What can be done to stop the inexorable march of intelligent design? It's a fantastic hoodwink because it sounds scientific enough to allow people on the margin to accept it as science. Majorities support it and groups like the Thomas More Law Center are willing to pour millions of dollars into defending school boards in court. After a few more years of judicial appointments, the courts will become useless for defending science from religion.
It has been suggested that the backstop for evolution and global competitiveness in the life sciences is probably the universities, where actual scienists, not parents with too much time on their hands, pick the textbooks. It would be very effective for top colleges, public and private, to tell school districts that they can teach whatever they like, but that their students would have to take remedial classes as a prerequesite for introductory biology and organic chemistry.
An important test case for whether this would work is on its way in California. Six students at a California Christian school and the Association of Christian Schools International are suing the state university system for failing to certify some of the school's classes, including science classes built around a textbook produced by Bob Jones University:
For texts, [UC spokeswoman Ravi] Poorsina said, the university wants comprehensive and instructive overviews. A university fact sheet says publishers sometimes acknowledge their books are mainly to teach religion. The sheet has this excerpt from Bob Jones's "Biology for Christian Schools," used in unapproved courses, "The people who have prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second."
It doesn't get much clearer than this. Courts will make a decision that will likely reverberate for some time: is it viewpoint discrimination when the viewpoint gets in the way of the legitimate nondiscriminatory goal of making sure students are ready for college-level material?
Law student that I am, I did a Lexis search on just this topic. In Chiras v. Miller, 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 14177, the Northern District of Texas upheld the State Board of Education's decision to not subsidize school district purchase of an environmental sciences textbook that board members said was not conservative enough for the state and unfair to the oil and gas industry. Chiras, the book's writer, claimed viewpoint discrimination.
In denying Chiras's complaint, the court applied the "legitimate pedagogical concerns" test from Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier and found that the test allows for viewpoint discrimination:
Plaintiffs allege that Defendants rejected Chiras's textbook because they disagreed with Chiras's conclusion that the root cause of environmental problems is economic growth, because the oil and gas industry's position was not adequately presented, and because the textbook did not accurately reflect the traditional, conservative values of most Texans. Because Hazelwood does not require viewpoint neutrality, these alleged motives for rejecting Chiras's textbook may constitute "legitimate pedagogical concerns" even though they are viewpoint-discriminatory.
Chiras isn't controlling precedent, but I think that the logic of Hazelwood as presented here would apply to a state university system choosing whether or not to certify high school classes as meeting their standards.
UPDATE: Wow. I didn't know how non-scientific the science book in question is. Another blogger has a sample page to gasp and gawk at.
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