According to my friends from Ohio Citizens for Science, Steve Rissing and Patricia Princehouse, in this article in the Akron newspaper.
Patricia Princehouse, evolution advocate and professor at Case Western Reserve University, said the achievement committee didn't run behind schedule by accident.
Princehouse said the committee ate up the two hours by rewriting minutes from July to remove from the public record any direct mention of intelligent design.
Steve Rissing, an Ohio State University professor and evolution backer, said the changes in the minutes are significant.
"The corrected minutes bear no resemblance to what I saw and what I heard,'' Rissing said.
And they've got a tape of the meeting to prove it. This could get interesting.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Yesterday was a very good day for science education in the midwest. I wrote last week about ongoing controversies in Michigan and Ohio as advocates of intelligent design (ID) were trying to find a way, any way, to weaken science education and open the door at least a crack for the introduction of…
Sunday's New York Times had a fascinating article about the growth of local citizens groups to fight the ever-increasing challenges to evolution in public schools. I found this of particular interest because I co-founded one of those groups, Michigan Citizens for Science, 3 years ago. We are…
Here's the rundown on some of the elections I either wrote about or just took an interest in for one reason or another. In Michigan, Dick DeVos, the pro-ID candidate for governor, was voted down by a wide margin. Proposition 4, which puts strict restrictions on eminent domain in the state, passed…
The New York Times reports that a group of 75 scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio has endorsed the candidacy of Tom Sawyer in his race against creationist Deborah Owens Fink for a spot on the Ohio Board of Education. That group includes Lawrence Krauss and Patricia Princehouse.…
Now THIS is something you don't see every day. What's the penalty for tampering with public records? Jailtime?
Who has the tape? In the Dover case, all school board meetings were taped, but the creationists made sure the tapes were erased before they could be used in court. The creationist board members also suffered selective amnesia when asked at their depositions about discussions of "creationism" at public meetings.
As an Ohio resident (down in the Cincinnati / Dayton / Oxford corner), what can I do to help keep things honest?
Mark-
In this case, the good guys have their own tape.
Can anybody say "Buckingham"?
It is not very clear from the report that I've seen but it sounds like the committee some time ago put references in the minutes to global warming and stem cells, when, in fact, those issues weren't raised back in July, and evolution was the only "controversial subject" discussed. This latest round of minutes mangling is apparently the creationists taking those references back out to prevent the phony minutes being used against them. At least that is what I took from the article (which, by the way, the Akron Beakon has issued a correction about).
http://www.ohioscience.org/AchieveCommittee.mp3
The link above is the recording of the pertinent portion of the July meeting of the Achievement Committee of the Ohio DOE if anyone is interested. Note that at the end the discussion turns to what particular topics in science should or should not be singled out for "critical thinking."
Colleen Grady mentions that there are recent issues that have generated more interest than evolution. She disagrees with the committee member who feels that singling out any particular issues for this "controversy template" is not a good idea. Global warming is mentioned as an example of these other items in the last part of the recording.
The gist of it seems to be:
We are making a proposal but we are not making a proposal. A proposal is being made but it is not being made. A proposal might be made in the future if we actually had any substance. We have something written down here, but there is not really anything written down. Lets vote on it at the september meeting.