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The school board at Cranston RI racked up a $150,000 legal bill in their foolhardy attempt to defend the blatantly unconstitutional prayer banner in the Cranston High School. And now they’ve decided it’s unfair to expect them to pay the whole thing. Their solution? Split the bill with the taxpayers, 50/50. [UPDATE: A commenter informs [...]
Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
Aiming for stupidity
April 17th, 2012 
Deacon Duncan The Happy Scientist took a look at the test questions for Florida’s FCAT exam, used to assess whether or not fifth graders have achieved expected levels of scientific literacy for their age group, and found some problems. I expected the Test Item Specifications to be a tremendous help in writing simulated FCAT questions. What I [...]
Preach the controversy
April 11th, 2012 Deacon Duncan Chalk up another win for the “Preach the Controversy” gambit injecting creationism into public schools. The governor of Tennessee has decided not to sign the bill, and not to veto it either. This will allow the bill to become law without necessarily making the governor personally accountable for its contents—which are pretty bad. In any [...]
Conservative trust in science in sharp decline
March 29th, 2012 Deacon Duncan From the color-me-surprised department comes news of this study showing a very clear trend towards anti-science hostility among conservatives and/or people who regularly attend church. Relying on data from the 1974-2010 waves of the nationally representative General Social Survey, the study found that people who self-identified as conservatives began the period with the highest trust [...]
Posted in Current Events, Denialism, Education, Politics, Science, Secularism, Society 
10 Comments »On the effectiveness of prayer
January 16th, 2012 Deacon Duncan From time to time various people attempt to study the effect of prayer under real-world conditions, and it occurs to me that we have ideal conditions for undertaking such a study right now. The Cranston West High School has recently concluded a 48-year experiment in which students were exposed to a specific “School Prayer” on [...]
Florida committee takes aim at First Amendment
November 3rd, 2011 Deacon Duncan Looks like some “concerned Christians” in Florida are setting themselves up for a fairly blatant violation of the First Amendment. This time, however, it’s not going to be a local school board. It’s the state itself. School prayer is one step closer to being legalized in Florida after a proposal was passed in a state [...]
October Challenge
October 2nd, 2011 Deacon Duncan If there could ever be such a thing as a good religion, I think it would have to be based around three core principles: integrity, community, and purpose. Integrity: being true to yourself and those around you. Community: living with peace, tolerance, and charity towards those around you Purpose: making life better for yourself and [...]
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