Education
stcynic | November 28, 2005Jay Wexler of the Boston University School of Law has an upcoming article in the Washington University Law Quarterly which responds to the arguments of Francis Beckwith concerning the constitutionality of teaching ID. Beckwith is a Discovery Institute fellow and the associate director of the Dawson Center for Church-State Studies at Baylor. He is also a friendly adversary who has posted comments here from time to time. He has argued for many years that it is not unconstitutional for public schools to teach ID in science classrooms.
You may recall the brouhaha that erupted between Brian Leiter…
stcynic | November 22, 2005I was on the phone last night with my friend Rick and he told me about this project called Kalamazoo Promise. I grew up in a suburb of Kalamazoo and my parents still live there. Rick works for the city of Kalamazoo today. Someone very wealthy in the area - and their identity is a complete mystery - has started an endowed fund promising to pay the tuition for each and every student that graduates from Kalamazoo Public Schools to attend any public university or community college in the state. It works on a sliding scale depending on how long you attended. Someone who was in Kalamazoo public…
tsmith | November 20, 2005...and has spawned some press coverage, here in the Ames Tribune and here in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, making us the first state to have faculty from all Regent universities speak out against intelligent design. I'll briefly address some of the comments.
In the first article, U of I physics professor (and signer of the DI's "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition) Fred Skiff elaborates one giant strawman:
"It's part of science to consider what blinders you might be wearing," Skiff said. "Materialists put conditions on science that things can only exist if they satisfy materialism. I…
tlambert | October 24, 2005The John Lott article at Wikipedia was unprotected and the edit
war has
restarted. Lott is using a sockpuppet called Timewarp to try to make
massive changes to the article. Some of the additions
he wants to make are interesting:
Although Lott has published in academic journals regarding education,
voting behavior of politicians, industrial organization, labor
markets, judicial confirmations, and crime, his research is hard to
consistently tag as liberal or conservative. For example, some
research argues for environmental penalties on firms.
Hmmm, that sounds familiar. Here's Mary Rosh
I…
stcynic | October 4, 2005It's clear that the DI's political strategy on Dover is to spin it as a danger to academic freedom, but this position is utter nonsense. They are crowing over a brief filed in the case by a group of scientists, no doubt prompted by the DI, claiming that if the court rules on the nature of science it could destroy careers and have far-reaching effects. But history denies this. The 1981 McLean v. Arkansas ruling directly engaged the question of what is and is not legitimate science, ruling that "creation science" was religion, not science, and therefore could not be taught in public school…
stcynic | September 17, 2005Fresh off his electrifying performance on the Daily Show, the intrepid Dr. Dembski is still, it seems, attempting to do comedy. Witness the extraordinary chutzpah it took to write this post about the speaking schedule of NCSE staffers. He writes:
Have a look at http://www.ncseweb.org/meeting.asp. One of my colleagues describes reading this page as "watching a car wreck." I'm just sorry we can't get a percentage cut from all the speaking engagements they are getting as a result of attacking us. Life is so unfair.
Well Bill, we'd love to have a cut of your speaking fees, and of the fees you…
stcynic | September 13, 2005Perhaps I awarded September's Robert O'Brien Trophy too soon, before I became aware of "Dr" Don Boys and this breathtakingly bad piece of anti-evolution agitprop. Even by creationist standards, this is a ridiculous article, chock full of unsourced "quotes" and lots of rhetoric, but virtually no substantive argument. And the very first sentence offers a great opportunity to take a look at "Dr" Boys:
Evolution is pure quackery and purveyors of this foolishness should be branded as quacks. They are phony intellectuals (and a Ph.D. doesn't add credibility to a phony) and venders of ancient…
stcynic | August 31, 2005In reading the complaint against UC, there are some interesting things to discover. Here's an interesting item it contains. The plaintiffs allege that UC is official state board of education policy by requiring students to believe in evolution:
Furthermore, the State of California has agreed that in public and private schools, students do not have to accept everything that is taught, and cannot be required to hold a state-prescribed viewpoint:
Nothing In science or in any other field of knowledge shall be taught dogmatically. Dogma is a system of beliefs that is not subject to scientific test…
stcynic | August 29, 2005Over the last few years, a bizarre situation has been going on here in Michigan. In 2003, a philanthropist named Robert Thompson offered to spend $200 million to build 15 charter schools in the city of Detroit, each serving 500 students, with a guarantee that each one would graduate at least 90% of its students. That plan required approval of the state legislature and in late 2003 they had reached a deal to pass a bill that allowed this to happen, but the Detroit teacher's union called a one-day strike and marched on the state capitol to protest this plan. As a result, the Detroit mayor and…
stcynic | August 25, 2005It's round 4 with our favorite PhD in creation science apologetics, William Gibbons. You can find his reply at the bottom of this post. I'm moving this all up top so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. He begins with the issue of plagiarism. I had pointed out that his first response was almost entirely plagiarized, virtually every word of it simply cut and pasted from various creationist webpages without any attribution at all. He had a three part response. First, he invented a mythical "evolutionist" who had allegedly done the same thing and gotten away with it:
It would seem that it is…
loom | August 5, 2005I'll close the week with an open letter to President Bush just released by the American Astronomical Society's president, Prof. Robert Kirschner, to express disappointment with his comments on bringing intelligent design into the classroom. Astronomers may not deal with natural selection or fossils, but as a general principle, they don't like seeing non-science and science getting confused.
Washington, DC. The American Astronomical Society is releasing the text of a letter concerning "intelligent design" and education that was sent earlier today to President George W. Bush by the President…
stcynic | August 1, 2005The full report on the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' Bible course curriculum is now available from the Texas Freedom Network. The report was written by Mark Chancey, a professor of Biblical studies at Southern Methodist University. As Chancey notes, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools has quite a select group of supporters and they've managed to compile an entire curriculum on how to teach about the Bible without a single Biblical scholar on either their 8 member Board of Directors or their 50+ member Advisory Committee. They do, however, have…
stcynic | August 1, 2005One of the growing trends around the country is school boards allowing schools to teach an elective course on the bible. The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS) has been very active in lobbyign school boards to do so and selling them their textbooks for such a class in the process. Such courses are legal as long as they are, in the words of first amendment scholar Charles Haynes, "taught academically, not devotionally." Schools can teach about the bible, about what people believe about it, but they may not endorse biblical teachings or any particular religious…
dmunger | June 20, 2005Every parent wants his or her child to do well in school. They help the kids with their homework, volunteer in the classroom, do everything they can think of to help their children succeed. But what type of elementary school education actually leads to older kids who do better in school? Typically students are tested at the beginning of the year and the end of the year, and if they improve, their educational program is labeled as successful. This type of assessment, though valuable, sheds little light on what happens in the long run.
A team of researchers led by Gian Vittorio Caprara sought…
loom | May 19, 2005Today in Science scientists reported a potentially big advance in creating embryos that can be used for stem cell transplants. Briefly put, they figured out how to take skin cells from patients, inject them into donated eggs emptied of their own DNA, and nurture them along until they had divided into a few cells. The cells were able to develop into a wide range of cell types, their chromosomes were normal, and they were so similar to the cells of the indvidual patients that they would not be rejected as foreign tissue. The research stopped there, but the dream behind this work is to heal your…
dmunger | March 31, 2005Early childhood education can often seem like one of the most over-researched fields imaginable. So many parents are so concerned with the fate of their progeny, that it's natural for research to focus on more effective ways to teach kids. Yet the process of learning is also so complex that it can be difficult for studies to come up with conclusive results.
University of Chicago researchers Melissa Singer and Susan Goldin-Meadow have done extensive research on the role of gesture in teaching, finding that teachers spontaneously use gestures to teach, and that the use of gestures increases…
stcynic | March 14, 2005The Washington Post has a pretty good article on ID this morning, one that will no doubt bring howls of outrage from the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division (aka their blog). A couple interesting bits from it:
Some evolution opponents are trying to use Bush's No Child Left Behind law, saying it creates an opening for states to set new teaching standards. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a Christian who draws on Discovery Institute material, drafted language accompanying the law that said students should be exposed to "the full range of scientific views that exist."
"Anyone who…
stcynic | February 21, 2005I'm still reading this stuff, and it's just unreal. It's like I've overturned a rock and all these southern nationalist whackos are streaming out. How about this story about a book called Southern Slavery, As It Was, written by League of the South board member Steve Wilkins:
Students at one of the area's largest Christian schools are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures."
Leaders at Cary Christian School say they are not condoning slavery by using "Southern Slavery, As It Was," a…
stcynic | February 10, 2005I am very pleased to announce that Howard Van Till has agreed to join the board of Michigan Citizens for Science, on whose board I also sit. Dr. Van Till is professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan and is also on the board of advisers for the Templeton Foundation. As a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, Howard has been active in encouraging members of the scientific community and the faith community to engage each other seriously and in positive ways. Despite being a devout Christian, he has written extensively…
stcynic | January 31, 2005A new study from Texas A&M researchers on abstinence-only programs in Texas concludes that they have had no effect on teen sexual activity for those enrolled in the programs:
The first evaluation of programs used throughout the state has found that students in almost all high school grades were more sexually active after abstinence education. Researchers don't believe the programs encouraged teenagers to have sex, only that the abstinence messages did not interfere with the usual trends among adolescents growing up.
"We didn't find what many would like for us to find," said researcher…