By Julia C. Keller
Research News and Opportunities in Science and Theology
http://www.researchnews.org/free1.html (temporary link)
Some of the biology textbooks that
members of the Texas State Board
of Education looked at before a meeting
last month in Austin, Texas.
On Sept. 10, science educators, religious leaders, and concerned parents gave testimony before the Texas State Board of Education, voicing their concerns over the adoption of new textbooks for the state's curriculum.
This was the second and final public hearing to discuss whether the 11 new biology textbooks meet the requirements set out by the Texas Education Code.
With almost $30 million dollars in the budget for textbooks, Texas is one of the leading purchasers of textbooks in the country, second only to California. Often, when states decide which books to adopt for their curricula, they look to Texas as a model. Thus, decisions made about textbooks in Texas may have far-reaching consequences.
Groups like the Texas Citizens for Science believe all the textbooks should make the cut for adoption. Other groups, such as Texans for Better Science Education, believe the textbooks do not present the whole truth about biology, specifically evolutionary theory. Texans for Better Science Education spokesperson Ide Trotter told Research News the state board was "highly interested" in the opinions of speakers whose testimony ended wellpast midnight at the Sept. 10 meeting.
"It was a 12-hour marathon session," Trotter said. DeEtta Culbertson, a spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency, commented, "We were aware that the biology adoption would generate a great deal of interest from the number of inquiries about the hearing since the beginning of the year."
The agency also opened the floor to interested parties from outside the state, including the National Center for Science Education. This out-of-state presence quickly polarized the debate into science-versus-religion, according to Trotter.
"Those seeking to censor peer-reviewed corrections to the textbooks were orchestrated by the National Center for Science Education, a California organization of Darwinian thought police, to focus less on attempting to challenge demonstrated factual errors and repeat a mantra that the issues were not scientific but religious," Trotter wrote in an e-mail. Alan Gishlick from the National Center for Science Education disagreed, suggesting the organization only came to support its Texas members. "I think the scientists made a really strong case for why the textbooks should be kept in their current form," Gishlick said. "I think the general feeling was 'Accept the text books as they are.'"
The Texas Education Agency's state office building was the stage for what &emdash; on the surface &emdash; seemed like a classic debate between proponents of evolution theory and supporters of alternative theories like intelligent design. Even though big names from both camps testified before the State Board of Education, the question at hand was not whether evolution should be included in high school biology textbooks, but how it should be included to comply with a seemingly innocuous sounding clause in Texas educational law &emdash; a statement known as "3A."
The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills are the concepts and skills school children kindergarten through high school must learn. The science-related TEKS include clause 3A. According to 3A, the high school biology student is expected to "analyze, review and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information." This clause appears under every science subject, but biology has received the closest scrutiny.
Even though the TEKS also require that each student "knows the theory of biological evolution," the 3A controversy is directed specifically at evolutionary theories. Clause 3A could potentially alter high school biology textbooks, requiring some mention of the "weaknesses" of current evolutionary thinking. If the textbooks do not allow students to adequately question theories, like evolutionary theory, then the 15-member Board of Education panel can vote to place the books on a "non-conforming" list. The vote, which will take place during the board meeting on November 6 and 7, will determine which textbooks are adopted for the next eight years.
School districts can still choose to buy books from the "non-conforming" list. But, according to Steve Schafersman, president of the Texas Citizens for Science, that classification is "like the kiss of death." Schafersman, also a former educator at University of Texas, Permian Basin, attended the first public hearing on July 9 and said he was highly concerned about the use of 3A to modify textbooks concerning evolutionary theory. "If you plan to modify biology textbooks by requiring the authors and publishers to remove or change scientifically accurate material about evolution," the hearing's transcript quotes Schafersman as saying, "please remember that the eyes of Texas are upon you and you can not get away with it."
Schafersman's eyes, and the eyes of 156 other registered attendees, closely watched the board's reaction to testimony given on the second hearing in early September. The number of registered speakers in September was four times that of July, indicating it was not only Schafersman who felt the use of clause 3A could set a precedent for future textbook adoptions or rejections.
"This is only step one," said Schafersman in an interview. "If they get this, step two will be getting the state board to revise the curriculum to put intelligent design in there." Specifically, the "they" Schafersman is rallying against are the members and affiliates of the Discovery Institute, based in Seattle.
The Discovery Institute adamantly denied using the public hearing as a forum to push intelligent design into the science curriculum. "We absolutely are not trying to have evolution removed from textbooks," said Rob Crowther, Discovery Institute's media and public relations spokesperson, in an interview. "We are not asking for anything additional to be added to textbooks like an alternate theory. We don't promote any theory like creationism. We're not asking for intelligent design to be included." Instead, said Crowther, the institute is looking for evolutionary theory to be "fully and completely presented in textbooks. By that we mean that all scientific evidence &emdash; both the strengths and weaknesses &emdash; should be presented."
However, the Discovery Institute's members do include some of the foremost thinkers on the subject of intelligent design, including William Dembski of Baylor University and Michael Behe of Lehigh University. Regardless of its members' religious affiliations, the Discovery Institute's goals are clear. "We're hoping that the Board of Education will recommend textbooks that will uphold the law in regard to presenting those strengths and weaknesses," said Crowther.
To that effect, the Discovery Institute rated the biology textbooks with an eye toward adequately explaining evolutionary theory's weaknesses. The "best" textbook only received an average grade: a C-minus. For the other 10 textbooks, the Discovery Institute claimed the books contained "material that is so factually misleading, and that ignores the scientific literature so completely, that unless they are substantially revised they may be totally unsuitable for use in biology classrooms."
On the list of the 10 "worst" books was the Prentice-Hall textbook Biology, authored by Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine. Although the book did not fail any category, it received an overall rating of D-minus for what the institute saw as its inadequate explanation of weaknesses in evolutionary theory.
Miller claimed the Discovery Institute unequally evaluated evolutionary theory over other biological theories. "For some reason, they're not looking for weaknesses of the cell theory, or the germ theory of disease, or the phloem theory of phloem-transported plants," said Miller, a professor at Brown University, in an interview. "Therefore, what they would like publishers to do is to present biology as 'We were pretty sure about everything and there's one thing that's shaky and that's evolution.'"
The Discovery Institute suggested that because evolutionary theories are always being reexamined in the scientific community, there should be more room for public discussion. "For us, [it is important] that the public understands that there's a legitimate public debate. We don't have to be afraid to teach the controversy. If you go to Asia and other places in the world, they pull Darwinian evolution apart from every angle, because they don't have the cultural baggage that we do," Crowther said.
Nancy Bryson knows that first hand. Bryson, a chemistry professor at the Mississippi University for Women, gave a presentation in February titled "Critical Thinking on Evolution," which included thoughts on alternatives to Darwinian evolution. After the talk, a senior professor of biology derided the speech as "religion masquerading as science." The day following the lecture, the university's vice president of academic affairs requested Bryson's resignation. Bryson maintained it was her controversial presentation that incited the resignation request. She was one of several out-of-state parties who testified in front of the Texas State Board of Education.
"The Texas SBOE should hear this story, because it is the classic case of a self-styled evolution expert ... shouting down legitimate concerns about Darwinism rather than collegially addressing those concerns," wrote Bryson in an e-mail. "The take-home message for the students &emdash; who were uniformly supportive of me &emdash; is that some theories are so sacrosanct that one will get ridiculed and even fired for challenging them."
The university later renewed Bryson's contract, protecting Bryson'sright to free speech, but her beliefs and whether they should be written in a high school science textbook had little bearing on the question of 3A. The real thrust of Bryson's testimony came instead from her background in physical chemistry and her belief that there are flaws in the thermodynamics of current origin-of-life scenarios. "From my studies, I am convinced that Darwinism has significant flaws," Bryson wrote. "To conceal these from students &emdash; who, in my experience, often accept uncritically what they are told by authority figures &emdash; is to be dishonest."
This uncritical acceptance is the crux of the emotional debate over science textbooks. Clause 3A specifically outlines that Texas students must be able to "analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations." However, Bryson's testimony may ultimately detract from the decision to put a textbook on the "non-conforming" list or not. Nothing about the state board's evaluation of the 3A clause requires alternate theories to Darwinian evolution to receive equal time in the classroom with traditional, TEKS-required material.
In a 1987 case, Edwards v. Aguillard, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's "Creationism Act," which attempted to prohibit teaching evolution theory if not accompanied by creation theory. Similarly, an Arkansas federal court ruled that a "balanced treatment" of both creationism and Darwinian evolution in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Likewise, if the Texas legislature gets involved in the textbook debate, any decision that the State Board of Education makes may be overturned, and the limited power the panel members currently have to place textbooks on the "non-conforming" list could be revoked. In the revision of the Texas Education Code in 1995, the state legislature truncated the board's powers, ruling the Board of Education could not modify textbook content beyond ensuring books met the "Knowledge and Skills" requirements, were free of factual errors and met the binding regulations. This reform quickly followed controversy that the Board of Education was unduly changing information in science textbooks to suit its own ideological agendas. However, even though the board's power has been limited, the definition of "factual error" may be yet another fine point that relegates a textbook to the "non-conforming" list.
What constitutes science "fact" came under fire in the first public hearing from board member, Gail Lowe, who took umbrage with most textbooks' inclusion of the Kettlewell moth studies. The study describes the change over time of moth populations from light-colored to dark, coinciding with the rise of industrialization, increased pollution of natural environments by dark-colored soot and subsequent protection for camouflaged moths. The controversy revolves around the picture of a light-colored moth form on a dark tree trunk, versus a dark moth on a dark tree trunk, which Lowe claimed is falsified.
In its review, the Discovery Institute lambasted textbooks that included the photograph without an explanation that the picture was "staged," giving most textbooks the rating of "F" in that category. Ken Miller, whose textbook did not include the Kettlewell study, railed against the institute for implying the picture represented a factual error, calling that tactic "unconscionable." Miller said the picture had only been used for a visual reference. "Those photographs have nothing to do with the study itself," Miller said. "It's like taking stuffed bunny rabbits in the snow in a museum diorama, and saying that the grey bunny is easy to see against the snow while the white bunny is not."
But even before the board's scheduled November ruling, publishers have already responded to the Discovery Institute's review. Glencoe/McGraw Hill, the nation's leading educational publisher for grades six through 12, agreed with part of the institute's evaluation. In its rewrite of the Kettlewell study, Glencoe intends to amend the photograph to include only the moth's scientific name. The publishing company Holt, Rinehart & Winston entirely removed the Kettlewell studies, as well as the controversial drawings of comparative embryonic stages from its Texas edition biology book. "Throughout Holt Biology Texas," the publisher wrote in their response, "the theory of evolution is described as a true scientific theory that will be refined and improved in the light of new evidence."
Whether refining and improving evolutionary theory is a "weakness" or whether it is part of the scientific process, the Texas Board of Education, schoolteachers, scientists and book publishers have more than just a passing concern for the interpretation of TEKS clause 3A and the definition of "factual error." Yet, as Texas Education Agency spokesperson Marilyn Keuhlem said, everyone at the hearing got a chance to speak. "It was democracy in action," said Kuehlem. "We allowed everybody a chance to speak and everybody had their say and their opinion on the public hearing, and we think it went very well. People were civil and polite and everybody had a chance to voice her opinion. And that was the important point."
Surprisingly, the most interested party in the Texas State Board of Education's November decision to blacklist certain biology texts does not come from the scientific or religious communities. According to Steve Schafersman, the most valuable players in this debate may be the businessmen of Texas.
"The reason I keep winning is that Texas businessmen don't want to have our curriculum perverted," said Schafersman. Schafersman believes businessmen desire a biology curriculum comparable to other states' so that Texan students can compete in the nation's workforce. What businessmen see as essential communication and critical thinking skills may cast the deciding vote on which textbooks Texas adopts. Schafersman believes this fact is going to help him "win" the textbook debate, keeping the state board from "messing with textbooks." "The business people want a good state educational curriculum; we don't want it watered-down or censored," said Schafersman. "That's why we're going to keep winning."
Julia C. Keller is a freelance writer living in Boston.