Category Archives: Social Studies

Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Start Counterattack

Has Kansas been touched by His Noodly Appendage?

The New York Times: Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Start Counterattack

August 1, 2006
Evolution’s Backers in Kansas Start Counterattack

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
KANSAS CITY, Kan., July 29 — God and Charles Darwin are not on the primary ballot in Kansas on Tuesday, but once again a contentious schools election has religion and science at odds in a state that has restaged a three-quarter-century battle over the teaching of evolution.

Less than a year after a conservative Republican majority on the State Board of Education adopted rules for teaching science containing one of the broadest challenges in the nation to Darwin’s theory of evolution, moderate Republicans and Democrats are mounting a fierce counterattack. They want to retake power and switch the standards back to what they call conventional science.The Kansas election is being watched closely by both sides in the national debate over the teaching of evolution. In the past several years, pitched battles have been waged between the scientific establishment and proponents of what is called intelligent design, which holds that nature alone cannot explain life’s origin and complexity.

Last February, the Ohio Board of Education reversed its 2002 mandate requiring 10th-grade biology classes to critically analyze evolution. The action followed a federal judge’s ruling that teaching intelligent design in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A defeat for the conservative majority in Kansas on Tuesday could be further evidence of the fading fortunes of the intelligent design movement, while a victory would preserve an important stronghold in Kansas.

The curriculum standards adopted by the education board do not specifically mention intelligent design, but advocates of the belief lobbied for the changes, and students are urged to seek “more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

Though there is no reliable polling data available, Joseph Aistrup, head of political science at Kansas State University, said sharp ideological splits among Republicans and an unusual community of interest among moderate Republicans and some Democrats were helping challengers in the primary.

Kansas Democrats, moreover, have a strong standard-bearer in the incumbent governor, Kathleen Sebelius, who has distanced herself from the debate.

“And if a conservative candidate makes it through the primary, there’s a Democratic challenger waiting” in the general election, Professor Aistrup said.

Several moderate Republican candidates have vowed, if they lose Tuesday, to support the Democratic primary winners in November. With the campaign enlivened by a crowded field of 16 candidates contending for five seats — four held by conservatives who voted for the new science standards last year — a shift of two seats could overturn the current 6-to-4 majority. The four-year terms are staggered so that only half the 10-member board is up for election each two years.

The acrimony in the school board races is not limited to differences over the science curriculum but also over other ideologically charged issues like sex education, charter schools and education financing. Power on the board has shifted almost every election since 1998, with the current conservative majority taking hold in 2004.

“Can we just agree God invented Darwin?” asked a weary Sue Gamble, a moderate member of the board whose seat is not up for re-election.

The chairman of the board, Dr. Steve E. Abrams, a veterinarian and the leader of the conservative majority, said few of the opposition candidates were really moderates. “They’re liberals,” said Dr. Abrams, who is not up for re-election.

He said that the new science curriculum in no way opened the door to intelligent design or creationism and that any claim to the contrary “is an absolute falsehood.”

“We have explicitly stated that the standards must be based on scientific evidence,” Dr. Abrams said, “what is observable, measurable, testable, repeatable and unfalsifiable.”

In science, he said, “everything is supposedly tentative, except the teaching of evolution is dogma.”

Harry E. McDonald, a retired biology teacher and self-described moderate Republican who has been going door to door for votes in his district near Olathe, said the board might have kept overt religious references out of the standards, “but methinks they doth protest too much.”

“They say science can’t answer this, therefore God,” Mr. McDonald said.

Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.

“It’s a nice bedtime story,” she said. “Science doesn’t back it up.”

Dr. Abrams said his views as someone who believes that God created the universe 6,500 years ago had nothing to do with the science standards adopted.

“In my personal faith, yes, I am a creationist,” he said. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with science. I can separate them.” He said he agreed that “my personal views of Scripture have no room in the science classroom.”

Dr. Abrams said that at a community meeting he had been asked whether it was possible to believe in the Bible and in evolution, and that he had responded, “There are those who try to believe in both — there are theistic evolutionists — but at some point in time you have to decide which you’re going to put your credence in.”

Last year’s changes in the science standards followed an increasingly bitter seesawing of power on the education board that began in 1998 when conservatives won a majority. They made the first changes to the standards the next year, which in turn were reversed after moderates won back control in 2000. The 2002 elections left the board split 5-5, and in 2004 the conservatives won again, instituting their major standards revisions in November 2005.

Critics said the changes altered the science standards in ways that invited theistic interpretations. The new definition called for students to learn about “the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.”

In one of many “additional specificities” that the board added to the standards, it stated, “Biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process that has no discernable direction or goal.”

John Calvert, manager of the Intelligent Design Network in Shawnee Mission and a lawyer who wrote material for the board advocating the new science standards, said they were not intended to advance religion.

“What we are trying to do is insert objectivity, take the bias out of the religious standard that now favors the nontheistic religion of evolution,” Mr. Calvert said.

Janet Waugh, a car dealer and the only moderate Democrat on the board whose seat is up for election, said that just because some people were challenging evolution did not mean their views belonged in the curriculum.

“When the mainstream scientific community determines a theory is correct, that’s when it should be in the schools,” Ms. Waugh said. “The intelligent design people are trying to cut in line.”

The races have been hard-fought. With the majority of the 100,000 registered Republicans in Mr. McDonald’s northeast Kansas district usually ignoring primary elections, a few hundred ballots could easily be the margin of victory.

So Mr. McDonald, who with $35,000 is the lead fund-raiser among the candidates, printed newsletters showing his opponent, the conservative board member John W. Bacon, with a big red slash through his face and the slogan, “Time to Bring Home the Bacon.” Mr. Bacon did not respond to several calls for a response.

But many of the homeowners Mr. McDonald visited Friday night showed little interest in the race. Jack Campbell, a medical center security director, opened the door warily, and when Mr. McDonald recited his pitch, seemed disappointed. “I thought I won some sweepstakes,” Mr. Campbell said.

Last Thursday night at Fort Hays State University, Ms. Morris debated her moderate Republican challenger, Sally Cauble, a former teacher, and the Democratic candidate, Tim Cruz, a former mayor of Garden City, whom Ms. Morris once accused of being an illegal immigrant. (He said he was third-generation American, and Ms. Morris apologized.)

The audience asked about Kansas being ridiculed across the country for its stance on evolution.

“I did not write the jokes,” Ms. Morris said.

Spectators split on the winner.

“There are so many more important issues in Kansas right now,” said Cheryl Shepherd-Adams, a science teacher. “The issue is definitely a wedge issue, and I don’t want to see our community divided.”

History without books gets a test in California schools

It was only a matter of time before digital curriculum materials moved beyond the ancillary to the main event for publishers.

Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher ($2.5 billion in school sales last year), has introduced a digital materials for California’s social studies classrooms, which is apparently the first large-scale attempt to eliminate textbooks from classrooms.

Of course it remains to be seen if the digital format actually affects the pedagogical strategies of teachers, but in the meantime at least California students will have dramatically lighter backpacks.

History without books gets a test in California schools
By Jeffrey Goldfarb | August 1, 2006

LONDON (Reuters) – School children fond of chanting “No more pencils, no more books” may finally have their wish.

What began as a long-shot attempt last year by Pearson Plc to sell California educators digital materials to teach social studies has become reality in what could be the first large-scale step to eliminate books from classrooms.

Pearson, the world’s biggest publisher of educational materials, disclosed on Monday with its half-year results that about half the state’s elementary school students will learn about the American Revolutionary War and Thomas Jefferson using an interactive computer program.

The company also said its success in California, where about 1.5 million students aged 5-11 will use the program in classrooms this year, has led it to plan the same approach in additional states and with more subjects.

“Digital development costs us less and takes less time,” Pearson Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino said. “We’re speeding up how we’re rolling out those kinds of programs.”

London-based Pearson estimated it cost about half as much to develop as a textbook with supplemental materials, and added that it had about a 41 percent market share.

“We’re experimenting with the program and the price,” Chief Financial Officer Robin Freestone said, adding that Pearson gave California a discount compared with a book-based proposal. “It’s a major breakthrough, though. We managed to launch something for schools that didn’t need a book.”
The company said the California contract was valued at about $70 million, leaving some analysts guarded in their optimism about Pearson finding broader scale for digital curricula. While they saw some advantages for Pearson, they also found little that was technologically dazzling in the materials.

“All of their competitors are going to have to answer to this now,” said one media analyst, who asked not to be named because of bank rules restricting public comments.

“Pearson have got the first-mover advantage, but I doubt there’s any technical advantage. It can probably be replicated fairly easily.”

Pearson’s 2005 sales derived from schools, its biggest division, were about 1.3 billion pounds ($2.43 billion).

The California social studies contract was a longshot for Pearson, which had not even been planning to bid because of the strict guidelines the state puts on submissions for the subject.

“We didn’t think we could find a return,” Scardino said.

Instead, it opted to cull existing materials into a digital offering that included online homework assignments. It sent state officials a laptop computer instead of a pile of books in April 2005, and won state approval in November.

“Most schools have a big fat textbook on the table that doesn’t really entice students any more,” Scardino said.

Pearson’s multimedia product, created by its Scott Foresman unit, enables teachers to tailor lessons to individual students, includes video clips and is able to read aloud all of the lessons in English and Spanish.

“History and social science comes to life with exciting text, vibrant media clips and activities,” said Cheryl McConaughey, assistant superintendent at the Lamont School District near Bakersfield, California, in a statement supplied by Pearson. It was the first district to buy the materials.

“Our teachers are thrilled with virtually all aspects of the program.”

Press release on Pearson digital social studies project

What do Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, James Brown, Dolly Parton, Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan have in common?

Great idea here…I’ve had some success using blues music in social studies classes to teach about the experiences of African Americans as well as economic and class issues.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Pitt professor aims to help teach other subjects through music
7/30/2006, 12:29 p.m. ET
By ANDREW DRUCKENBROD
The Associated Press

PITTSBURGH (AP) — What do Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, James Brown, Dolly Parton, Irving Berlin and Bob Dylan have in common? They, among others, just may save music in American schools and put a powerful tool in the hands of teachers of all subjects.

A University of Pittsburgh music professor is disseminating a new approach to teaching history, English, social studies and other humanities by including music to be studied like any primary text. The results have been stunning for those teachers who have implemented his program in their curriculums.

“A large percentage of teenagers are bored with education, find that it has less to do with their real life and become disaffected,” said Deane Root, founder of the Voices Across Time program. “Textbooks already have vivid color and illustrations but miss out on music history. If music is one of the primary ways teenagers identify with each other, why not use it in the classes?”

Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'” fits snugly into a class investigating the protests of the ’60s, for instance. Sting’s “Russians” makes sense in a chapter about the Cold War. Root’s project, however, also specializes in providing information about lesser-known songs from earlier periods.

Class discussions on slavery gain from the authentic voices expressed in spirituals such as “No More Auction Block for Me.” An understanding of the abject, pre-union working conditions in American sweatshops gains depth with a listen to “The Song of the Shirt.” Discrimination (“No Irish Need Apply”) and prohibition (“Father’s a Drunkard and Mother Is Dead”) are investigated through song, as well as the many U.S. conflicts, from the birth of the country to the Civil War to the World Wars and Vietnam.

The trick, said Root, is to get teachers to treat music in the classroom in a more integrated manner, “not using music as wallpaper or window dressing or a curtain you walk through as you come into the room.”

To do that, he realized he had to give teachers the tools to understand how to use this information: music and text. All at a time when school districts have been curtailing music literacy.

In the past 20 years, “cut time” has meant something completely different to music teachers in public high schools. Financially strapped school districts were already decreasing music programs before No Child Left Behind was signed as federal law in 2002. It requires students to pass annual exams in reading and math, causing school districts to shift the balance of classes to those subjects.

“Though many programs across the nation are stable and some might even be growing, data from the Council for Basic Education, from analysis of California Department of Education data, and certainly from anecdotal sources suggest that the trend is downward,” said Michael Blakeslee, spokesman for the National Association for Music Education.

“In Pennsylvania, it is rare to have music cut out completely, but things have been whittled down,” said Richard Victor, former president of the Pennsylvania Music Educators Association. “Classes taught five days a week are changed to four or three days.”

The fight is still on, in the greater cultural arena and in schools, to reinstate or provide better funding for music education and instrument lessons. Several studies have shown how playing an instrument increases responsibility and brain development, not to mention broadening cultural experiences.

But Root and others are making the bold case that music also is a potent way to help students learn other school subjects. “I want to change the whole notion that music is a periphery to education and show it is an integral part of the core curriculum,” he said.

Earphone cords emerge from nearly every teenager’s ears these days, attached to iPods, MP3 players, even cell phones. If they are not getting instrument study as much as they once did, listening to music is more important than ever.

“There is nothing in education school which teaches prospective teachers how to use music as a regular part of their lesson plan,” said Root.

He began researching Voices Across Time in 1995, but it wasn’t until 2004 that he could offer seminars for teachers — as a partnership between Pitt’s Center for American Music and the Society for American Music, and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Now, any interested secondary education teacher can apply for funding to the classes here in Pittsburgh and in workshops he puts on throughout the country.

“With the kids connected to their MP3 players, I knew it was important,” said Joanne Krett, who teaches English and humanities at Boyce Campus Middle College High School in Monroeville. In 2004, she participated in the first of Root’s five-week summer seminars, and the results from implementing his approach, she said, had a “phenomenal” effect on her students.

“I always had music playing as a mood setter in the classroom; I just never had the tools to use it effectively,” she said. “The kind of kids I teach are so turned off by traditional education. It definitely engaged them more.

Root and his assistants supplied Krett with a guidebook and CDs analyzing songs that intersected with the issues she was teaching. One such subject was American social history of the ’60s, often misunderstood by her students. “The kids have this view of the ’60s as hippies, they don’t realize that was a small movement in a greater conservative environment,” she said.

In addition to the standard historical materials, Krett had the students listening to two songs of the time: Neil Young’s “Ohio” and Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee.” The study of the lyrics and the music brought to life both sides of the cultural divide of the time.

Not only do the texts of these songs offer a deeper context to the turbulent times, students also find they learn much from the music. They already have the tools to decode songs simply from listening to them all the time, and that deepens their understanding of the lyrics and the issues.

“Students often form identities around musical styles because it contains a lot of information they can understand,” said Root, who also is chair of Pitt’s music department. “Songs from throughout history are packed with information. … Music is ubiquitous today, but it was everywhere in American history.”

Mark Albright has taught history at St. Agnes Academy in Houston, Texas, for 26 years, but was astounded by the effect that the project had on his students.

“This is very effective in getting them engaged,” he said. “They love the music, (and it) just dovetailed so nicely with all the other elements of the course. A book, a song, a picture — is a means. Using as many of them as possible, you can help students come to understand a broader richer, deeper cultural sense of the nature of people in another time.”

Albright also is amazed by other effects of including music in the curriculum. His students created a music video that speaks to the evolution of the image of adolescent women in society. Likewise, Krett had her students write new lyrics to “The Alcoholic Blues,” a song protesting Prohibition. “We asked them to take any policy and write a song in the same meter and rhyme to protest that. They loved it (and were) actively involved.” Subjects included curfew polities, the school’s dress code and the No Child Left Behind mandate.

Both Krett and Albright had only limited background in music before attending Root’s seminar, but Root was ready for that with activities that helped to make the learning curve less steep. For this summer’s institute, wrapping up this week at Pitt, Root booked several guest speakers and musicians. Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, the songwriters who did the soundtrack to Ken Burns’ documentary “The Civil War,” sang through songs with the teachers in a recent seminar.

Voices Across Time is one of several independent projects funded by the NEH on this subject. Another was created by music industry expert Joseph Horowitz. “What Deane and I are doing is strategizing to get music back into the curriculum via social studies and history, (getting) music into the high school in classes other than the band room.”

Horowitz’s project includes a book, “Dvorak and America,” and a soon-to-be published DVD-ROM by music historian Robert Winter that uses Antonin Dvorak’s historic visit to America in the 1890s as a portal into understanding American culture at the time.

Horowitz is impressed with how Root has expanded such a project to include music for every period of history or aesthetic movement. “Deane is miles ahead of me in linking to high school teachers,” he said. “I think he is a visionary.”

The irony running through the efforts of Root, Horowitz, Vanderbilt’s Dale Cockrell and others like a recurring bass line is that it has been through music’s precarious existence in schools that these new, rich avenues for its inclusion have developed.

“It is very wrong-headed and shortsighted and an act of ignorance to remove music to save money and raise test scores. They are actually removing the incentives to become a better student,” Root contends.

He hopes to extend his project to more teachers by finding a publisher and expanding the classes to other geographical areas.

“The kids are listening to music. Why can’t we use it?” Root asked.

CDC reports smashes pernicious stereotypes about black youth

Tim Wise’s latest ZNet commentary details findings from a new Centers for Disease Control report, which which examines the rates at which students between grades 9-12 drink, take drugs, carry weapons, and engage in all forms of potentially destructive behavior.

First, youth in general are far less engaged in destructive activity than commonly believed. Rates of drug and alcohol use and abuse, for example, as well as violence and other forms of pathology tend to be much higher among adults, even as the young are disproportionately tagged as the problem.

But beyond that, the CDC notes that contrary to popular belief, it is not black youth, but rather whites who tend to lead the pack in these categories of deviance, and that among all youth who are either black, white or Latino, blacks almost invariably are the least likely to do drugs, drink, or carry weapons either on school grounds, or generally.

And, as Wise notes, these findings have been consistent for over a decade and consistently ignored by the media.

“Yet in virtually no year has the media seen fit to make an issue of disproportionate white pathology, or the relative good behavior of black youth. If black youth kill someone, it’s a headline; if they do something right, you’ll be lucky to hear about it at all.”

So here are some of the facts, compiled by CDC in 2005, which should be making the news:

White youth are 2.3 times more likely than black youth to drive drunk;

White males are a third more likely than black males to have carried a weapon in the past month (31.4 percent vs. 23.7) and fifty percent more likely to have taken a weapon to school (10.1 vs. 6.8);

Although black and white youth are equally likely to have tried cigarettes, whites are twice as likely to smoke currently (26 vs. 13 percent), and 3.3 times more likely to smoke at least a half-pack a day (11.7 vs. 3.5 percent);

Although white and black youth are roughly equally likely to have tried alcohol, white youth are fifty percent more likely to drink currently (46 percent vs. 31 percent), and nearly three times as likely to engage in episodic binge drinking (defined as having five or more drinks at a time, more than once a month). Indeed thirty percent of white youth have engaged in such heavy drinking, while only eleven percent of black youth have, meaning that white youth are nearly as likely to have binged more than once in the past month, as black youth are to have taken a drink at all;

Although there is no statistically significant difference between white and black youth when it comes to marijuana use, whites between grades 9-12 are almost 3.5 times more likely to have tried cocaine, twice as likely to be current coke users, twice as likely to have used inhalants, twice as likely to have used illegal steroids, 3.3 times as likely to have used hallucinogenic drugs, nearly four times as likely to have used methamphetamine, and slightly more likely to have used heroin or ecstasy. While it should be noted that only very small percentages of youth of any color have tried these harder drugs–the fact remains that blacks are typically the least likely to have done so.