by Greg Mayer

In a must-read special report at Politico, Stephanie Simon examines the growth of government-funded instruction in creationism via the voucher school movement.

Voucher schools are private schools for which the government pays full or partial tuition. Most of them are religious (70 %, fide Politico), are not held to educational standards, and have little oversight. Here’s the money quote:

Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies. Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment. Public debate about science education tends to center on bills like one in Missouri, which would allow public school parents to pull their kids from science class whenever the topic of evolution comes up. But the more striking shift in public policy has flown largely under the radar, as a well-funded political campaign has pushed to open the spigot for tax dollars to flow to private schools. Among them are Bible-based schools that train students to reject and rebut the cornerstones of modern science. [emphasis added]

Jerry recently highlighted a similar report by student pro-science advocate Zack Kopplin on government subsidy of creationism, and how this support is now found in many states. Simon shows how the movement for voucher schools is spreading over the country, spending lots of money (including from—you guessed it—the Koch brothers), and trying to influence both Republicans and Democrats.

One thing that struck me is that the curricula of these schools don’t just teach some sort of alternative set of claims about the world, but teach active hostility to science. An example from Simon’s piece:

Another Calvary Christian Academy, this one in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., describes the goal of its AP Biology course as preparing “students to have faith in Jesus in an age of science by evaluating college-level biology, chemistry and physics from a purely biblical perspective.”

Their AP Biology class is designed not to prepare students for college work, but to resist doing college work!!

It’s also absolutely clear that these schools are misusing the appellation AP—Advanced Placement-—for their courses. Advanced Placement is a set of curricula and exams-for-credit in a wide variety of subjects developed by the College Board. For Biology, the very first item in the AP curriculum is

Big Idea 1: The process of evolution drives the diversity and unity of life.

And that’s exactly right: evolution is the central concept of biology, and the first thing students of biology should learn (see the full curricular outline here)!

That support for voucher schools invokes broader cultural themes than just anti-science is shown in the following passage from Simon’s report:

But Doug Tuthill, who runs one of the largest private school choice programs in the nation, says states have no right to determine what kids should learn, beyond basic math, reading and writing. Other topics, from the age of Earth to the reasons for the Civil War, are just too controversial for a government mandate, he said, even when taxpayer money is at stake.

This is anti-science, anti-government oversight, and even neo-Confederate: “the reasons for the Civil War”! (As made abundantly clear by the secession ordinances, which have been much republished with salutary effect in the last few years as part of the Civil War sesquicentennial observances, and as Apu memorably put it, “Slavery it is, sir.“) These broader cultural themes may explain the support of people like the Koch brothers, who, for all their faults, are not anti-evolution.

The report is accompanied by an astonishing set of images illustrating what passes for science in some of these schools.

A two-option multiple choice question– now that’s rigorous! And the “wrong choice” can be easily dismissed as not even making sense: are creationists being distinguished from clouds, because students in these schools can’t readily distinguish between people and meteorological phenomena? Even fifth graders know what rain is!

In one paragraph, the above slide combines factual errors in geology and archaeology, a complete non sequitur conclusion, and tops it off with an error about the Bible. The writers of this curriculum aren’t even any good at Bible study, which is what they claim as their area of expertise.

I finish with the above because it comes from a school not very far from where I live and work. There are a cluster of tax-supported creationist schools in southeastern Wisconsin, as can be seen in this map from Slate. This image also shows that even so-called mainline churches like the Lutherans can be creationists. To be fair to Lutherans in general, though, I note that there’s a lot of variation among the varied Lutheran denominations; and, as Simon points out, not all religious schools are creationist (I received a fine science education during 12 years at Catholic schools, although this was before the Catholic hierarchy made a political alliance with right wing Protestantism).

My university, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, was involved in getting this publicly-funded private school movement started in southeastern Wisconsin a dozen years ago. The University was mandated by the state legislature to “charter” a school that would be tax-supported, but not subject to oversight by the local school district, nor, even much by the University, despite the fact that we had somehow officially given them the right to be a state-funded school. There was only one group wanting to start such a school (I guess they had friends in the legislature), and a university committee was convened that included a biology professor to organize the granting of the charter. Some way into the process I became aware that the principal of the new school was to be a local church pastor who was somewhat notorious for writing loony items on the opinion page in the local paper, including creationist material. I alerted the committee to this, but when the biologist on the committee brought it up, a charter school advocacy “consultant” to the committee firmly stated that such concerns about what the school would be teaching were off limits and not subject to discussion by the committee. The creationist principal did not last long, fortunately, and my understanding of the school is that it does not teach creationism.

h/t Andrew Sullivan, and many readers who contacted Jerry