When public-school students enrolled in Texas’ largest charter program open their biology workbooks, they will read that the fossil record is “sketchy.” That evolution is “dogma” and an “unproved theory” with no experimental basis. They will be told that leading scientists dispute the mechanisms of evolution and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.
The more than 17,000 students in the Responsive Education Solutions charter system will learn in their history classes that some residents of the Philippines were “pagans in various levels of civilization.” They’ll read in a history textbook that feminism forced women to turn to the government as a “surrogate husband.”
Responsive Ed has a secular veneer and is funded by public money, but it has been connected from its inception to the creationist movement and to far-right fundamentalists who seek to undermine the separation of church and state.
Infiltrating and subverting the charter-school movement has allowed Responsive Ed to carry out its religious agenda—and it is succeeding. Operating more than 65 campuses in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana, Responsive Ed receives more than $82 million in taxpayer money annually, and it is expanding, with 20 more Texas campuses opening in 2014.
A favorite creationist claim is that there is “uncertainty” in the fossil record, and Responsive Ed does not disappoint. The workbook cites the “lack of a single source for all the rock layers as an argument against evolution.”
The workbook also claims, “Some scientists even question the validity of the conclusions concerning the age of the Earth.” As Miller pointed out, “The statement that ‘some scientists question,’ is a typical way that students can be misled into thinking that there is serious scientific debate about the age of the Earth or the nature of the geological record. The evidence that the Earth was formed between 4 and 5 billion years ago is overwhelming.”
The curriculum tells students that a “lack of transitional fossils” is a “problem for evolutionists who hold a view of uninterrupted evolution over long periods of time.”
Another tactic creationists often use is to associate evolution with eugenics. One Responsive Ed quiz even asks students, “With regards to social Darwinism, do you think humans who are not capable should be left to die out, or should they be helped?”
“They imply that the control of human reproduction and the abandonment of people who might be ‘left to die’ are elements of evolutionary theory,” Miller said. “This is false, and the authors of these questions surely know that.”
Responsive Ed’s butchering of evolution isn’t the only part of its science curriculum that deserves an F; it also misinforms students about vaccines and mauls the scientific method.
Outright creationism appears in Responsive Ed’s section on the origins of life. It’s not subtle. The opening line of the workbook section, just as the opening line of the Bible, declares, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
When it’s not directly quoting the Bible, Responsive Ed’s curriculum showcases the current creationist strategy to compromise science education, which the National Center for Science Education terms “stealth creationism.” To get around court rulings, Responsive Ed and other creationists resort to rhetoric about teaching “all sides” of “competing theories” and claiming that this approach promotes “critical thinking.”
Bringing creationism into a classroom by undermining evolution and “noting … competing theories” is still unconstitutional. What’s more, contrary to Gonzalez’s statement, teaching about supernatural creation in the section on the origins of life is doing far more than noting competing theories.
Last month, science won the day in the battle over textbooks, and Texas adopted texts that teach evolution. But schools don’t necessarily have to adhere to this list of textbooks. They can choose, as Responsive Ed does, to use alternative textbooks, which may teach creationism.
Science isn’t the only target of the religious right. The movement also undermines the study of history. I received a set of Responsive Ed U.S. history “Knowledge Units” through my public records request and discovered problems there, too.
In the section on the causes of World War I, the study materials suggest that “anti-Christian bias” coming out of the Enlightenment helped create the foundations for the war. The workbook states, “[T]he abandoning of religious standards of conduct and the breakdown in respect for governmental authority would lead to one of two options: either anarchy or dictatorship would prevail in the absence of a monarch.” Responsive Ed also asserts that a person’s values are based on solely his or her religious beliefs.
A section on World War II suggests that Japan’s military aggression was led by the samurai. They write, “Following World War I, Japan attempted to solve its economic and social problems by military means. The Samurai, a group promoting a military approach to create a vast Japanese empire in Asia, wanted to expand Japan’s influence along the Chinese mainland including many Pacific Islands.”
I asked one of my former professors about this. Rich Smith, an East Asia scholar at Rice University, said, “There were no samurai in Japan after WWI; the samurai class was effectively abolished in 1876, after the Meiji Restoration in 1868.”
Responsive Ed continues to demonstrate its religious and cultural biases in a section on the Philippines, describing the population as made up of “Catholics, Moslems (Muslims), and pagans in various stages of civilization.”
About President Franklin Roosevelt, it teaches, “The New Deal had not helped the economy. However, it ushered in a new era of dependency on the Federal government.”
Perhaps the workbook’s best line comes when it explains that President Jimmy Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers out of “a misguided sense of compassion.”
One of Responsive Ed’s schools, Founders Classical Academy in Lewisville, Texas, where Responsive Ed is based, uses a curriculum far worse even than the Responsive Ed Knowledge Units. The school teaches American history from A Patriot’s History of the United States. The patriots book is “required reading,” according to Glenn Beck, and it opens with an interview between Rush Limbaugh and the author. It is a book that, as Dave Weigel says, “will make you stupider.”
Yup, A Texas school is using a Glen Beck book to teach history...
Some of Responsive Ed’s lessons appear harmless at first, but their origin is troubling. Students also learn about “discernment,” which is defined as “understanding the deeper reasons why things happen.” In other sections, students learn other moral lessons such as “values” and “deference.”
Many of Gothard’s teachings revolve around obedience to men, especially that of the wife and the children. Gothard has upset even other conservative Christians. In an interview for an article published by Religion Dispatches, Don Veinot, a conservative Christian and founder of the Midwest Christian Outreach, accused Gothard of “creating a culture of fear.” Gothard has been accused of emotional and sexual abuse by some of his former followers, “happening as far back as the mid- to late-1970’s and as recently as this year.”
Not sure how much of the obedience to men thing is actually in the textbook.
The Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes has published the leading report on the academic effect of major charter operators across the country. The report found that while students who attended Knowledge Is Power Program schools experienced positive academic gains, “Responsive Ed had a significant negative impact on student reading gains and a non-significant effect in math.” (Responsive Ed responded by criticizing the CREDO report, and CREDO issued a response to Responsive Ed’s response.)
http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...schools_undermining_the_charter_movement.html
Awesome stuff...
I especially liked the history section, and that one school using Glen Beck's book.
