Evolving controversy 

School boards caught in a new Darwinian debate

It’s been 80 years since a Tennessee teacher was charged with violating a ban on the teaching of evolution in the celebrated Scopes Monkey Trial. Since then, American courts have consistently ruled against the teaching of Biblical creationism in public school science classrooms.

Nonetheless, the evolution wars are heating up once again. Modern evolution critics have launched a sophisticated new campaign to “teach the controversy” over evolution that’s being argued in local school district boardrooms across the country. This new approach to evolution teaching, which critics say is the same old attack in slick new packaging, is resonating with the public and winning endorsements from President Bush, members of Congress, state legislatures, and state and local school boards.

Because overseeing curriculum is a major part of every school board’s job, increasing numbers of school board members across the country are finding they have little choice but to enter the newest skirmishes in the decades-long battle over evolution.

The newest anti-evolution campaign

“By the late 1980s, most educated Americans — and virtually all professional biologists — thought creationism was dead,” says Oakland-based author Gordy Slack, a contributing editor at the California Academy of Science’s California Wild magazine. Slack, who is writing a book about “the high-stakes political and cultural warfare” surrounding the evolution debate, has been tracking the movement for years, interviewing scientists, theologians and intelligent design advocates.

“The creationist movement is upright again and on the move,” he says, “but now it’s wearing a lab coat over its vestments.”

School boards on both sides of the evolution debate have run into legal trouble. Although most cases involve lawsuits against boards that have tried to undermine the teaching of evolution, a California district wound up in hot water recently for refusing to adopt changes to the curriculum.

Two school board members and a number of administrators in Placer County’s Roseville Joint Union High School District are being sued by a parent who lobbied relentlessly — and without success — to convince the board to adopt his anti-evolution “Quality Science Education Policy.” The district said the proposed changes would have weakened the science instruction and violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

At the beginning of the school year, a coalition of Christian schools filed suit against the University of California on behalf of six college-bound students, who took high school science classes based on anti-evolution texts. The lawsuit alleges that UC discriminated against these students on the basis of religion, by refusing to count these classes as eligible to satisfy science course requirements for admission.

Glenn Branch, a full-time defender of the teaching of evolution in public school science classes, gets worried whenever he hears that a local school board has gotten embroiled in — or dragged into — a debate over whether alternatives to evolution belong in the science curriculum.

“In my opinion, when school boards are involved, it’s usually a bad sign,” says Branch, deputy director of the Oakland-based National Center for Science Education. “It’s not the board’s job to tell science teachers what to teach.”

Board members are, however, in the cross-hairs of both pro- and anti-evolutionary forces, because they play such a central role in overseeing local school districts.

In California, the Education Code gives school boards responsibility for ensuring that course content is academically sound and for choosing instructional materials that are in line with state curricular frameworks and academic standards.

The state’s academic science standards explicitly require lessons on Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution, and an explanation of “how the independent lines of evidence from geology, fossils and comparative anatomy” support the theory. A special policy statement adopted by the California Board of Education forbids the teaching of religious or philosophical beliefs in science class.

Branch admits he may have a jaundiced view of school boards. After all, his organization generally gets called in cases where, as he sees it, school boards have ignored prevailing scientific wisdom and gone on the offensive against evolution — sometimes for explicitly religious reasons. But it’s also true that some school boards are dragged kicking and screaming into the debate by anti-evolutionary activists intent on injecting their views into the curriculum.

Consider the case now being tried in Pennsylvania. Parents sued the Dover district after the school board ignored the recommendations of the science community and their own teachers. The district included a statement in its curriculum warning students that evolution is just a “theory” and “not fact” and inviting them to learn more about an alternative explanation called intelligent design. When teachers refused to read the statement, the board directed the superintendent to do so.

Branch and evolution supporters are busier than ever these days. The newest efforts to sow doubts about the scientific veracity of evolution are far more sophisticated than past creationist efforts.

“For school boards, the debate is a no-win situation,” says Kerry Clegg, President of the California School Boards Association, who holds a doctorate in molecular and developmental biology and has no doubts about validity of the theory of evolution. “Both sides are taking the issue to court.”

Aided by a handful of articulate scientists, whose research is supported by conservative think tanks like Seattle’s Discovery Institute, evolution’s newest critics are asking what seems to be a reasonable question: Why not introduce students to alternatives to evolution, which, they say, is just a theory and one of many possible explanations for the history and diversification of life?

What controversy?

The only problem with “teaching the controversy,” say the nation’s leading scientists, is that as far as science is concerned, there is no controversy.

“There is no scientific debate over evolution,” says biologist Christopher Scott, a former vice chancellor at the University of California at San Francisco. In the July 2005 issue of Edutopia, a monthly magazine published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Scott defended the teaching of evolution as essential to educational excellence. “It’s easy to forget that caught in the middle of the evolution ruckus are our students — the next generation of scientists and science teachers.”

The newest evolution critique — intelligent design — argues, among other things, that living beings are made up of such an array of complex, inter-related components that they must have been designed by an intelligent creator of some kind.

By contrast, Darwin’s theory of natural selection says that living things in their present forms are the result of random genetic mutations and adaptations to different environments that have occurred over hundreds of millions of years.

Secular but not science

Unlike overtly religious creationists who believe God made the world and all living things, intelligent design backers are not specific about who or what did the designing. For this reason, they argue that their explanation is secular, not religious.

It may or may not be secular, critics argue, but it is not science. “Every bit of current experimental evidence changed and enhanced by new developments in DNA technology, new paleontological and anthropological finds support the basic premise of evolution,” says Clegg. “While some questions may still remain unanswered, these are constantly being narrowed as scientific investigation proceeds. ID does not and cannot be investigated by the scientific method. ID relies ultimately on the ‘designer,’ which is a euphemism for the ‘creator’ or ‘God,’ the existence of which can neither be proved nor disproved by the scientific method. It’s accepted on faith, and thus, is religious doctrine.”

Some districts have dealt with the issue by offering lessons on alternatives to evolution to be taught in social science or philosophy classes. A number of science teachers in districts across the country say they help their students analyze alternatives to evolution to sharpen their critical thinking skills. Fresno attorney Michael Smith, former president of the California Council of School Attorneys, advises school boards to be very wary of taking a “teach the controversy” approach to the issue. Smith, who will present a workshop titled “God on Campus” at CSBA’s Annual Education Conference in December, says the controversy over evolution is “arguably religious and not scientific.”

For that reason, he recommends that boards that want to introduce lessons on evolution critiques should do so in political science or sociology class, not science.

But most backers of intelligent design, including the handful of impressively credentialed scientists who support ID, insist that intelligent design be taught as legitimate science, not as a social or political phenomenon.

“It may be appropriate for schools to teach about intelligent design, but it is not appropriate to teach students that intelligent design is science,” says Kevin Padian, a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California and curator of Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology.

Padian is an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed against the school board in Dover, Pa. The district made national headlines when its school board became the first in the country to require that intelligent design be included in the biology curriculum. Irate parents sued, arguing that the new policy violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

Pressure to teach alternatives

Supporters of intelligent design got a big public relations boost when President George W. Bush said he favored teaching “both sides” of the issue, a sentiment echoed by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a surgeon. Rick Santorum, Republican senator from Pennsylvania, inserted language in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 that was interpreted by creationist supporters as a tacit invitation for schools to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. That language was ultimately not part of the final law, but is included in a statement released by the joint conference committee to explain how it reconciled the House and Senate versions of the NCLB bill.

Leading science education organizations say they are extremely worried that, even with the state curricular frameworks and legal precedent on their side, teachers will avoid teaching evolution for fear of sparking controversy. The National Science Teachers Association reports that three of every 10 science teachers say they are pressured by parents or students to teach non-scientific alternatives to evolution.

Phil Lafontaine, Administrator of the Math and Science Leadership Office at the California Department of Education and a former high school science teacher, says during his teaching career he sometimes encountered parents who were worried about the science curriculum. “I told them that what we teach in science must be testable,” he says, “but we’re not trying to get their children to ‘believe’ anything. We are telling them: ‘This is what science thinks on this issue.’ “

Science is not a democracy

The scientific community may be winning most of the legal victories in the evolution wars, but they are losing in the court of public opinion. Recent polls show that most Americans believe in a Biblical view of creation and favor teaching students about intelligent design as well as evolution.

In some ways, evolution advocates argue, popular opinion about Darwinism and natural selection is beside the point. Designing science curriculum should be left up to the experts in the field, they say. And while most would insist that public school science teachers must be sensitive to their students’ cultural and religious backgrounds, their job is to ensure that students understand the latest and best scientific thinking. Parents do not have the right to dictate their children’s curriculum, although they do have rights under the education code to opt their children out of certain sex education classes and animal dissection labs.

“Science is not decided by popular vote,” says anthropologist Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Science Education Center and a Fellow at the California Academy of Sciences.

California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell has gone on the offensive to support California’s science curriculum frameworks and academic standards. At a press conference at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, O’Connell said he would oppose any effort to “inject the concept of intelligent design” into California classrooms.

Under then-Superintendent Bill Honig, Padian helped write the state science frameworks, which guide curriculum, academic standards and specify what children need to know. He was also instrumental in creating the policy statement on the “Teaching of Natural Sciences” that introduces the state curriculum frameworks.

He said the policy statement provides crucial guidance for school boards confronted with complaints about the teaching of evolution.

The policy, adopted by the state Board of Education in 1989, makes it clear that students do not have to “accept everything that is taught in the natural science curriculum.” Students do, however, “have to understand the major strands of scientific thought, including its methods, facts, hypotheses, theories, and laws,” the policy says.

The policy goes on to remind teachers they are “professionally bound to limit their teaching to science and should resist pressures to do otherwise.” Questions about issues outside the realm of natural science, the policy says, should be handled with respect, but discussed outside the science classroom.

There’s no law that requires school boards to use state-recommended curriculum or to adhere to state academic frameworks. However, because schools are evaluated based in large measure on their students’ performance on standardized tests based on these standards, it makes good educational sense to follow them closely. “School boards will be less subject to indefensible challenges to their science curriculum if they cleave to the state frameworks,” Padian says.

However, adhering to the standards doesn’t give a district complete legal protection.

The dispute in Roseville

Two members of the Roseville Joint Union High School District board and a number of district administrators are now in federal court after the district failed to adopt supplemental anti-evolutionary instructional materials. The board made its decision at the recommendation of their science teachers and university science experts who evaluated the material at the district’s request and after almost a year of study and deliberation.

Nonetheless, district parent and attorney Larry Caldwell is suing the district for “viewpoint discrimination” and alleged violation of his rights to free speech and religious freedom. Caldwell is representing himself with the help of the Sacramento-based Pacific Institute of Justice, a non-profit organization that provides free legal services to defend religious evangelism, home schooling, churches, private schools and parental rights.

In the reply brief filed in U.S. District Court, attorneys for the district argue that Caldwell’s science proposal amounted to a “creationist religious viewpoint.” “To have adopted the QSE Policy would have in fact been the adoption of a religious viewpoint by the district,” the district contends. Local school boards have a legal obligation, the district argues in its court pleadings, to adopt textbooks and a curriculum that meet requirements of state law; nowhere does the law give a parent veto power over curriculum or instructional materials.

The court is now weighing a motion by the district to dismiss the suit.

Debate is costly and divisive

Debates over the teaching of evolution can be expensive and counterproductive. Such is clearly the case in Pennsylvania, where the board majority in the Dover district has already spent thousands of dollars to defend a curriculum that has been condemned as unscientific by leading academics in the field and the district’s own science teachers. Even the nation’s leading proponent of intelligent design, the Discovery Institute, has distanced itself from the lawsuit, saying mandating lessons on intelligent design may not be a viable strategy at this time.

The board policy, being challenged in court by 11 parents, warns students that evolution is a theory, “not a fact.” It mandates that students hear about alternative ideas, such as intelligent design, and urges them to consult the intelligent design textbook “Of Pandas and People.” The anti-evolutionary book has been roundly condemned by scientists like Padian and Brown University biology professor Kenneth Miller, who wrote one of the nation’s leading biology texts. Miller called the book “a collection of half-truths, distortions, and outright falsehoods that attempts to misrepresent biology and mislead students as to the scientific status of evolutionary biology.”

CSBA President Clegg says it’s appropriate to draw a strict line between religion and science and between supernatural beliefs like intelligent design and strictly naturalistic theories like evolution.

This is not to say that scientists cannot be religious, Clegg says. Many of them are.

“For those scientists who are avid evolutionists and who maintain a religious tradition in their family, the issues never cross,” he says. “They make a distinction between what is scientific theory and what is religious doctrine to be accepted on faith as good moral policy. They understand that some things in the universe are not easily approached by science and may never be.”

Carol Brydolf (cbrydolf@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.