Louisiana Coalition for Science

By Barbara Forrest

The new school year is just getting under way in Louisiana, and we have already flunked. Just as predicted here last year, negative fallout continues to accumulate from the legislature’s passage and Gov. Jindal’s signing of the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act. First, in February of this year, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology announced that, because of Gov. Jindal’s signing the LSEA — despite pleas from scientists and concerned citizens around the state and the nation that he veto it — SICB will hold no more meetings in Louisiana while the law is on the books. (See LCFS’s response to this news.) Now, because of the passage of this creationist law and the subsequent gutting of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education policy that implements it, a survey of state science standards in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach gives Louisiana an F. The Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), aided and abetted by the Discovery Institute, initially created this situation by promoting stealth creationist legislation disguised as an “academic freedom” bill, which was sponsored in the 2008 legislative session by Sen. Ben Nevers. Nevers stated that he introduced the bill on the LFF’s behalf because “They believe that scientific data related to creationism should be discussed when dealing with Darwin’s theory.” The legislature (except for three members of the House of Representatives) and the governor assisted by respectively passing and signing the bill into law. In doing so, they have undermined the Louisiana state science standards, which govern the teaching of science in Louisiana public schools.

In “Why Science Standards Are Important to a Strong Science Curriculum and How States Measure Up,” Dr. Louise S. Mead and Anton Mates of the National Center for Science Education survey the science standards of 49 states and the District of Columbia. (Download the pdf here. Html text is here.) Mead and Mates point out that science standards are frequent targets of creationist attacks: “[T]here is no other arena in which the religious controversy surrounding evolution plays out to such a detrimental degree as in the generation of poor science standards.” Louisiana’s standards were given a grade of C in the well-known 2000 study conducted by Lawrence Lerner under the auspices of the Thomas Fordham Institute, Good Science, Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States. (Paul R. Gross led a 2005 update of the Lerner study; Gross’s survey, using a slightly different grading scale than Lerner’s, awarded Louisiana a “B.”)

Science standards are the most important safeguards of quality science education in each state. As Lerner said in his 2000 study, “They are meant to serve as the frame to which everything else is attached, the desired outcome that drives countless other decisions about how best to attain it. If a state’s standards are unsatisfactory, some of its other reform efforts are apt to be less likely to succeed, maybe even futile.” Louisiana’s standards, which both the Lerner and the Mead-Mates studies judged to be adequate, have now been undermined by the Louisiana Science Education Act, which permits teachers to introduce creationist critiques of evolution into public school science classes. Moreover, Mead and Mates point out, the policy that the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) adopted to implement the law made matters even worse.

In the case of Louisiana, there is certainly reason to think that . . . evolution will be invidiously singled out for attention and that creationist critiques of evolution will be used. When Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted a policy about what types of supplementary classroom materials will, and will not, be allowable under the new law, a draft provision that ‘materials that teach creationism or intelligent design… shall be prohibited from use in science class’ was deleted. [See the LCFS post here.]

As if that were not bad enough, the LSEA’s permitting the use of creationist “supplementary” textbooks in addition to state-approved textbooks effectively functions as a disclaimer of the reliability of the state-approved textbooks, which Mead and Mates also point out. Here is Mead and Mates’s summary of Louisiana’s situation:

The coverage of evolution in Louisiana’s state science standards is actually adequate and would have received a grade of C but for the Louisiana Science Education Act. Following the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) was ordered to establish science education guidelines consonant with this act. These guidelines, passed in January 2009, state that BESE is to provide ‘support and guidance of teachers regarding effective ways to understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review concepts, laws, principles, and scientific theories.’ To this end, teachers are permitted to use ‘supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials,’ save for those prohibited by BESE after a lengthy and onerous review process. The Louisiana Department of Education proposed that these guidelines forbid ‘materials that teach creationism or intelligent design or that advance the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind,’ but BESE removed this caveat after objections by creationist organizations and the sponsor of the LSEA [Senator Ben Nevers]. The brief but adequate treatment of evolution in the state science standards is completely undermined by the LSEA, and the standards now score an F.

Louisiana is not the only state to flunk this evaluation. We are in the company of Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. But we are the only state that flunked for passing legislation to give teachers the “academic freedom” to mislead children about evolution and the true nature of science.