Each year, as state legislatures return to work, there's a steady flow of bills introduced that target the teaching of evolution in public schools. With a few exceptions, most of these don't pass, and they fade quickly into obscurity. This year, however, the state of Texas has embarked on an extended fight over science education that has dragged in at least two state agencies and the legislature. By all appearances, the school board's role in matters will be coming to a close during a meeting that is currently taking place.

There's so much going on in Texas that it's difficult to know where to start. Chronologically, the first item in the recent chain of events occurred last year, when the Institute for Creation Research applied for permission to grant degrees in "science," despite the fact that its curriculum holds that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and species are not related by common descent. Texas' higher education board turned the request down, saying the ICR would be unable to properly prepare its students to teach science.

Instead of "strengths and weaknesses," the biology standards call for students to consider "the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record."

Although the ICR threatened to take the state to court, one Texas legislator apparently decided to take a shortcut to giving the group approval to grant degrees: a bill that would exempt any private, nonprofit institution from certification by Texas. Although the legislator who introduced the bill was apparently inspired by ICR's plight, the broadly worded bill will allow anyone to set up a nonprofit diploma mill in the state.

More recently, as part of its regular review of education standards, the Texas State Board of Education tackled the science standards. In past years, these have included a requirement that instructors cover the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories in classrooms. This year, the educators involved in formulating the new standards dropped this language.

Part of the reason for doing so is that it's bad pedagogy. We tend to only teach theories, like plate tectonics, that have strengths that vastly outweigh the weaknesses; focusing on the weaknesses creates a false sense of balance. It's also problematic in education terms because the weaknesses tend to require a far higher level of understanding than public school students ever reach. Few students are going to be equipped to understand the incompatibility between relativity and quantum mechanics before college level. Finally, the general use of the language is largely dishonest. Nobody's actually interested in teaching the weaknesses of relativity—the wording is there to target evolution.

Given that the new standards were formulated by professional educators, the State Board of Education might be expected to accept their guidance and examine it for obvious errors. But, this is Texas, where the Governor has appointed someone who also believes that the earth is 10,000 years old and that life is not related by common descent. (There are some recent profiles of Board chair Don McLeroy that give some sense of his perspective on evolution.) Instead, the Board invited two of the authors of the deeply flawed text Explore Evolution to critique the proposed standards, and then engaged in a protracted debate about them.

In the end, the teaching of evolution achieved what might be called a partial victory. The strengths and weaknesses language was kept out of the standards, although the vote on the issue was apparently a 7-7 tie, which meant the proposal to revise them failed. Nevertheless, the Board did sneak in some revisions that called into question a central tenet of evolution, common descent. Instead of "strengths and weaknesses," the biology standards call for students to consider "the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record." Common descent also took a hit in the earth sciences standards, which were revised by the Board to include a requirement that students, "evaluate a variety of fossil types, proposed transitional fossils, fossil lineages, and significant fossil deposits and assess the arguments for and against universal common descent in light of this fossil evidence."

This wording wouldn't be problematic in and of itself; fossil evidence provides our primary indication of major evolutionary transitions, like the origin of tetrapods and birds. Nevertheless, as Explore Evolution demonstrates, there's also lots of misinformation packaged as science when it comes to fossils, and requiring an evaluation of the case against fossil evidence opens the door to some problematic material. And it's not like the Board members are attempting to disguise that their efforts to place this material in public schools is religiously motivated.

All of that sets the stage for this week's meeting of the State Board of Education, in which the amended standards will face a final ratification vote. Supporters of science education will be attempting to get the problematic revisions eliminated, while reports are indicating that Board Chair McLeroy will be attempting to insert further revisions, possibly focusing on arguments over the ability of natural selection to produce complex structures. This line of reasoning is advanced by a proponent of intelligent design, Mike Behe, and played a prominent role in the defeat of the school board policy adopted in Dover, Pennsylvania.

No matter how the School Board votes, at least one Texas legislator is taking no chances. A bill has been introduced in the House that would reintroduce the strengths and weaknesses language to science education without involving the Board.