The Texas Observer

Creationism studies in Texas went back to square one Thursday. The nine-member Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board backed Commissioner Raymund Paredes’ recommendation to deny the Institute for Creation Research’s bid to teach creationism as science.

After Wednesday’s lengthy hearing and full day of testimony, board members voted that public testimony not be admitted today—proof, perhaps, that God is merciful.

The vote was quick and unanimous.  Joe Stafford, assistant commissioner for Academic Affairs and Research, read into the record a Texas Education Code statute about preventing public deception in the face of fraudulent or substandard college and university degrees. He also read from Texas Administrative Code rules 12a and 12d, which discuss the quality and content of curricula.

Dr. Henry Morris, CEO of the Institute for Creation Research, told the Observer that his school will appeal the decision within 45 days. Morris said the ICR may also take its case to the Texas Supreme Court.

A bid to teach creationism as science in Texas is facing extinction. Raymund Paredes, commissioner of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, today recommended that the Institute for Creation Research not be allowed to offer a Masters of Science degree in Science Education.

The ICR teaches that the earth was created in a week and that it is 6,000 years old.

Paredes made his recommendation before the Coordinating Board’s Academic Excellence and Research Committee. On Thursday the 9-member Coordinating Board will meet to take a final vote on the Commissioner’s recommendation.

Three participants spoke in favor of ICR’s application: a radio announcer with a science background, a military officer, and a tax attorney. Seven folks spoke against authorizing ICR to grant degrees. Among them were several science teachers and two representatives of science education organizations: the Science Teacher’s Association of Texas and the Texas Academy of Science.

Commissioner Paredes said in a press release that he based his recommendation on two considerations: ICR failed to demonstrate that the proposed degree program meets acceptable standards of science and science education, and the proposed degree is inconsistent with Coordinating Board rules that require the accurate labeling or designation of programs.

Dr. Henry Morris, president of the ICR, told the Observer he was not surprised by Paredes’ recommendation. Morris said there has been an “intensity of resistance from the academic community toward creationism in the last year in Texas.” He cited the dismissal of Texas Education Agency employee Chris Comer, the upcoming review of TEKS and critical thinking standards for Texas schools, and the pro-creationism movie “Expelled” as topics that had generated media attention and public debate in the last year.

Morris said if the Board votes to uphold the Commissioner’s recommendation, the Institute will appeal the decision in the next 45 days. If the appeal is denied, Morris said, the Institute may take its case to the Texas Supreme Court. “We were denied the right to operate in California and we went through a lengthy and onerous court case before we won,” he said. “It’s an option that we will consider in Texas if we are denied.”

Morris said the real issue at hand is “whether science can tolerate a different presumption about the beginning point of creation.”

The ICR attorney said it was a question of freedom of speech and the Constitution that the Institute should be granted the authority to teach science in Texas.

Steven Schafersman, who testified against ICR at the hearing, said he thought Commissioner Paredes had made a “decisive and strong decision based on sound reasoning.”

“The ICR attorney said it was about fair play and free speech, but I disagree,” Schafersman said. “They have the right to teach whatever they want, but not the right to have the state grant them the authority to teach pseudoscience.”

There’s always home schooling…

In recent years, the voices of religious moderates and progressives have been lost amidst the din raised by the yelpings of the religious right.

(Case in point: As I was writing this post I received a “weekly update” by email from Christians United for Israel, the lobbying outfit of Christian Zionist and San Antonio pastor John Hagee, who has of late been agitating for war on Iran. “It is not a matter if war is coming,” Hagee thundered in the email. “It’s only a matter of when!”)

But people of faith concerned with matters other than speeding Jesus’ return or stoking the nation’s cultural wars have never really gone away in this era of fundamentalism. They’ve been here all along, trying to be heard, trying to regroup.

Tonight I attended a dinner at the United Methodist Women in Texas’ 20th Annual Legislative Event in Austin. The event is officially nonpartisan but the coins of the realm are social justice and the common good - those abused, but still useful and necessary ideas. Texas Impact, an interfaith organization that marries progressive religious values with political action, is hosting the conference. The women learn the nuts and bolts of the political process while brainstorming ways to make education, the environment, and health care top priorities again.

Tonight the women heard from two men - branding guru and former Bushie Matthew Dowd and Texas campaign finance expert Fred Lewis - who both see a state and nation that is in dire need of spiritual, political, and social mending.

Dowd described the current zeitgeist. “Nearly every major institution in this county - the American public, the people of Texas have lost faith in them,” said Dowd. Scandal after scandal has discredited corporations, government, churches, even the Boy Scouts and sports. This crumbling of the traditional social order has “created tremendous anxiety and disconnected us from each other,” said Dowd.

“We don’t feel part of a community, we don’t know where to turn.” Americans don’t trust either major political party to represent our dreams, though we do respond to leaders who at least seem authentic. (This authenticity, or appeal to “gut values,” is the rallying cry of Applebee’s America, a book which Dowd co-authored with Douglas Sosnik.) Young people are simultaneously plugged in (read: Facebook, MySpace) and tuned out. The mostly silver-haired audience gasped at the statistic that the average working person now has nine jobs before they turn 30.

This all adds up to a crisis. But a crisis that will precipitate a great “turning” - something that only happens every four generations in Dowd’s estimation. Dowd didn’t say exactly what this turning would look like but stressed the opportunities for organizing at the “local” level.

“When you look at that landscape you see a great, great fertile ground for people like you in this room,” he told the Methodists.

Fred Lewis reminded the audience that what draws them together is community and a faith in the common good. “You can have too much community and you can have too much individualism,” Lewis remarked. “Right now in this county we don’t have a problem of too much community. We have individualism run amuck.”

If demography is destiny, Texas is in trouble. While 87 percent of Anglos in the state graduate from high school, only 75 percent of African-Americans and 49 percent of Hispanics do. Today, one in two babies born in Texas are Latino. Yet the state leaders seem to have little interest in improving public schools.

“If that continues and we don’t do something to change that by investing in early education, good teachers, health care for our kids and their families, our standard of living will decline,” Lewis said.

The answer is bringing low- and middle-income people into the political process. Lewis described a project he is involved in called Houston Votes. It is estimated that one million Houstonians are eligible to vote but not registered. The goal is to reach out to people - mostly people of color - living in the older, marginalized suburbs of Harris County. So far, the group has knocked on 20,000 doors.

“The people there over and over again have told us that what they care about is education and health care for their families,” Lewis said.

Look for more coverage of faith in action tomorrow from my colleague Dave Mann.

Looks like the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board won’t be considering the Institute for Creation Research’s application next week after all. A Board spokesperson says THECB Commissioner Raymund Paredes has continuing concerns about ICR’s request for accreditation to grant master’s degrees in science education.

For more backstory on the ICR’s request to grant degrees see this previous Observer blog post.

The spokesperson, De J. Lozada, says concerns were raised after THECB consulted with a wide variety of individuals, and include questions about how students might expect to gain exposure to scientific experimentation in an online-only environment. Paredes has also asked for documentation of current ICR research projects and either a revision of the ICR curriculum or, alternately, an explanation as to why the current curriculum departs from the norm for a master of science degree program in Texas.

Complying may prove a tall order, considering that ICR teaches the universe was created in six days by God, who also cooked up humankind from scratch in the form of Adam and Eve. In an e-mail sent to THECB, Dr. Eddy Miller, dean of ICR’s graduate school, wrote, “It has become obvious to us that in order to do justice to the concerns you raised, we would need more time than is available to us if our Application is to be considered at the January meeting of the THECB. Thus we would like for you to delay consideration of our Application until the April meeting.”

Lozada is quick to clarify that ICR’s request hasn’t been rejected, just delayed. God may have created the universe in little more than a standard work week (though the geologic record suggests otherwise), but then Rome was hardly built in a day. For the time being, at least, ICR’s version of academic heaven will just have to wait.

Yesterday’s meeting of the State Board of Education, those creationist monkeys, ended not with a bang but a whimper. The most controversial agenda item - hiring an outside consultant to manage the development and writing of new curriculum standards for the state - was tabled after several board members expressed a desire to hold off on a decision until January. Science defenders breathed a collective sigh of relief. They were worried that the consultant could be a back door strategy by anti-evolution board members to short-circuit the input of real science educators.

“The process is critical because if the process is out of whack then the end product may not be as rigorous as we would like,” Kathy Miller, president of Texas Freedom Network, told the 15-member elected board. That’s Miller’s nice way of saying that a rigged process will mean crappy science textbooks. Steven Schafersman, of Midland-based Texas Citizens for Science, said the proposal as written “contains all sorts of red flags,” including ambiguity as to how, and who, would select the consultant and whether he or she would have veto power over the expert’s recommendations.

Texas defenders of science are in heightened vigilance mode because the board will spend 2008 overhauling the state’s curriculum standards. That means we’re likely to have to endure another pique of anti-evolution fervor from the creationists on the board, led by new chairman Don McLeroy, a fundamentalist Christian and Republican who has boldly declared that he does not share “a common ancestor with a tree.” (I’m sure the tree feels the same way.)

The last time the board touched the science standards was in 2003. At that time creationist activists and their board allies tried (unsuccessfully) to strip the science of evolution and the chemical origins of life from biology textbooks. A majority of the board, however, have pledged to keep “intelligent design” out of the classroom this go-around. A more likely approach for the die-hards would be to ramp up their pseudo-scientific attacks on the supposed holes in evolutionary theory. H.L. Mencken once wrote that “democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.” We shall see soon enough if the monkeys are still in charge at the Texas board of education.

Today the Texas Freedom Network released a statement excoriating Don McLeroy, Gov. Perry’s recent pick for chairman of the State Board of Education, for his comments on religion and Intelligent Design in a 2005 sermon to his church in College Station. The Observer uncovered and discussed the sermon in a recent blog post.

From Texas Freedom Network’s press release: “This recording makes clear the very real danger that Texas schoolchildren may soon be learning more about the religious beliefs of politicians than about sound science in their biology classes,” TFN President Kathy Miller said today. “Even worse, it appears that Don McLeroy believes anyone who disagrees with him can’t be a true Christian.”

You may have evolved from a monkey, but Rick Perry sure didn’t! Our enlightened Guv - global warming denier, former Aggie Yell Leader, and Ted Nugent fan - has been on the record for years as a believer in “Intelligent Design,” the hottest new version of Creationism. When Perry was running for re-election last year a spokesman said that while the Governor was in favor of teaching ID in Texas classrooms “much as the theory of evolution is now taught,” he was not pushing for a statewide curriculum change.

But Perry has found a proxy to carry out his anti-evolution monkey business. In this case it’s Don McLeroy, the Gov’s paleocon pick, announced July 17, for Chairman of the State Board of Education, the 15-member organization that oversees the state’s curriculum. McLeroy, a dentist and Republican from Bryan, is a member of the SBOE’s religious right faction, which has feuded repeatedly with moderate Republicans and Democrats.

An elected member of the SBOE since 1998, McLeroy has cast votes to weaken the teaching of evolution in biology textbooks, approve abstinence-only health textbooks, and ban an environmental science textbook that spent too much time discussing global warming and endangered species, according to the Texas Freedom Network.

Now as chairman, McLeroy will oversee the first overhaul of science curriculum standards in Texas since 2003. Get ready to redo the Scopes Trial, folks.

Mainstream media coverage of McLeroy’s appointment has been both dull and timid, failing to examine what he actually believes. Understanding how his faith informs his politics is important because while this guy may be an amiable small-town dentist, he’s also in a position to decide what thousands and thousands of Texas schoolchildren will be taught. (Not only that, but due to the sheer size of the state, Texas - along with Florida and California - largely determines what textbooks the rest of the country uses.)

Read the rest of this entry »