If you hear there will be discussion in front of your school board about “Teaching the Controversy” . . .

this year, or in the next couple of years, it will probably involve materials coming from the Discovery Institute, Christian fundamentalists’ front group for trying to tear down evolution. Here is one example of “Teaching the Controversy” this year from NC, but you know it is happening elsewhere.

In the wake of the Dover Disaster (a disaster for the Discovery Institute specifically and creationists/fundamentalists/evangelicals in general) the Discovery Institute has gone about trying to find ways around textbook requirements in order to get their ideas into public school classrooms. That tactic? “Supplementary materials”. As noted by John Timmer (introduced below), supplementary classroom materials often don’t have to meet the same standards as textbooks.

ArsTechnica recently brought in . . . whatever term you use for someone with the following credentials:

John got a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry (yes, that’s possible) from
Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology
from the University of California, Berkeley. He’s done over a
decade’s worth of research in genetics and developmental biology at
places like Cornell Medical College and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center. In addition to being Ars’ science content wrangler, John
still teaches at Cornell and does freelance writing, editing, and
programming, often with a scientific focus.

to review the Discovery Institute’s new Supplementary Materials.

I would quote the rather damming final summary paragraph, but that would only distract and take the focal point away from the fact that the body of the review is a masterpiece in disembowling of these substandard “educational” materials. Here is a sample:

This presentation can also be considered a “bait and switch”—take a
real scientific controversy, tell your readers that it exists, and then
substitute in the controversy you’d like them to think exists without
comment. This is obvious in the section on the fossil record, where the
Reply section contains a long list of academic discussions of the
limitations in our collections of fossils. That section wraps up by
claiming these limitations, “have led some scientists to doubt that the
fossil record supports the case for common descent.”

Who are those scientists? Well, poor Malcolm Gordon (who actually wrote
in favor of common descent) gets dragged out again, but the rest aren’t
actually scientists, nor are their publications peer-reviewed science.
Instead, there’s a book by an Italian creationist and another by
Discovery Institute Fellows, including some of EE’s authors. The bait of real issues has been switched to a statement that isn’t actually supported by the footnote.

As a libertarian and someone who believes in the principles of federalism, I am generally in favor of decisions relating to educational standards being handled as locally as reasonably possible. However, as a strong believer in the principle of the separation of church and state, I believe there is a valid rational prohibition against either overtly or subtly trying to insert religious instruction into public schools, and that’s exactly the direction, the kind of pandering, that these materials support.

If our local school board, or the state educational board, started flirting with these materials or the DI, you can be certain I will be circulating this article to them. Just say to no non-science (in this case the similarity to nonsense being intentional) in science class.