Elections in Kansas this November for seats on the State Board of Education are forcing candidates to answer questions about how they think the state should teach evolution, according to this article in the Kansas City Star.
The majority of candidates don’t favor changing the current, evolution-friendly biology standards. However, history beckons: The state had worked with five different sets of standards from 1999 to 2007, as conservative Republicans, skeptical of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection, gained and lost board majorities. So now, understandably, people are skeptical.
“The hard part is when we go back and forth,” said Brian Cole, a Sabetha High School physics and chemistry teacher and a member of the board of the Kansas Association of Teachers of Science. He notes that he’s a Christian and believes God created the world, but he doesn’t want the public schools to keep changing the curriculum. “It’s not good for our teachers—it’s not good for our students—to have our standards be a pendulum.”
The state’s science teachers are working with those in about 25 other states, including both Maryland and Illinois, and the National Research Council to develop a common science framework, known as the “Next Generation Science Standards.” The framework, published in May 2012, is now in a public comment phase.
Kansas, you may remember, is where the whole evolution-creationism debate began in the late 1990s. Educators in the state find themselves in a perpetual fishbowl, as scientists, politicans, and schools look to see what the next set of standards might include. One candidate, Carol Viar, put Christianity in her own perspective: “The Bible is the story of how God loves us, not a science manual,” the Star quoted her as saying.
But some private schools, especially in the South, take a different position, teaching creationism and rejecting evolution in order to promote a religious doctrine that challenges many of the central big ideas in biology. Critics argue public money shouldn’t be spent on such religious teaching, saying such programs reduce the quality of science education as well as students’ preparedness for college science courses.
