The NY Times covers the Chris Comer resignationtoday. This story is a wonderful window into the events transpiring within the Texas Education Agency — they are gearing up to shut down biology education in the whole damn state. And why now?

The standards, adopted in 1998, are due for a 10-year review and possible revision after the 15-member elected State Board of Education meets in February, with particular ramifications for the multibillion-dollar textbook industry. The chairman of the panel, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist and Sunday School teacher at Grace Bible Church in College Station, has lectured favorably in the past about intelligent design.

There’s a major standards review coming up, and the guy running the show is a bible-thumping clown of a dentist. Note the hint of the wider ramifications: Texas is a huge textbook market, and what goes down in Texas affects what publishers put in books that are marketed nationwide. It is time to start thinking about ending Texas’s influence. If you’re a teacher, a school board member, or an involved parent, and if you get an opportunity to evaluate textbooks for your local schools, look carefully at your biology offerings. If you’re reviewing a textbook and discover that it has been approved for use in Texas, then strike it from your list. It’s too dumb and watered down for your kids.

Let’s hit the publishers where it hurts. Tailoring their books for the Texas market should cut them out of the national market.

Other news to keep your eyes open for today: the Discovery Institute will be having a press conference in Iowa in a few hours. They claim to have juicy revelations in the Guillermo Gonzalez case; I suspect it will be something along the lines of someone on the tenure review committee called Intelligent Design creationism a mean name in an email somewhere. Anyway, we may hear more from either Tara or an Evil Monkey later today.

The creationist blogs will probably be full of indignant outrage over the Gonzalez case for a while, but don’t expect a whisper from them on the Comer case.

Now the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal is running an op-ed critical of Ken Ham.

There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. The tax-exempt ministry, Answers in Genesis, and its new $28 million creation museum in Boone County has become the de facto source of science information to thousands of Christians who are throwing away reason and 500 years of scientific inquiry and replacing it with ignorant dogma.

And it just gets fiercer and fiercer from there…

We do not need citizens who are closed-minded, anti-knowledge fundamentalists who want to see the world move closer to the Biblical prophecies of an Armageddon. (AIG also believes in a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation.) Unfortunately, the creation museum in Northern Kentucky has been very successful at encouraging their non-thinking, anti-reasoning philosophy, especially among young, dinosaur-loving children. Inaction in this matter may come back to haunt us in the future.

Now that’s what I like to see in our media!

It’s good to see that the Austin American-Statesman can see the obvious:

Is this state’s education agency being driven by a political orthodoxy so fierce that it dumped its science director for passing along a harmless e-mail? It’s possible.

Chris Comer was director of the science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency for nearly a decade when she was forced to resign recently. Her offense, as unbelievable as it is to relate, was forwarding an e-mail message about a presentation by an author critical of the intelligent design approach to science education.

We knew when McLeroy was appointed to run the agency (and before) that Texas education was going to be subordinated to promoting a religious doctrine. Maybe this little episode will finally wake a few people up.

The Discovery Institute is spinning wildly to make excuses for West’s performance on Friday, and to declare him the “winner”.

I got two calls last night about Dr. John West’s presentation at the University of Minnesota on Darwinism’s fathership of eugenics. It appears that the scholarly and well-delivered lecture, derived from the new West book, Darwin Day in America, was successful in influencing the thinking of a largely skeptical audience. (The dyspeptic and ad hominem blogger/biologist Dr. P.Z. Myers was there and brought a Darwinist claque. West generously introduced him and acknowledged him as Minnesota’s Richard Dawkins, which is about right.)

[Read more…]

A reminder: tonight is the creationist schlockfest at the University of Minnesota. Smart people will meet at the Campus Club, on the fourth floor of the Coffman Union, between 5:30 and 6:45, for pre-seminar preparation.

See you there!

Mark Mathis, the guy who did the interviews for the creationist movie Expelled, has been doing the Christian talk radio circuit lately. He was on in the Twin Cities yesterday, although I missed it … but he’s about to go live on WAMT 1190 in Florida, at 11:05 ET. Listen in, or even call in…make him dance.

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The call-in numbers are 407-273-1190 and 888-300-3776, by the way. And the KKMS interview in the Twin Cities might be accessible here, I haven’t tried it myself.

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OK, all done. What an amusing show! Mathis is your classic, standard creationist, constantly claiming (falsely) that evolution is about nothing but pure chance. He made the usual bogus statement that we biologist teach evolution as a fact rather than as a theory, which is precisely the reverse: we consider theory to be a higher order description of a phenomenon than a mere collection of facts, so we teach it as a theory and thereby emphasize its importance. We’d be trivializing it if we taught it as just a fact.

He also played the equivocation game: these are just different “views” and we should let students learn about “views” and express their “views”. Science isn’t just about opinions. We build a story on a framework of hard evidence, every step of the way. We don’t just say that such-and-such is our opinion, we have to present observations and experiments in support. We cannot do that with ID. They have no experiments. They have no observations that can’t be explained in better ways by evolutionary biology.

Finally, he was rather frantic about trying to turn the audience against me by declaring me an atheist, even plugging Pharyngula and urging everyone to go look and see that, oooh, PZ Myers has an atheist blog!

That ploy doesn’t work on me. I proudly admit to being a militant atheist and own up to my beliefs, unlike the Intelligent Design creationists, who are clearly ashamed to be Christians.

Texas Citizens for Science has posted a summary of the political pressures:

TEA has a new policy, one of neutrality between biological evolution and Intelligent Design Creationism. This new policy was put in place when Dr. Don McLeroy–an outspoken Creationist and activist for Intelligent Design Creationism and its marketing campaign–was appointed the new Chair of the State Board of Education (SBOE). By publicizing a lecture by a Louisiana State University professor of the philosophy of science that supported evolution–as required by the state’s science standards–and opposed Intelligent Design Creationism, Chris Comer ran afoul of the new policy and was asked to resign or be fired immediately. The memo to her from the TEA contained several other excuses, all of which were bogus, trumped-up, or common among employees. Amazingly, this memo is now available for the public to read thanks to the American-Statesman (see below), and it reveals the lengths to which the top administrators of our state’s public education agency will go to silence dissent from their new policy of not criticizing Creationism.

The real reason she was forced to resign is because the top TEA administrators and some SBOE members wanted her out of the picture before the state science standards–the science TEKS–were reviewed, revised, and rewritten next year. Plans are underway by some SBOE members and TEA administrators to diminish the requirement to teach about evolutionary biology in the Biology TEKS and to require instead that biology instructors “Teach the Controversy” about the “weaknesses” of evolution, that is, teach the Creationist-inspired and -created bogus controversy about evolution that doesn’t exist within legitimate science. There are no scientific weaknesses with biological evolution as the natural process is understood by scientists. At the level at which it is taught in high school, evolutionary biology has no weaknesses, gaps, or problems. Therefore, it is duplicitous to pretend such “weaknesses” and “controversy” exist.

I knew McLeroy was trouble from the very beginning.

We now have a copy of the vile, biased e-mail that cost Chris Comer her job. It’s unbelievably one-sided and horrible — I swear, it’s like using your office network to harrass co-workers with explicit porn. It turns out that this offensive e-mail was from the NCSE, and referenced the Center for Inquiry; if only it had mentioned the ACLU, it would have achieved a hellish trifecta.

The mind-blowing e-mail is below the fold, to protect innocent eyes.

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In the Dover trial, you got the palpable sense that the creationists were terrified of Barbara Forrest’s testimony. I did not know quite how deeply the dread was until today, though: the Texas director os science curriculum, Chris Comer, was pressured into resigning because she forwarded an e-mail announcing a talk by Barbara Forrest. One Lizzette Reynolds, Republican hack and senior advisor to the Texas Education Agency, was freaking horrified.

This is highly inappropriate. I believe this is an offense that calls for termination or, at the very least, reassignment of responsibilities.

Barbara Forrest is a philosopher of science with special expertise in creationism. Inappropriate? She’s exactly the kind of person boards of education ought to consult before going down the road of attempting to legislate religion into the public schools.

This is something that the State Board, the Governor’s Office and members of the Legislature would be extremely upset to see because it assumes this is a subject that the agency supports.

Well, that’s honest, at least. I did assume that the Texas Education Agency would support science education. I guess I was wrong. The situation is really bad, though, if learning about science is a subject that gets the Texas Legislature upset.

This is the word from Chris Comer’s boss:

the forwarding of this event announcement by Ms. Comer, as the Director of Science, from her TEA email account constitutes much more than just sharing information. Ms. Comer’s email implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker’s position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral. Thus, sending this email compromises the agency’s role in the TEKS revision process by creating the perception that TEA has a biased position on a subject directly related to the science education TEKS.

Whoa. The Texas Education Agency is neutral on the subject of teaching good science? It’s bad if the TEA takes a position on the subject of science education?

Apparently, TEA members are supposed to close their eyes and maximize ignorance before making decisions. I really feel sorry for Texas.

Otherwise, though, someone unleash Barbara Forrest and set her to smiting the creationists. It’s impressive the way they have this knee-jerk terror of her soft-spoken words.

(You can get more commentary on this issue from
TfK
and the
Austringer.)