The Weekend Wonk: Educating for Ignorance – It’s “School Choice” Week!

The video above contains some pieces from my video documenting the 2012 Heartland Institute Climate Conference in Chicago – including some clips that did not make the original cut.  I wanted originally to  spotlight Heartland’s focus on destroying the American Public School system, as you can see.

For the last 40 years, the ‘conservative” movement has attempted to further it’s ends by manipulating the most virulent, ignorant, and fanatical elements of the fundamentalist Christian right. We can see in today’s Republican party how well that strategy has worked out.  The same people think they can use the fanatical Christian right as a trojan horse – to move Anti science, Climate denial disinformation into the school system under the shadow of the “Teach the Controversy” Creationism movement.

It’s School Choice Week – celebrating the right of your children to be taught that the earth might be 5 billion, or 5000 years old, and to make up their own minds about the science.  They will also have the right to be taught that maybe the last 150 years of physics is wrong, heat seeking missiles don’t really seek heat, CO2 lasers don’t really lase, and heat trapping gases can’t really trap heat – that they should “think for themselves”, and, well, listen to Rush Limbaugh instead of the National Academy.

The celebration is supported by a rogues gallery of the usual suspect right wing think tanks, like the Heartland Institute, Cato,  Freedomworks, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  Why would a group of far right wing, mostly libertarian, Ayn Randian types be in bed with the tongue talkers and snake handlers of the creationist movement?

Chris Mooney in Slate:

All across the country—most recently, in the state of Texas—local battles over the teaching of evolution are taking on a new complexion. More and more, it isn’t just evolution under attack, it’s also the teaching of climate science. The National Center for Science Education, the leading group defending the teaching of evolution across the country, has even broadened its portfolio: Now it protects climate education too.

How did these issues get wrapped up together?

There is the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” theory. In other words, anti-evolutionists and climate deniers were both getting dumped on so much by the scientific community that they sort of naturally joined forces. And that makes sense: We know that in general, people gather their issue stances in bunches, because those stances travel together in a group (often under the aegis of a political party)

But there’s also the “declining trust in science” theory, according to which political conservatives have, in general, become distrustful of the scientific community (we have data showing this is the case), and this has infected how they think about several different politicized scientific issues. And who knows: Perhaps the distrust started with the evolution issue. It is easy to imagine how a Christian conservative who thinks liberal scientists are full of it on evolution would naturally distrust said scientists on other issues as well.

When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.

 The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”

Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.

Infiltrating and subverting the charter-school movement has allowed Responsive Ed to carry out its religious agenda—and it is succeeding. Operating more than 65 campuses in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana, Responsive Ed receives more than $82 million in taxpayer money annually, and it is expanding, with 20 more Texas campuses opening in 2014.

Charter schools may be run independently, but they are still public schools, and through an open records request, I was able to obtain a set of Responsive Ed’s biology “Knowledge Units,” workbooks that Responsive Ed students must complete to pass biology. These workbooks both overtly and underhandedly discredit evidence-based science and allow creationism into public-school classrooms.

A favorite creationist claim is that there is “uncertainty” in the fossil record, and Responsive Ed does not disappoint. The workbook cites the “lack of a single source for all the rock layers as an argument against evolution.”

As the video above demonstrates, the fossil interests that seek to delay responses to climate change are perfectly willing to piggyback on top of the fundamentalist movement to introduce creationism into science curriculums.

Policymic:

In the past five years since 2008, among the hottest years in U.S. history, ALEC has introduced its “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” in 11 states, or over one-fifth of the statehouses nationwide. The bill has passed in four states, an undeniable form of “big government” this “free market” organization decries in its own literature.

ALEC’s “model bills” are written by and for corporate lobbyists alongside conservative legislators at its annual meetings. ALEC raises much of its corporate funding from the fossil fuel industry, which in turn utilizes ALEC as a key — though far from the only — vehicle to ram through its legislative agenda through in the states.

A DeSmogBlog investigation last year found that the Environmental Literacy Improvement Act’s origins date back to 2000.

The Act’s creation is directly connected to the ongoing efforts of another corporate-funded group, the Heartland Institute (of “Heartland Institute Exposed” fame), a group well plugged into the climate change denial machine.

Slate:

As the map below illustrates, creationism in schools isn’t restricted to schoolhouses in remote villages where the separation of church and state is considered less sacred. If you live in any of these states, there’s a good chance your tax money is helping to convince some hapless students that evolution (the basis of all modern biological science, supported by everything we know about geology, genetics, paleontology, and other fields) is some sort of highly contested scientific hypothesis as credible as “God did it.”

NYTimes:

History and economics texts are also infused with fundamentalist theology and an unabashedly conservative viewpoint. The Great Depression, one says, was exaggerated to move the country toward socialism, and it described “The Grapes of Wrath” as propaganda.

Frances Paterson, a professor at Valdosta State University in Georgia who has studied the books, said they “frequently resemble partisan, political literature more than they do the traditional textbooks used in public schools.”

Mr. Arnold, the headmaster of the Covenant Christian Academy in Cumming, Ga., confirmed that his school used those texts but said they were part of a larger curriculum.

“You have to keep in mind that the curriculum goes beyond the textbook,” Mr. Arnold said. “Not only do we teach the students that creation is the way the world was created and that God is in control and he made all things, we also teach them what the false theories of the world are, such as the Big Bang theory and Darwinism. We teach those as fallacies.”