Texas’ New Science Curriculum: Win, Lose, or Draw?
By Clare Wuellner

On March 27th, the Texas State Board of Education approved the science curriculum. The good news was that the wording “strengths and weaknesses,” which required students be introduced to erroneous “evidence” that seemingly weakened the theory of evolution, was voted out of the science curriculum.

The bad news was that they made nine amendments that were just as unscientific as teaching “weaknesses” of theories, but that will hopefully not do as much damage. (For a complete breakdown of the amendments and an evaluation of their potential use and abuse, see Paul Murray’s “Cultural Noise “ blog entry for April 1st 2009, <http://culturalnoise.blogspot.com/2009/04/summary-of-sboe-butchering-of-science.html>.)

Because the damage these nine amendments will do depends on how textbook publishers respond and how the 2011 State Board of Education weilds its responsibility, both anti-science and pro-science folks see potential for a “win.”

Between now and January 2011,

• Texas will have a gubernatorial election (the governor appoints the SBOE chair);
• seven of the fifteen SBOE members will be up for re-election;
• Don McLeroy’s nomination to chairman of the SBOE will not be confirmed because the Senate is not likely to give the 2/3 majority vote required. This is wonderful news! BUT what is likely to happen now is that Gov. Perry will nominate one of the other young-earth creationists to be chair during the summer, when the Senate is not in session, thus circumventing the approval process. Bottom line: we don’t know who the new chair of the SBOE will be;
• there are at this writing seventeen bills introduced in the Texas Legislature that could have serious impact on the SBOE, the science curriculum, or both (an excellent resource for tracking these bills is at http://www.tfn.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Bills2009);
• pro-science organizations, like CFI Austin, will be campaigning for the best possible interpretation of the new science curriculum standards in textbooks; and
• unfortunately anti-science organizations will be campaigning equally hard for the interpretation of the new science curriculum standards to be as pro-creationist as possible.

So, there you have it in a nutshell. There are too many variables for anyone to predict an outcome. For now, the battle rages on.