment is from poor public schooling, a correlation that the paper didn’t directly test, we’d expect that those groups that are most likely to home school or send their kids to private school would show a weaker predisposition to anti-evolutionary thinking.
Now, who is more likely to send their kids to a public school—a middle-class, moderate to liberal Democrat, or born-again right-wing Republican?
What a bizzare statement. In urban areas in the South, sure, Democrats play a major role in school boards. But in many suburban and rural counties, Republicans are in the majority. Not only has Moran not read the paper in question, he seems not to have read a newspaper since, I don’t know, 1968?
Same shit they’re trying to pull on the disaster in Iraq. The wingers aren’t to blame for the massive damage they’ve caused to the country, oh no, it must be those damned liberals again.
I’m surprised he didn’t blame the teacher’s unions. That’s what the right wing usually blames poor education on as a way of, by proxy, blaming it on the Democrats.
Don’t worry, Jason will be here any minute and we can count on him to recite some cliches about teacher’s unions.
Don’t get me totally wrong; I’m no fan of the teachers’ unions, having a relative who worked in the public schools (not as a teacher) for many years. The unions tend to protect seniority-based perks above all else, making it virtually impossible to fire incompetent teachers after they achieve a certain level of seniority. And it is true that the teachers’ unions are a major supporter of the Democratic Party. My meaning is that it’s fairly hard to blame the teachers’ union for the decreasing teaching of evolution and the infiltration of school curriculums with ID because in most cases, as far as I’ve been able to tell, the unions generally oppose the introduction of ID. I suppose one could argue that they aren’t vocal enough about it, as this example from Dover seems to illustrate, but they don’t really actively push ID. It is Republican-controlled school boards that do that.
Sometimes I think they say these things to see what they can get away with, even when they know they’re the ones at fault.
This is a pièce de résistance case of the criminal blaming the victim…like the rapist blaming the woman for dressing sexy. Likewise, the right has been seeking for decades to destroy the public school infrastructure by redirecting funds and wasting the valuable time of school boards advocating vaccuous tracts like ID and creationism in general. And then they blame Democrats for their intentional meddling.
I hope this country gives the Reps the political punch in the face they have for so long deserved in November.
Get out and vote your asses off people.
The question I always have about these folks is: stupid or evil? Is he really dumb enough to hold forth on the paper without, you know,reading it? Or is he intentionally twisting the conclusion, counting on his readers not to check for themselves?
Also, I’m almost afraid to say it, but isn’t
code in your lovely country for “black”? Is he making the underhanded (demented fuckwit) suggestion I think he’s making?
I actually have a LOT of problems with the ‘blame the teacher’s unions for everything’ policy that is the mainstay of the GOP. I live in northern California, and my wife has been a public school teacher in a very poor school district for 10 years. Most of our exposure to the teacher’s unions has been during those times every 2 or 3 years when the school district or the state makes one of their semiregular attempts to roll back my wife’s medical benefits, or to take away her dental care, or to cut her retirement pension (already miniscule) or to cut her salary (already one of the lowest of any Bay Area district). The unions are the only people who are in any position to try and stop this, and I personally fail to see how working to keep my wife’s and my medical benefits somehow destroys the schools.
On the other hand, I cannot tell you how often in the last 25 years the California Republican party has mounted efforts to TAKE AWAY funding from California’s schools, or to block attempts to raise their funding (which is already in the bottom 10% per capita for the US).
And of course, let’s not forget No Child Left Behind, which essentially just says schools will have their funding taken away if they do not perform up to certain levels on standardized tests, yet without providing any additional funding to accomplish these goals. The effect of NCLB has essentially been to make schools terrified of not performing well on tests (and thus being shut down), so the schools now spend almost all their time doing nothing but preparing their children to take these tests and ignoring everything that isn’t on the tests, such as music, art, languages, or analytical reasoning.
So I don’t exactly get real excited by attempts to blame Democrats and unions for our schools’ problems.
I see a disconnect between blaming the Democrats for the deficiencies of US schools and the implied praise for European education: Usually the right-wing rants about European socialists and social policies. US Democrats are a very pale shade of pink by comparison.
It would be interesting to see comparisons of educational acheivement state by state within the US, including attitudes toward evolution, correlated with religiosity and education dollars. As far as I can see, the wingers in Congress won’t allow direct comparisons, because the results are foreseeable and disastrous for their mythologies.
Note also that nation-wide comparisons that show the US falling behind in [INSERT SUBJECT HERE] are pretty useless given the state-by-state nature of our educational system – don’t compare the US to Singapore, compare Minnesota or Iowa or Arkansas to Singapore. (And to each other)
I’m betting that some states will rank right up there with the rest of the western world, while certain states will make Malawi look good. I’m also betting that it won’t be the red states on top.
While more money isn’t the only solution, actually funding education helps quite a bit.
Of course, the same people who want to weaken what kids are taught also hate to pay taxes. They like to have more money for Praising Jesus. Or being libertarian and shit.
You know, I take that back, at least the part about the red states. The top state in eighth grade science, according to the 2005 assessment, was North Dakota. Although the bottom state was Missippi, the next lowest two (it was a tie) were California and Hawaii.
(All from http://nationsreportcard.gov/science_2005/s0106.asp?tab_id=tab2&subtab_id=Tab_1&printver=#chart )
Sounds like the Reagan era “Perception is everything” idea. Float a bullshit idea like this and enough of the choir believe it to be true. Not because they verify it but because their people said it. So it must be true. It is nothing more than a willful lie. And Rick Moran is a willful liar.
The real nemesis of education is this very same divisive standard that allows any half baked idea to be presented and accepted as valid. When in fact these idiot generated ideas need to be cut off at the roots. Education would be so much further ahead if the curriculum only contained Valid, Verifiable and Useful teachings. Similar to Mathematics. Math is the same world wide. Give a Math test to a Chinese student or an African student or a Dutch student. The answers are the same. There is no controversy. The controversies should never be taught to children. Teach them the positive first. Give them a solid basis of what is known and as they get old enough then expose them to the debate.
“The question I always have about these folks is: stupid or evil?”
These day, I figure that any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from evil.
In the South there is little difference between Democrat and Republican and what difference there is is largely cosmetic. One common joke is that when a young Southron comes of age, he/she draws a marble from an urn to determine whether he/she is going to espouse being a Democrat or a Republican. This is done so that the Yankee government will not decide that the South is not part of the two party system and pay attention to dissidents. While there are a lot of splinter political groups in the South – Libertarians and Propertarians, Environmentalists, … – the Democrat-Rebublicans enjoy a Lanchestrian monopoly of political office.
I don’t know about there being no difference. Is Edwards just like Lott? Am I just like the guy at the hardware store who has Limbaugh on whenever I go in there?
Ahem.
check out the distribution of drop out rates in the country.
The southern states not only fail to give a good education, they often fail to provide an education period. The real stats on high school graduation rates are much more difficult to see now, but ever since all these crummy states started replicating Texas and the George Bush educational “miracle” – basing drop out rates based on which proportion of 12th graders enter and graduate, rather than which proportion of 9th graders go on to graduate.
No child left behind and the Republican reforms have been nothing but a scam from the start. I find it hysterical that they have the gall to blame Democrats for these problems. And yes, he should have read the paper.
I hereby dub this Harmon’s First Law of Stupidity.
The other spin I’ve seen is that, since the US barely outranked Turkey, it shows that the most religious Western country is still more sensible than the most secularized Muslim country. If you get jollies by pointing out how backward Muslim countries can be, fine, but that doesn’t help us here in the USA.
I am with the wingnuts on this one. Homogenizing schools so that teachers are worried more about self-esteem and tolerance and gender neutralization virtually guaranteed that other countries would start putting out better scientists – and I can hardly feel that is something right wingnuts came up with.
It has been a 40-year mantra that equal opportunity had to also mean equal outcomes and that’s where we failed. At the early school levels we don’t want men to succeed in science unless the same number of women also succeed and 12% of the successes are blacks and 13% latinos – so we’ve dragged everyone down to whatever the lowest point is.
No one can blame No Child Left Behind for the current failure of science. It hasn’t been in effect long enough. For being a science posting a lot of people commenting here don’t seem to understand what cause and effect means.
OT a little bit, why does Texas still get to tell publishers which textbooks to buy? It ranks after CA and before NY whose total population together is twice that of Texas. I’ve never understood this and I’ve heard the meme for years.
Any help out there?
Thanks.
Yes, Cash, I completly agree. I used to have the atomic weights of every element memorized, but when I was taught that differences are okay and that white superiority is bad, it all fell out of my head. Shame, I was going to be in the next Christian Seperationists Bowl too. Clearly, respecting people is terrible for science.
I am with the wingnuts on this one. Homogenizing schools so that teachers are worried more about self-esteem and tolerance and gender neutralization virtually guaranteed that other countries would start putting out better scientists – and I can hardly feel that is something right wingnuts came up with.
Let me guess: you’re not a teacher, you do not know anyone who is a teacher, you’ve never been anywhere near a public school since you were in high school, and have never had any children in any public schools. Did I guess right?
Rather funny that Cash’s comment ends with “For being a science posting a lot of people commenting here don’t seem to understand what cause and effect means.” after providing nothing more than irrational ranting and no evidence whatsoever.
No one can blame No Child Left Behind for the current failure of science. It hasn’t been in effect long enough.
Yes, in much the same way as the Iraq War will become a roaring success if we just keep at it for another ten or twelve years.
My ten cents worth of opinion:
Smaller classes, higher standards, decent funding and teachers are evaluated on performance, just like the students.
Both the left and right have a large burden of blame to share when it comes to public schooling, but then so do many parents. Education does not end when they walk out of the schoolhouse. And the ‘not MY child’ mindset needs to take a long walk. I’ve yet to see anyone who gave birth to an angel (particularly a teenage angel).
Language barriers seem to be a large problem as well in many districts but there is not an easy fix to that. My personal opinion would be to teach in the two dominant languages, but that REALLY ruffles a lot of feathers.
Sorry folks … didn’t mean to deviate from the groupthink. By all means continue to surround yourselves with people who already believe the same as you and attack someone like me who thinks the way of the past few decades isn’t working. I’m not as smart as the rest of you so I can’t find a way to blame Bush for that. I’m mostly okay if you want to continue to be bad scientists but the logical fallacies and ad hominem attacks I received because I didn’t subscribe to your beliefs is a little silly. It’s supposed to be SCIENCEblogs … instead the people who have emailed me or responded here have just been the crazy harpies most of America thinks you are.
Sorry folks … didn’t mean to deviate from the groupthink.
Disagreeing with you is ‘groupthink’? Interesting. Have you always felt that way?
I’m not as smart as the rest of you so I can’t find a way to blame Bush for that.
Finally an accurate statement.
I’m mostly okay if you want to continue to be bad scientists
We have your *permission*? Cool!
instead the people who have emailed me or responded here have just been the crazy harpies most of America thinks you are.
You can read the minds of ‘most of America’? Maybe you’re very smart after all!
Bruce asked “…why does Texas still get to tell publishers which textbooks to buy?…”
The reason lies in how the text books are bought or to put it more bluntly, bureaucracy. Believe it or not Texas is far more bureaucratic in its educational management than New York or California. I edited/published science and math texts from the 60’s through the 90’s so let me explain briefly how things worked then.
The Texas DOE funds the purchase of all textbooks in Texas, so the local school boards budget no money for them. One string attached to that arrangement is that schools may use those state funds only for texts the state has approved or “adopted.” For all basic courses the state allocates funds for new texts every five years, whether new texts are needed or not. One result among many is that any publisher who wants to sell books in Texas, plans its revision cycles around the Texas adoption schedule, other states be damned.
Let’s say that Texas is adopting basic biology books in 2007. Every publisher of a biology text will plan a new edition for submission during the spring/summer of 2007. Keep in mind that a science text involves the text, the teacher’s edition, a lab manual, a TE for that, a testing program, software of some sort, and assorted other teacher or student learning aides, a package that may cost $25,000,000 to develop. They submit texts for approval in March or April according to state set schedules, for which the deadlines are usually absolute. The state establishes a committee of 15 drawn from across the state, all disciplines, classroom teachers, and administors. Publishers then go through a carefully choreographed dance from April through November at which point the committee decides on up to five texts for state approval, usually with an assortment of mandated changes.
Then starting February of 2008, every publisher with a state “adopted” text will tour the state calling on every district (and in some cases every teacher) seeking to get them to adopt its text. In the meantime the publishers will have shipped inventory of their books to state approved depositories in Texas. Schools make their decisions, buy their books from the depositories, and everyone it happy–sorta.
Typically one or two texts will command 90% of the sales and the others approved by the state will pick up only a few scraps. The most successful publisher will sell 100,000 or more copies of its text which, at better than $50 a pop, is a lot of money. Since something like 300 to 400 thousand biology texts are sold each year in the US, for the year that Texas is buying, it’ll command close to half the total market. That speaks volumes to publishers. And Texas knows it gains them leverage with publishers. And every pressure group with an axe to grind knows it gives them great leverage to influence text books for the entire country.
The system is rotten to its core, having originated back in the 19th century when it took a month to ship a book from New York or Ohio and local teachers were not competent to select a text book. But it endures because the state holds power over the schools, the state depositories (politically connected private companies) find it very profitable at a 7%+ fee with no risk, the pressure groups like it because it gives them a forum in which to make a lot of noise (and the state likes it because the publishers have to answer the pressure groups, not the state). Also keep in mind that because of “most favored nation” clauses, in any given year every state pays the same price for a text book so Texas pays the same as New York. So even though New York will spend nearly 70% more per pupil, while enrolling only two thirds as many students, Texas spends a lot more for texts than New York. And it buys any one text all in one year giving it clout beyond its population or budget.
I sure don’t like the rightwing attitude toward the public school system but Democrats don’t have much of substance to offer either. Deciding who gets to instruct young people and within what bounds is a very hard problem. flame821 offers pretty good advice.
One thing we can do is actually study public education itself, as opposed to passing judgments based merely on personal experience. Seems to me that most suggestions for improvement are based on dubious but widely accepted assumptions about learning itself. For example, that it occurs or must occur in a classroom setting or that grades are more important than the accomplishments they are supposed to measure. I’ve never met a child that did not like to learn yet know more than a few whose joy of learning was destroyed by badly implemented, often purely arbitrary, testing (and other widely accepted aspects of schooling). How many kids surrive even six years of our educational system, let alone twelve, with their love of leaning intact?
Oh…and he Just forgot to add
“All they need is local government (run by Democrats for the most part) to run the schools so incompetently that students can graduate while lacking the scientific fundamentals…And It’s All Bill Clinton’s fault.”
These Christopathogical Cretins use anything and everything to STAY ON MESSAGE…it’s always the Democrats Fault – even when it’s NOT.
Blech
“Sorry folks … didn’t mean to deviate from the groupthink.”
Why do I always get the impression that people like Cash only post here to use this lame cliché?
…why does Texas still get to tell publishers which textbooks to buy? It ranks after CA and before NY whose total population together is twice that of Texas. I’ve never understood this and I’ve heard the meme for years.
In 1995, the Texas state ed. board authority to essentially dictate the textbooks for the entire state was removed and, like most of the rest of the country, gave its local districts more latitude to individually chose (within broad guidelines). So Texas’s domination isn’t what it was and total state population given local control doesn’t matter.
However, PZ’s right in implying that the Texas creationists are working overtime to return things to pre-1995. So far they’ve been beaten back.
http://www.tfn.org/pressroom/display.php?item_id=3061
http://www.tfn.org/pressroom/display.php?item_id=2737
(Aside: isn’t is freaking WONDERFUL that our enemies have returned to the Nixonian era of employing names with that wonderful, humourous Dickensian flavor? Especially inthis case, given the famous Xian protester with his “MORANS!” sign?)
Mr. Moran’s a Bu–sh– “Republican,” therefore a conceited, selectively-to-100% ignorant liar. Fuck, and I mean brutally ignore and ridicule and heckle, his opinions about everything, and examine ANY facts thoroughly before tentatively accepting them into any discussion.
Keanus,
Thank you very much; that was an excellent. Never understood how a bunch of s***heels (apologies to Austin)could wield such power in the marketplace.
You (and the other friendly, intelligent contributors)are another reason Pharyngula’s such a great site.
Daniel Martin
This says different. I wonder which is correct?
Here is a state by state evaluation of the states science teaching standards evaluated for effectiveness. That is what I got from it.
http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=352
This says different. I wonder which is correct?
Here is a state by state evaluation of the states science teaching standards evaluated for effectiveness.
I think you two are comparing different things – standards versus outcomes on a certain test. A state may have excellent standards but poor implementation of those standards (caused by poor funding, political squabbling, etc.) Cases in point: California and South Carolina.
This coming from someone whose criticism is based on a straw man version of public education. The needle on the ol’ irony meter just wiggled.
I would to take a moment to apologize for that. I’ll try to be more berrating of the local IDiots… or something.