Op Ed

Good morning. The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) official meeting is called to order at 9:03 a.m. by Board Chairwoman Barbara Cargill. There is no student performance this month. After the traditional invocation (Bible verse read and prayer led this month by Gail Lowe) the two pledges, business started immediately.

9:10 a.m. – Of greatest importance today from a scientific viewpoint will be a new vote to allow Holt McDougal to defend its biology materials from the criticisms against their evolution content by a single member of the biology review panel. Yesterday, when the Holt materials came up for a decision, the Board was correctly told by staff that six pages of alleged errors by a biology review panel member listed several errors. Under normal circumstances these errors would be routinely corrected, but since all the identified “errors” dealt with evolution and all were written by one person (who turned out to be David Shormann, an aggressive and dogmatic Young Earth Creationist), some Board members wanted to examine the legitimacy of the identified errors. It was pointed out by one of the ultra-right Republicans that all the members of the review panel signed off on the list and should be accepted. This was true: yesterday TEA staff reported that all three members of the panel signed the error report, but besides two were biology teachers. Unfortunately in Texas, many biology teachers don’t know very much about evolution and are easily misled by an aggressive Creationist who claims to hold superior knowledge. This is what happened here.

9:25 – The Board takes up the issue of Holt McDougal. Thomas Ratliff brings up the issue that Holt needs to be reconsidered. Anita Givens tells the Board that unexpectedly the three-person review panel did not sign the error report, but the error reports of all the other materials submitted were signed by their respective panel members. Michael Soto makes an amendment to strike the identified eight errors from the report. A huge debate now starts. Terri Leo and David Bradley attempt to defend the original Creationist error report.

Pat Hardy states that she has been told that scientists have objected to the error report. They claim that Shormann’s alleged identified errors are not real errors. She said that other publishers had similar topics and similar wording and Holt was being singled out to make changes not demanded of others, and this was not fair. Bob Craig makes the point that if the Board accepts the original error report, the Board will be responsible for forcing a publisher to make changes that are in themselves in error if in fact they are as claimed by several scientists present in the hearing room and also by five science teachers who signed a statement written by TFN and NCSE the night before.

Michael Soto speaks in favor of his motion. He said that the Board members are not biologists and do not have the expertise to evaluate the alleged errors. He further stated that the alleged errors were identified in a style that was snide, unprofessional, and impractical and he thought this was unscientific and unscholarly and indicated to him that the alleged errors were probably incorrectly identified. He also said that he examined biology books in an education library and that four of the eight topics were treated similarly to the original Holt language.

George Clayton says that the vote yesterday to deny the publisher the opportunity to address the alleged errors was unfortunate and he regrets it. He does not want now to be responsible for inserting new errors in biology materials.

10:05 – Barbara Cargill calls for a 15-minute recess.

10:20 – The Board resumes discussion. Michael Soto is encouraged to withdraw his motion to strike the alleged eight errors from the error report so that the biology materials can be adopted with the provision that Commissioner Robert Scott examine the eight passages and rewrite them in a way that is scientifically-accurate and satisfactory to the publisher. Commissioner Scott indicated his willingness to do so. Mr. Soto then withdrew his motion. Bob Craig moves to adopt the Holt McDougal biology supplemental materials with the described provision. The vote is taken and the vote board indicates that the motion passes 15-0 even though Mary Helen Berlanga is not present. This generates minor amusement from some in the room. Someone apparently voted for Mary Helen, but the error is attributed to the technology. Chairwoman Cargill confirms that the recorded vote, 14-0, is the official one.

Finally, the Board votes to adopt all the supplementary science instructional materials. This vote is the official vote since today the Board is sitting as the offical SBOE. The preliminary votes yesterday were votes of the Committee of the Whole Board.

The final result is a major victory for science education. Except for the Holt McDougal materials, all the biology supplemental instructional materials submitted for review by the TEA and SBOE were adopted by the State Board with no political or religiously-inspired changes that damage science education by weakening evolution content in ways that would have misled and confused students. No information about Creationism or Intelligent Design was included, of course, but that would be illegal in any case and even the religious right Board members know this. Of course, legitimate factual errors will be changed but that is normal.

The alleged but bogus errors in the Holt biology materials that concern evolution–identified by a Creationist appointed to the biology review panel by a fellow Creationist member of the State Board–were not accepted in the official error report. Instead, Commissioner Scott will now use his own experts and probably some on TEA staff to review the eight alleged errors and work with the publisher to re-word the passages that concern evolution. I fully expect some changes that won’t affect the scientific accuracy of the text. Of course, the original language was perfectly okay but the alternative we closely avoided was to have the Holt materials rejected or forced to make the unscientific changes to have the materials adopted–which is the alternative Holt would have chosen as explicity stated by the Holt representative. Of the three possible alternatives we achieved the best outcome. I spoke to Commissioner Robert Scott after the meeting ended adn he told me he will keep everyone informed of the outcome of his negotiations with the publisher.

This concludes the live blog today but I will come back and fill in some additional content later. As an active participant in the process (I am a professional science education adovocate–an advocate is a lobbyist who is not paid) as well as a writer, I often had to move away from my notebook computer to talk to Board members and the press and I had to skip recording some sections. But I remembered what happened and will fill this in soon.

Steve Schafersman is blogging on the SBOE hearing as a participant and activist. He is presenting testimony to the board as well as writing about his observations. His testimony is available here.

10:00 a.m. – Good morning. I am present at the William Travis Building in Austin waiting for the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) meeting to start. Later this morning the State Board will hear public testimony about the impending adoption of new supplemental digital science instructional materials. These are the first science instructional materials submitted under the new 2009 controversial science curriculum standards that had several new TEKS inserted by the State Board over the objections of the scientists and science educators who wrote them. The standards were written and adopted by 8-7 majority votes by the radical religious right Republican SBOE members. Highly-qualified science curriculum experts and professional scientists and science teachers were asked to write new science standards and update old science standards during a series of meetings in 2008 and 2009. These were given to the SBOE and generally adopted, but sections in Biology and Earth and Space Science that included information about evolution, DNA, the fossil record, and the origin of life were modified by the ultra-right members.

I have discussed these issues in detail in articles on the website of Texas Citizens for Science and here at the Texas Observer. Articles are at both places now. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I am the president of TCS and I also will testify on behalf of TCS during public testimony later today.

The SBOE meeting is being live-streamed here. You must have a RealPlayer client such as RealPlayer SP installed on your computer to watch the streaming videos. I often watch these live video streams at home when the State Board is meeting to avoid ten hours of driving to and from Austin to attend in person.

My friends at Texas Freedom Network (TFN), Ryan Valentine and Dan Quinn, are also live blogging this meeting at TFN Insider. Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education is also here live tweeting at at @JoshRosenau and @NCSE (using hashtag #txtxt). TFN informs me they are also live tweeting at #SBOE. Abby Rapoport of the Texas Observer will also be tweeting about this meeting using #SBOE.

11:00 a.m. – Today is the first meeting chaired by Barbara Cargill who was just appointed to the chairmanship by Governor Rick Perry two weeks ago. When the special session of the Texas Legislature ended without Senate approval of Perry’s former appointment of Gail Lowe as chairman, Perry had to appoint someone new. He chose Cargill. Like Gail Lowe and Don McLeroy before her, Barbara Cargill is a Young Earth Creationist (she believes the Earth is 6-10,000 years old and Earth, life, and all species were specially created by a supernatural deity in six days) and radical religious right Republican. Cargill, McLeroy, and Cynthia Dunbar were most instrumental in damaging the science standards with motions to amend the specific topics of evolution, the fossil record, origin of life, and DNA. Barbara Cargill especially tried to damage the new Earth and Space Science standards with numerous anti-science amendments that would damage the integrity of the ESS standards. Several unfortunately passed. However, ESS materials were not requested for adoption so today only the Biology supplemental materials will be controversial. Physics, chemistry, and other non-controversial sciences will also be adopted tomorrow but I doubt many will address these sciences.

11:30 a.m. – The SBOE is still listening to testimony about technology TEKS that mostly concern computer courses. I am not going to write about this testimony.

The science TEKS will come up next. It is very likely that only supplemental instructional materials submitted under the high school Biology standards will be controversial and addressed by testifiers. Tomorrow, during formal adoption of these materials, the State Board members will discuss these topics with quite differing viewpoints. Mainstream publishers will be criticized by Creationists for not writing enough about the bogus “problems” evolution supposedly has with biological complexity and the fossil record. The politically-inserted standards that promote Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC) will be the topics of debate from those presenting public testimony. The mainstream publishers certainly addressed the new standards, but not in the way that Creationists wished. They expected more content that would disparage the ability of evolution to account for complexity in DNA, cells, the origin of life, and indeed in all of biology. Complexity is one of the ideas that motivate ID Creationists such as those at the Discovery Institute. They sincerely believe that life is too complex for evolution to explain it, but this is nonsense. Mainstream modern biology does not share this belief. Many experiements and observations have revealed how evolution can produce complex biochemicals and organism relationships.

The other side, scientists and pro-science testifiers, will support the mainstream publishers and criticize the single IDC supplemental science submission from International Databases LLC (ID LLC, get it?). The author of the ID LLC materials is an experienced high school and college science teacher who lives in New Mexico. He is intersted in geology as well as biology. He is a person who also sincerely believes that evidence of IDC exists in nature, a concept contrary to mainstream science that sees no IDC in nature. His materials explicitly mention Intelligent Design, much to the annoyance of the Discovery Institute who want to hide the IDC undercurrent in materials they write and distribute to teachers and school officials for use in public schools. Unfortunately for ID LLC, his materials also contain many errors of fact and science. I discuss one such error in my written testimony.

11:50 a.m. – We just broke for lunch but I want to get one more item in. The SBOE Committee on Instruction met earlier this morning. This important five-member committee has long been dominated by radical religious right members because the Board’s leaders, Don McLeroy and Gail Lowe were able to appoint a majority to this panel, but there are signs that a change is coming. The committee’s first order of business today was to elect a new chair, after Barbara Cargill announced she was stepping down since she was just appointed the chair of the SBOE. In a move that seemed to surprise Cargill, George Clayton, R-Dallas, nominated new board member Marsha Farney, R-Georgetown, as new chair. Clayton and Farney, though Republicans, have been ostracized by Cargill and the far-right faction of the party. Cargill immediately nominated fellow radical religious right Republican Terri Leo, R-Spring, and the vote was deadlocked at two votes for each candidate because Democratic board member Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi, is absent from today’s meetings. The committee moved to postpone the election of chair until the September meeting when Mary Helen will be present. Terri Leo chaired the meeting after the vote, making me think for a moment that she was elected. But she chaired the meeting because she was vice-chair and Cargill did step down. Berlanga will likely vote for Farney at the September meeting and we will finally have a responsible and non-agenda Republican leading this important committee.

12:50 p.m. – The meeting resumes with an introduction by Associate Commissioner for Curriculum and Instruction Anita Givens describing the new digital science instructional materials. Next, new Chair Barbara Cargill described the new rules of public testimony. She will only allow two minutes instead of the traditional three minutes. Also, she will allow only a maximum of four hours of testimony instead of continuing until everyone has finished.

1:15 p.m. – Public testimony begins. Most of the first speakers ask the Board to keep Creationism out of the science instructional materials. Both David Bradley and Ken Mercer claim the science standards do not mention “creationism.” Indeed they don’t, but the concept is still there as an implication in the politically-inserted standards.

Kathy Miller (TFN) and Jonathan Saenz (Liberty Institute) presented conflicting views about the process without getting into the details of the instructional materials (because neither is a scientist). Kathy asked that the process not be corrupted by either making changes to mainstream publishers’ materials in ways that compromise scientific accuracy. She also aske the SBOE to ignore the ID LLC submission (which was not recommended). Saenz also presented no details (you really can’t present details in two minutes!) but said that subsequent “scientists” would detail some of the problems with the biology materials. He of course was referring to the fact that the mainstream publishers did not produce content that disparages evolution or implies that there is a scientific alternative to evolution within modern science. The point is this: although the political radical religious right Board members inserted the unnecessary and really unscientific standards for the purpose of forcing publishers to include material that weakens evolution and implies an IDC alternative, the publishers did not do this. They produced scientifically accurate content which is now making some Board members angry.

I was the next speaker. My testimony is availble here. I asked the Board to adopt only the recommendations of the TEA and Commissioner and not adopt the ID LLC submissions (which was not recommended and would have to have a positive motion to adopt). I did acknowledge that a few mainstream materials still contained the erroneous Haeckle vertebrate embyo diagram. This engendered questions from both Terri Leo and Ken Mercer about my apparent agreement with their side. In fact, the flawed nature of this old diagram has been well known to scientists for decades and the diagrams have been gradually removed from biology textbooks over the years. Creationists, such as the Discovery Institute, adopted this critique and have made it their own by widely publicizing it. Just because Creationists object to Haeckel’s diagram doesn’t make it permissible. My specific page about the Haeckel diagrams is here. I learned just today that one of the submitters withdrew its Biology module and the other two have already agreed to make changes. I believe the members of the biology review panels that evaluated these submissions already detected the use of Haeckel’s vertebrate embryo diagrams and asked that these be changed. I also emphasized that the other objects to the mainstream materials contained in the DI Evaluation (see the previous link) were not valid and should be ignored. Ken Mercer pointedly insisted that the Haeckel diagram was fraudulent but I explicitly said it was erroneous, not fraudulent. Haeckel was ignorant of the true morphology of some vertebrate embryos and his flawed diagram has been handed down for generations from one biology textbook to the next as an illustration of the evidence for evolution. I emphasized in a response, at considerable length, that the evidence for vertebrate embryonic similarities is there but the specific diagram should not be used.

David Shormann, a Young Earth Creationist who produces pseudoscience materials for home schooled children whose parents are Religious Fundamentalists, spoke about science education but presented no details. I thought his testimony was rather mild compared to what I expected. I thought he would explicitly demand changes to the mainstream publishers’ materials and perhaps ask that the ID LLC modules be adopted, but he did not.

A long stream of speakers follows, almost all supporting the adoption of the TEA Commissioner’s recommendations. A few criticized the mainstream publishers for not addressing the claimed but actually bogus criticisms identified by the Discovery Institute. Although no representative of the DI is present, a few speakers took up its cause of damaging evolution content in the new digital instructional materials. The only publisher that the DI liked, ID LLC, was not recommended by the TEA for several reasons. ID LLC did not cover the TEKS adequately, did not make three mentions of each TEK, had many factual errors, and most notably explicitly advocated Intelligent Design Creationism.

4:30 – Public testimony about the proposed new supplemental science instructional materials has ended, and the State Board of Education is now starting debate about whether to adopt the materials recommended by the Texas education commissioner. In past adoptions, the state board has taken a preliminary vote at the end of this initial debate. The final, formal vote on which materials to put on the official adoption list is scheduled for the meeting tomorrow, Friday, and I will be present to live blog this (in case anything happens at the last minute–which it often does).

 

The SBOE decides to consider the proposed instructional materials by grade level, beginning with Grade 5. Under consideration are science materials for Grades 5-8 and materials for Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and Integrated Physics and Chemistry at the high school level. The State Board is considering a motion that would require publishers to make corrections to errors identified by the Texas Education Agency’s instructional review teams in June. This motion would apply to all materials, for Grades 5-8 and high school. This type of correction is normal and is a good thing since the review panels usually have good people on them who know the subjects. It is a fact that new instructional materials always have errors that should be corrected. Problems only arise when the State Board members themselves decide to make the changes by majority vote, since the Board members generally have no knowledge or expertise in the subject (usually evolution).

4:47 – The Board begins voting on the approval of the commissioner’s recommendations by grade level, subject to publishers making required changes to errors. Chairman Barbara Cargill moves Biology to the end of the list because it is really the only subject that will generate controversy from some members of the Board. The Board quickly gives preliminary approval to the Commissioner’s list for Grades 5-8 subject to publishers correcting any errors review teams identified.

The errors that publishers must correct include grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes. Sometimes these errors really add up. During the present adoption, School Education Group/McGraw-Hill was dinged for 2,288 errors. I spoke to the publisher rep who was present and he told me the errors were all for commas out of place! Of course these will all be routinely corrected. It’s not unusual for publishers to correct numerous such errors after initial submission for adoption. Problems arise only when some state board members start identifying errors that are really ideological, religious, or political objections to content. [More soon about Holt McDougal and this very concern.]

5:21 – Board members discuss concerns that they might be adopting instructional materials without knowing how publishers will make corrections to identified errors.

6:00 – Thomas Ratliff states that the Board shouldn’t make a decision about a publisher’s biology materials content from the review of one person without hearing from the publisher who would defend its content. The content in question deals with evolution and the critical review (from a biology review panel member who is obviously a Creationist) objects to several statements. The publisher did respond in print, also provided in the handout, but the Creationist Board members want the material removed because one person criticized it from a Creationist standpoint. Next, George Clayton questions whether we would hear from a publisher or a biologist of the publisher. A vote is taken to determine if we should hear from the publisher. The vote wins 7-6 but Cargill then votes no, and a tie vote means it does not pass. If Mary Helen Berlanga were present, this vote would have won.

Gail Lowe objects to drawings of Haeckel’s vertebrate embryos in the biology materials submitted by Adaptive Curriculum and Learning.com. She asks that the materials be approved subject to replacement of the Haeckel diagram with something else.

6:20 – The State Board votes to adopt Adaptive Curriculum and Learning.com biology materials subject to replacement of its Haeckel vertebrate embryo diagram with photos of vertebrate embryos. The publisher rep showed the State Board photos of very early embryos that looked identical and more developed embryos of a human and a fish. These will be posted here soon.

Many people don’t understand why public education is being deliberately torpedoed in Texas by its own Legislature and Governor. One might think that conservatives would support a traditional, long-existing, honorable, and valuable state system; after all, isn’t that the definition of conservatism—support of traditional values? What is more traditional and valuable in the United States than public education?

But public education in Texas is heavily politicized by both the Texas Legislature and the Texas State Board of Education. The Legislature has allocated fewer state funds to public schools over the last 15 years, but this year for the first time it deliberately under-funded schools by $4 billion.

This deliberate under-funding could easily have been avoided by simply raising taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses in Texas or tapping the $10 billion “Rainy-Day Fund,” created years ago with the primary purpose to provide money to finance public schools at appropriate levels in case of economic hardship.

In 2006 a new business tax replaced part of state property tax in a way that state financial experts predicted would be insufficient to support Texas schools. This structural deficit could be corrected now by simply reconfiguring the new business tax to bring in the necessary amount of money, but again the Legislature deliberately refused to correct it.

Thus it is clear that the intention of the Republican majority of state legislators is to deliberately damage public education in Texas. The reason for this, however, is not well known: Public schools damaged by underfunding will be more likely to fail and thus create a situation—the sole situation—for which the Supreme Court legally permits private religious school voucher programs.

Many in the current crop of Republicans in Texas are radicals, not conservatives, and they have several reasons to defund public education. Perhaps the most popular is that under-funding will cause school districts to lay off teachers who have in the past financially supported and voted mostly for Democratic candidates, thus damaging the Democratic Party in Texas. A second is to damage the quality of public schools so more citizens will support private schools, the vast majority of which are religious. However, the least known but by far most important reason is that in the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris decision in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision for the first time allowed a private voucher program for private religious schools, but only when the local public school system is failing.

Goaded by Governor Perry, radical Texas Republicans tried to institute vouchers in the past by legislative action but failed by extremely narrow votes in the Legislature. Anti-voucher proponents, some Republicans but mostly Democrats, damaged the legislation sufficiently with amendments to cause its supporters to retract the bill. Now, by underfunding public education, Republicans are trying to create the sole conditions in which public voucher programs are legally permitted: making the poorest school systems in Texas—mostly urban systems—fail. A perfectly-legal state voucher system in the future will shift vast amounts of public tax money—far more than $4 billion—from public to private religious schools.

Some Texas citizens have a nebulous but gnawing feeling that, except for a few secular private schools, K-12 education in Texas isn’t very good. This feeling has a basis in reality. Without going into the details, Texas teacher pay, Texas per-student expenditure, Texas school quality, and Texas student achievement rank very low compared to most other states in the country, and very much lower than the teachers, schools, and students in most European and Asian countries. Those who are interested in this topic know the statistics or can easily find them on the Web.

There are, of course, some states that have poorer statistics than Texas, but we are not talking here about competing for the bottom rung of the education ladder. Instead, the question is why does one of the wealthiest states in the nation have such low K-12 academic achievement? Most U.S. states, wealthier or not, make public education their highest priority. This is, however, not the case in Texas. Why? There are two reasons.

First, it appears that some Texas public officials and political leaders care little about providing a quality public education to Texas children. The enormous politicization of classroom curriculum standards and instructional materials in Texas has resulted in a culture of diminished expectations and achievement. Students are expected to attend school for a credential rather than for greater knowledge of how to succeed in a highly-competitive global economy. Ironically, despite the evidence that Texas schools are failing their students, many parents develop a totally unwarranted self-satisfaction that Texas public schools are successfully preparing students for either higher education or for immediate high-paying and fulfilling jobs. They need to be more realistic. Unwarranted self-satisfaction is probably the phrase that best describes Texas K-12 education. The results certainly show it.

Texas policy-makers and public officials have a peculiar belief not shared by their counterparts in most other states. They believe that it doesn’t matter how much we spend on Texas public schools or whether their quality is good enough, because if Texas can just create more jobs than other states, the better-educated citizens of those states will move to Texas and take the jobs here. Texas can depend on other states to spend their tax dollars to educate and train high-value workers so we don’t have to. As long as our state’s economy creates high-value jobs, those workers will move to Texas and bring their expensive educations along with them.

This Texas belief—official Texas legislative and executive policy, really—absolves state government policy-makers from having to adequately fund the state’s public school system. The result has been year after year of decreasing state funding of public education, forcing local communities and school districts to raise their taxes to the highest levels to pay for a minimum education system.

This official Texas policy thumbs its nose at the social contract, at the American belief in fair play and the idea that we’re all in this together. Instead, the Texas view is that our state is competing against other states and if they aren’t slick enough to create jobs that attract other states’ educated citizens, then that’s their problem. In Texas, we create those jobs by underfunding public education, allowing Texas to have low taxes that attracts more companies.

It goes unrecognized, however, that the best and highest-paid knowledge jobs are created in states other than Texas, states that have good primary, secondary, and higher education systems supported by a reasonable tax base. A state that deliberately and selfishly underfunds its own public education system to keep its individual and business taxes artificially low, and unfairly seeks knowledge workers educated at other states’ expense, deserves to receive little or no education funding or stimulus funding from the federal government. Indeed, when Texas scored its first stimulus funding for education, it used the funds for general state expenses and kept state education funding at current levels, completely negating the purpose of stimulus funding. This is really Texas-sized selfishness, but I’m sure the self-satisfaction gained by pulling a fast one on the feds was worth it.

But there is far worse to consider: the second reason that Texas Republicans despise the state’s public school system is because it provides free education to working class Texas citizens, most of whom are Latin-American and African-American minorities. Our Republican policy-makers believe that public education funding is wasted on minorities, so deliberate underfunding of public schools has become official state policy. This policy is fed by a barely-hidden racism that demeans Texas and is shameful to those Texans who possess a fair and multicultural attitude toward ethnic-minority Texans and who defend fair treatment by the state of all citizens. This policy also creates a host of problems since under-educated citizens often turn to crime to make an adequate living. One major result of underfunding and politicizing Texas public education is that Texas has the largest prison population in the United States, indeed, one of the highest in the world.

The egregious school financial situation created by the Legislature is the most visible politicization of public education in Texas today, but it is not the only one. Some readers may know of my 31-year-long history of advocacy to protect the integrity and accuracy of science instruction in Texas public schools before the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) and Texas Education Agency. This will be the main topic of my next and several subsequent columns, including live-blogging of the SBOE meeting in July 21-22.

As many readers will remember, in 2009 the SBOE on votes of 8-7 damaged the Texas science standards by inserting extreme, non-educational, radical sectarian agenda-driven standards into the Biology and Earth and Space Science Texas Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) against the advice of the scientists and science teachers who originally wrote these standards. The new politically-driven standards were added to have students question the effectiveness of biological evolution to account for the diversity and complexity of life on Earth, question the origin of life by natural processes, and question the patterns of evolution of ancient fossil organisms as explained by modern paleontologists. Censoring, manipulating, and editing these topics were of prime concern to the seven radical religious right Republicans on the SBOE at that time, who wanted to force teachers to disparage biological evolution and confuse and mislead students. The five Democrats then on the State Board consistently voted against these unnecessary and unscientific changes.

The members of the SBOE have changed but the rush to politicize science education continues. Governor Rick Perry was forced to appoint yet another SBOE chairman, and the one he chose, Barbara Cargill, is one of the most extreme sectarian proponents of the irresponsible misuse of official power to push Creationist-inspired changes into Texas public school science curricula.

In an address to the Texas Eagle Forum, Barbara Cargill stated her intention of using her office to force mainstream science publishers to include material that falsely misrepresents the status of biological evolution in modern biology and misleads students about the accuracy and reliability of information about modern biological evolution. The changes she seeks would have the effect of promoting a belief in a supernatural Creation of life and all species, topics that are not part of modern science.

This week the elected members of the SBOE, eleven Republicans and four Democrats, will decide what materials are adopted in Texas by majority vote. One of the biology instructional materials submitted explicitly promotes Intelligent Design Creationism. This supplement was not recommended by the TEA and Texas Commissioner of Education, but the radical and sectarian non-scientists on the SBOE could adopt it anyway by majority vote. Is this any way to teach science in the 21st Century?  I will cover this process and explain what is happening so please stay tuned.

We woke up this morning to exciting news. The Texas Observer is a finalist for for six honors from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, including awards for feature writing, investigative reporting and public-service journalism. We couldn’t be prouder. Our mission is always to provide independent, investigative reporting, free of charge to readers. (If you want to help in our mission, consider becoming an Observer Partner.)

We’ll be crossing our fingers when the final results are announced on July 22. In the meantime, check out the stories that earned nominations:

• Forrest Wilder’s Agency of Destruction is up for AAN’s investigative reporting award. His story chronicled the systemic corruption in the world’s second largest environmental agency—the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

• Dave Mann’s A Bloody Injustice was nominated in the long- form news story category. The article explored the flawed evidence in that convicted Warren Horinek of murder in 1996 and revealed how questionable testimony from forensic experts can send innocent people to prison.

• Melissa del Bosque’s Children of the Exodus, nominated for the feature story award, describes the horrifying plight of children who cross the border illegally and then are deported without their families. The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund provided support for del Bosque’s reporting.

• Dave Mann’s story DNA Tests Undermine Evidence in Texas Execution broke the international story that DNA testing disproved key evidence that led to the 2000 execution of Claude Jones. The Observer partnered with the Innocence Project in the successful three-year court battle to obtain the evidence: a single strand of hair. The story was nominated for the public-service award.

• Michael May’s Gone Rogue was nominated for an award for drugs reporting. His article chronicled the story of Barry Cooper, a former cop who turned into a hardline activist dedicated to catching police breaking the law.

• Ben Sargent was nominated for the best cartoon for his regular feature Loon Star State. Sargent never runs out of hilarious ways to poke fun at Texas’ most outrageous political moments.

You know it’s presidential election season when talk shows, political blogs, and pundits are well into the winnowing process for potential candidates.

With the nation’s economy stuck, public pessimism and oil prices growing, and President Obama looking potentially vulnerable, the irony all spring has been that no GOP aspirant looks very formidable. It’s a deviation for the party that always seems to nominate a perceived frontrunner. Indeed, according to former Bush media maker Mark McKinnon, “the Republican field looks conventional and flawed.” Is Mitt Romney, the man for and against his own health care reform bill, really the man? Or is the Rick Perry buzz real, particularly in the wake of the mass resignations from Newt Gingrich’s campaign, freeing the Texas governor’s inner circle of consultants?

To understand Perry’s potential appeal to the GOP base, let’s step back several years. On January 20th, 2009, while the rest of the country was tuned to the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, 25,000 people were waiting on a chilly afternoon in Midland, Texas, to welcome the departing President George W. Bush back home. It felt like an alternative political universe. The massed crowd, holding thousands of red, white and blue cardboard W’s, heard the now former president deliver a short, gracious speech about how good it felt to be back home. The crowd’s affection for the president was genuine. But that was hardly the most exciting part of the day. Instead, it was Gov. Rick Perry’s speech that really got the crowd going. Obama had been in the White House only a few hours, but already, Perry had declared war—on state socialism, government mandates and coddling America’s enemies.

It’s a banner Perry’s continued to wave for the last three years. He was in front of the Tea Party anger that led to last November’s GOP tidal wave in Texas. Already the longest serving chief executive in Texas history, he destroyed three strong opponents in his overwhelming reelection win in 2010, immediately went on a successful national tour for his book Fed Up, and then was appointed head of the Republican Governors’ Association for a second stint.

It’s been clear for most of 2011 that there was a potential opening in the Republican field for a charismatic, conservative candidate. The political pundit silly season was in full swing as the media made out its Christmas list of “likely” candidates for the presidential nomination of the party out of power. At the beginning of the year, the list was long and full of people that most knew didn’t stand the slightest chance of ending up in the White House without an invitation to a state dinner. (Haley Barbour, the lobbyist-in-chief who’s wistful for old white citizen’s councils? Mitch Daniels, a governor who’s got negative charisma?)

That left us with the 2012 GOP competition’s big leagues, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Tim Pawlenty.

Romney has a political operation built out of his national campaign two years ago, and $8 million-plus in the bank, personal wealth and a long list of political IOU’s. He also won fewer delegates than Huckabee in 2008, passed a Massachusetts health plan that resembles Obamacare, is still a Mormon (a big negative to many evangelical Christians), and is not exactly a Tea Party favorite.

Palin has high negatives and is buried in any current match up with President Obama. But who needs an organization when you’re the star of a reality TV series and the only potential candidate who can get tens of thousands of people out in seemingly a snap of your fingers. The question is if she’s a candidate or a celebrity.

Pawlenty? He doesn’t offend anyone, even if he doesn’t excite anyone. A safe choice if Romney implodes.

Matt Bai, in a piece in The New York Times, has talked about how the Republicans are about to have their first real fight, without an anointed next-in-line choice, for their presidential nominee in more than three decades. In such a flawed field, why not Rick Perry?

Former Bush political strategist Matthew Dowd, an authority on electing Texans to the White House, is bullish on Perry’s potential. To Dowd’s thinking, the governor is well placed to be the vessel for the anger of Republicans with his “tremendous ability to communicate anti-Washington sentiment,” because he’s “able to speak passionately to this anti-establishment fervor and has the credibility as an elected official.” It’s a talent Perry displayed in 2010, humiliating Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary and crushing the first credible Democratic gubernatorial candidate in over a decade, Bill White, the popular former mayor of Houston, in November.

Perry’s 10 years in office look like the perfect success story to Republicans. Ten years of balanced budgets. Ten years of staying true to his conservative viewpoints.  A state that’s weathered the recession relatively well, with a population that’s booming (witness four new congressional seats in the coming reapportionment). And an ability to read the anger of the Tea Party wing of the party before the flames got lit.

How did a man derided by liberals like the late Molly Ivins as “Gov. Goodhair” and reelected in 2006 with only 39% of the vote in a multi-candidate field, manage this?  As Paul Burka, the Texas Monthly pundit, puts it, Perry has “an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time.”  Elected state representative as a Democrat (and later state chair for Al Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign!), he switched parties early, took on an overconfident Jim Hightower for state agriculture commissioner and beat him (with Karl Rove’s help).  Aligning himself with the conservative wing of the party that was always uneasy with then-Gov. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” Perry squeaked out a win for lieutenant governor in 1998, succeeded Bush two years later, and claimed the ideological right for his own. When the Tea Party pushed the party further right in 2009, he was waiting for them. Even when the national press derided Perry for hinting that secession might not be out of the question, this supposed gaffe became, in Burka’s view, a “call to arms,” that put him on the national conservative stage.

Perry has faced a serious challenge at home, starting with an almost $27 billion deficit to solve this year.  But whatever this special session ends up producing, the budget will be balanced (at least until early 2013), no matter the pain it may cause and taxes will not be raised.  Along with a list of ideological activist social legislation, it’s the kind of platform someone could run on if the primary voters were overwhelmingly conservative and really angry at the Obama administration.  Just like the Republican primary electorate awaiting in 2012.

So what does one call the governor of the biggest red state, someone who loves to go on the attack, a gifted campaigner with charisma to spare, and an almost unlimited ability to tap millions of Texas campaign dollars?  Some might call them a likely vice presidential running mate for more moderate sounding guys like Romney and Pawlenty. Others might call him a serious presidential contender.

Paul Stekler makes documentary films about American politics and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.