 There are 50 state science education standards currently. I know you're all looking at this map to see where your state is. If you're in Texas or South Carolina, you're, sorry, if you are in California or, well, I guess California. You're pretty happy. If you're in Texas or Minnesota, I'm sorry. These 50 states, 50 states science education standards have been devised over the last couple of decades. Some of them are pretty good. Some of them are not very good at all. But it's 50 different set of standards. Now, this is not really great. Americans, of course, are reflexively compulsive about local control of education. And there are many good things about local control of education, but curriculum is probably not one of them. There's really no reason why a third grader in Minnesota and a third grader in California should be learning different math projects. I mean, a third grader is a third grader. There's things that third graders should know about math, and this is not mysterious. What happened, actually, in math and in English language arts over the last couple of years is the establishment of something called common core standards, where 48 states got together to hammer out common curriculum standards for math and English language arts. And then they all agreed to do the same stuff, and this made the textbook publishers really happy. This made the teachers really happy. They were very challenging, and everybody's kind of on the same page. This is a good thing, because if you move from Minnesota to California, you don't miss long division, because they taught it at a different time in the different states. Now, science education is not yet there. There is currently, as I speak, under preparation something called the Next Generation Science Standards, NGSS. And this is not exactly the same thing as the common core standards of English language arts and math that I was just talking about. The process is a little different. The National Academy of Sciences has come out with a framework that outlines the topics and the pedagogy and sort of the general approach to science. It's a very good document. You can go to the National Academies of Sciences website, and you can read it yourself. It's very inspiring. And this framework document was given to a nonprofit organization called Achieve. And Achieve staff are actually the people putting the pen to paper to craft the NGSS. Now, the first draft of the standards has gone out for public commentary and for professional commentary professionals in the science education biz and us. We've given feedback on it. They're not there yet. There's still problems that we see with it. And the public has had a chance to win. There'll be a couple of more iterations of that sort of draft. And then the NGSS will be presented for adoption of the states. You might have noticed that I mentioned that the math and English language arts standards were adopted by 48 states. Only 23 states are working on the NGSS. And they haven't actually promised in advance to adopt them. Now, why is there this huge gap between the number of states that thought it was OK to have common standards in English language arts and math? And why is there this hesitation in the case of science education? Now, these are always multi-factorial problems. I'm not saying there's one single answer for this. I'm sure that there are budgetary reasons. And some states maybe couldn't afford to assign staff to this project, because everybody's understaffed and nobody wants to pay taxes and pay for education. So that's another whole issue. So maybe there's more things going on. But there are the issues of controversial topics in science education, like evolution and climate change. And in fact, there have been some state authorities, some representatives of governors and some representatives of state departments of education, fewer, more of the former than the latter, that have actually said, well, we're waiting to see what the standards say about evolution and climate change. We don't want to take a pig in a poke, so to speak. We want to be sure that we can control how those topics are taught and how much of those controversial issues are taught. I assure you the National Academy of Science framework has ample coverage of evolution and climate changes treated in a very respectful fashion. So if the NGSS actually track what the National Academy of Sciences framework has directed to do, then we'll be in pretty good shape. So actually, I guess that isn't such a cheerful, but it's more cheerful than the usual stuff I talk about. OK, now we'll get into the typical gloom, all right? But seriously, although I think common standards would be a very useful thing for science education and something that I'm certainly going to support and I hope you would support as well, we're still not out of the woods yet. Berkman and Pletzer published an article in 2008 in which they wrote, there are many reasons to believe that scientists are winning in the courts but losing in the classroom. This is partially true to the occasional explicit teaching of creationism and ID, but most especially because of inconsistent emphasis and minimal rigor in the teaching of evolution. What they found in their study is that 13% of teachers were teaching creationism or intelligent design. That's not a very high percentage, but it's far too many. I mean, imagine if there were 13% of geology teachers teaching the earth as flat. We wouldn't accept that at all. But they also talked about the cautious 60%. They also talked about 60% of the practicing biology teachers in their sample, it's not that they were teaching creationism, they just weren't teaching much evolution. They were concerned about pushback. In some cases, they didn't feel really comfortable with the subject because their own background in science, especially in the science of evolution, was inadequate. So the cautious 60% are in some respects a more concerning group of teachers because it's a lot of teachers out there. And they're basically giving evolution a once over lightly. Only 23% of the teachers in the Blitzer et al survey taught evolution as a unifying theme, which of course is what the National Academy and MCSE and all the other people who are concerned about evolution have been promoting for many years. Getting back to the standards, when they analyzed their data, they found that the variance among teachers, the spread around the mean, the statistical variance, the variance within a state of the amount of hours dedicated to the teaching of evolution that they found varied more than the difference between states. Now that's significant for science standards because it kind of suggests that teachers really aren't paying a lot of attention to the standards. If in a state like California that has really, really strong science standards and really strong standards in evolution, there is a huge variance within the state of California of teachers who give a once over lightly versus those who teach it as a theme, then that would imply, perhaps, that one might infer from that, that maybe standards are not especially being applied even if they're good standards. So I think these kinds of data will encourage us to work harder to see that standards are actually taught by the teachers who are in the state, especially if those standards are good. Well, what else do we have to look forward from the future? We have Texas. Last couple of years, the Texas science education standards have been a battleground for the teaching of evolution. And what we find in Texas is that through a very great deal of effort, the picture shows my colleague, Josh Rosnow, with our allies in Texas, the Texas Freedom Network and Texas Citizens for Science at a press conference a year ago. What we've all been able to do, in my opinion, is get about 90% of what we want, which in Texas is a good percentage. It's been a whole lot worse in the past. The current Texas science education standards have more evolution in them than ever before. The standards are better in terms of what they call for in the teaching, but the 10% that we lost is that the creationist members of the school board in these fights over the last couple of years have managed to get some rather dodgy wording in some of the questions. Believe me, it's not as bad as it might have been. In the Biology 7B standard, for example, analyzing the evaluate scientific explanations concerning any data of sudden appearance, stasis, and the sequential nature of groups in the fossil record. If you know anything about evolutionary biology, this doesn't make any sense at all. Why would you bother having students obsess over the notion of stasis and occasional sudden replacement? Well, this reflects the creationist enthusiasm for punctuated equilibrium. They believe that when you have stasis and then the replacement of a developing group in the fossil record, that's evidence for special intervention, that's evidence for special creation, and that's evidence against evolution in their opinion. So this standard was written precisely to try to allow teachers to bring some sort of anti-evolution or procreationism into the science standard. Similarly, the standard Biology 7G, analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the complexity of the cell. Well, again, this is kind of silly if you're a biologist because you don't stand around the laboratory obsessing about the complexity of the cell. This is kind of irrelevant, but it is right out of the Intelligent Design Handbook because obsessing over the complexity of the cell is exactly what all their literature is about. They believe that the cell is so complex, all those little working parts, all those little enzymes and stuff that are being churned out, that it couldn't possibly be produced by any sort of natural causes. Therefore, the Intelligent Designer must have poofed into existence the first cell and on and on and on. So all of the, they're like I say, we got 90% of what we wanted, but there's some weaknesses, as shall we say, in the literature there that are, in the standards that are of concern to us. Now, this is something to look forward to in the future because in 2013, the textbooks that have been written to reflect these standards will be submitted to the Board of Education and the Board will analyze them to see if all of the standards are reflected in these new textbooks. We will be there with our allies to try to make sure that more nonsense is not done because frankly, it is the textbooks that we are concerned about. Texas, as you might know, has an inordinate influence upon the content of science education textbooks because Texas buys a lot of textbooks and therefore the textbook publishers write for the Texas market and the textbook publishers are not really anxious to write a book for Texas and then have to write another book for the rest of the country. So unless you hold the publishers feet to the fire, the rest of us will get the crappy stuff that the Texas standards might require. So this all takes quite a bit of very careful monitoring. Some of you might recall last year at TAM when I announced that the National Center for Science Education was going to add climate change to evolution as so-called controversial issues. We have noted that there's are lots and lots of parallels between how climate change and evolution are treated by the public versus how they're treated by scientists. Scientists agree evolution happened, living things that common ancestors. Scientists agree that the planet's getting warmer and people's activities have a lot to do with that but teachers are being leaned on not to teach those very basic ideas, evolution and climate change and not because of scientific evidence against evolution or evidence against climate change but because of ideological biases one way or the other that are negatively affecting science education. We went live with our climate change initiative in early 2012 and just in time because the fine state of Tennessee had dug up, shall we say, a bill that we thought we had gotten, we and our allies had gotten killed in 2011 but it emerged again this last spring in a new form and it was basically a bill that was very similar to a number of other bills that we've been fighting since 2004 called Academic Freedom Acts. Academic Freedom Acts are very cleverly written bills that don't mention religion at all but they stress critical thinking and other very positive practices that certainly we all support but if you know the history of these bills and you know the language that is being used by creationists you can identify these bills as actually having a negative effect on science education rather than the positive one that is claimed. For example, both the Alabama and Tennessee bills, I mean to say that the Tennessee bill was modeled after and Alabama bill that was passed a couple of years ago in 2008, could you leave that slide up please for just a little longer because the slide does indicate the similarities. You probably can't read this fine print but I'll tell you what it says. Both the Alabama and the Tennessee bill bundle evolution, origin of life, global warming and cloning. Now evolution and climate change certainly are topics that are appropriate to the science curriculum but there's very, very little time spent on origin of life in the biology class and there is no time that I spent on human cloning. Let's go to the lab boys and girls. No, this is just not something that happens but these four topics, these four topics are very important to the religious right and so they bundle them together as a way to try to make sure that the wrong views, in other words not their views, are taught about the subject matters. Both are couched in terms of critical thinking. Critical thinking is something we all want. This meeting is about critical thinking. Obviously everybody in this room is very concerned with critical thinking, critical thinking in and outside of science but generally speaking the way these bills are written and the comments made by the supporters of these bills is they're not talking about critical thinking in the same way we are talking about. Critical means criticize. So these bills are really efforts to criticize standard science and evolution, global warming, cloning, origin of life and so forth. Both of these bills, the Alabama and Tennessee bill encouraged teachers to critique evolution and other subjects and again it's not critique in the sense that we think of it, it's criticize. These are anti-evolution, anti-climate change, anti-origin of life bills and both of these bills have an obligatory statement at the end that this is not about religion which if you just read the bill you wouldn't necessarily think was all about religion if you know the history of these bills you know it's all about religion but they have this little statement in there because they know sooner or later there's going to be a lawsuit about one of these academic freedom acts and they wanna try to signal to the judges that oh no no nobody here but a scientist this is not about religion. The Tennessee bill also is protective in the sense that it forbids any authority like a school superintendent or a board or another official from keeping teachers from employing the act. In other words if you see a teacher is bringing in creationist materials to teach the evidence against evolution this bill would prohibit you from disciplining that teacher from telling that teacher to knock it off. It's basically a get out of jail free card for creationist teachers and a number of these academic freedom acts have had this as well. I believe that this kind of protective provision arises out of three earlier cases back in the 2000s, the 1990s I mean, where teachers were teaching creationism or evidence against evolution their districts told them to knock it off the teachers sued in federal district court for their academic freedom to do these things and in all three of these cases the court said no you can't you have to do it your school district tells you to do because that's the nature of K-12 education, K-12 teachers can't just freelance and teach anything they want they have to teach the district's curriculum. It may sound unfair, oh we're all for academic freedom of course we're for academic freedom but there's also a real need in a school district to have consistency from classroom to classroom for young learners. K-12 is not the same as university level there's a reason why K-12 teachers have less academic freedom to just sort of teach whatever they want in the classroom. So these three cases of Levesque, Webster and Paloza all were cases in which freelancing teachers were smacked down by the courts. So these protective provisions that you see in the Tennessee law and other laws that I'm sure we will see in the future are intended to try to protect the teachers from any sort of discipline for doing what the creationists would like them to do. Now there of course are many teachers who would like to bring creationism into the classroom but of course they're not gonna do it if they're gonna be disciplined. So this is hopefully from their standpoint opening the door. Now you may have noticed that I've been talking about evidence against evolution as a form of creationism. This is not merely my paranoia from working with this topic for so many years. When you see the phrase evidence against evolution think creationism because that's the way they think. Soon after a very important Supreme Court case that declared it was unconstitutional to teach creation science, the Institute for Creation Research published in their newsletter, school boards and teachers should be strongly encouraged to stress the scientific evidences and arguments against evolution even though they don't wish to recognize them as evidences and arguments for creation. Pay attention to that last line. Evidence against evolution is evidence for creationism. If not A then B. If not evolution then creationism. This reflects what they've used for many, many years what they call the two model approach where there's only two possibilities. There's either evolution or biblical special creationism. If you disprove evolution then obviously creationism wins by default. So a great deal of the effort in the creationist community is to try to discredit evolution because they believe that students will also be thinking in this dichotomous fashion and although there's no survey research to show this I think they're right. There's an interesting little news clip from a CNN program where a student was in a class learning evidence against evolution and the reporter asked him some questions. What have you learned? And the boy answered, I've learned that evolution has become over the years. More and more people decide it's not completely true and that there has to be another belief or another thing that replaces it. And what is that? That's an intelligent designer. You mean a God? Yes, God. The Christian God who created Earth in six days. Of course I love this interview because the kid couldn't tell the difference between creationism and intelligent design although the people in the discovery issue would just break out in hives of the thought that intelligent design was in the same phrase as created in six days. They'd be very upset about that, but that's all right. We're pretty confident that Tennessee's not gonna be the last state to pass this kind of legislation and we'll be watching once the legislative season opens in 2013 and we'll be working with our grassroots allies to try to keep these bills from getting out of committee. I know the problem is that once these bills are out of committee, they go to the floor, they're really hard to vote against. Even in Tennessee, our allies in Tennessee told us about legislators who said, I don't wanna vote for this bill, but I gotta. The problem is even if it's a stupid bill, it's really hard to go back to your district and explain why you voted against God. And so these bills, we have our greatest success when we just stop these bills in committee. Finally, the future will hold more of the same at NCSE. We'll still be spending a lot of our time counseling individual teachers and parents and helping them deal with problems. The parent comes in complaining that he doesn't want his kid to learn evolution. How, what can a teacher tell a principal to persuade the principal not to let the kid opt out and make a mess of the teacher's class? A parent will call up with the teacher who's teaching creationism or not teaching evolution of what can that teacher say to the principal? We do an awful lot of this kind of retail person-to-person assistance to people trying to deal with this problem. And of course, none of that ever makes the newspapers. Interestingly enough, we're getting more complaints lately about problems at the community college level, which is very intriguing. I'm not exactly sure why that's the case, but we're gonna be watching it very carefully. Okay, that's what we're gonna be doing. What are you gonna be doing? Let me make some suggestions. Please inform yourself about these issues. Our website is a very good place to go. There are many other websites, blogs, books, articles. pandasthumb.org is a great source for intelligent design critiques, especially. The old talkorigins.org hasn't been updated in a while, but that's okay. The second law of thermodynamics argument still hasn't changed very much, so it's still quite relevant information there that you can find. Join your state's American Institute of Biological Science slash NCSE listserv. We have listservs in just about every state. There's a list manager who keeps a list of people who are interested and concerned about the creation and evolution issue, about the teaching of evolution, now climate change as well. And these people may not do a whole lot, but if a problem comes up in your state, we need to be able to contact you quickly to get you involved, to get your help in solving these problems. Pay attention. What's going on in your state legislature? What's going on in your state board of education? What's going on in your local board of education? Who are the people running for these offices? Who are the best people to elect? I can practically guarantee you that local school boards are always elected by a minority of the eligible voters, because those ballot issues are way down the ballot and nobody gets there and they're bored and they quit before and they don't know it's random anyway. So what that means is a very dedicated minority of people in your community may be able to have a disproportionate effect upon who gets elected to your local school boards. Support good science standards. We will check our website when the new science standards are finally finished. We can let you know whether they are as good as we are hoping they will be. In that case, try to get your state to adopt them because the more continuity we have, the better. And, if you don't mind, join NCSE. We have some interesting projects such as promoting legislation to encourage the publication of good textbooks and you can help us with that. Our website is ncse.com. If you go to this news alerts button over here, you can get a free Friday electronic newsletter that's written by Glenn Branch that's just superior. The news page is a very good place for you to catch up with the information on what's going on. This is the news page. Also, please note that we do have a climate change section now in our website that you might not have browsed and we will be adding to that more and more. And obviously we would love you to join or donate. Now, we also have a YouTube and a Facebook presence. Check out our YouTube offerings. We have several hundred by now. It's really somewhat scary. And I just want to say that it is always a pleasure and a compliment to be invited to speak at TAM. Thank you, Randy. Thank you, DJ. And thank you for listening and being interested in these issues. I think they're important and it's very, I'm very gratified that you do as well. Thank you.