Florida Citizens for Science has created an online petition. Please take a moment to sign it. Provided we can collect a decent number of signatures, we then plan on printing a copy and presenting it to the State Board of Education. We don’t have much time, though, so please don’t put it off!
[update]Â We are up to 456 signatures! Don’t stop, folks. Spread the word.
Please pass this on to other science minded blogs!!
Passed on.
Whoever Roberta Richardson is, she gets my statement of the day award for her comment to the petition: “I am astounded and ashamed that I even have to make this statement to you.”
Unfortunately it’s set up so only people with a US address can sign. While this is certainly a state and national issue, there are many people outside the USA who would gladly show their support.
Why would the board of education care what a foreigner thinks? Because there is no way this science-minder foreigner would consider moving my family, raising my children, investing my funds, or locating my business, in an area in which the destruction of science is an education objective.
(Isn’t Fla hoping to attract more high-tech investment, by the way? Do they imagine they’ll attract successful science workers who are willing to have their children indoctrinated in antiscience?)
Anyway, very best wishes in this important battle and, when the petition is delivered, mention that there is international concern too.
I’ve signed and blogged it.
The comment I put in was:
I was born in Florida, and I care about the state of science education there. There are two main things that I want to say about antievolution and science education.
First, antievolution is not based in science, does not represent an alternative scientific understanding of the evidence, and it specifically conveys a narrowly sectarian religious doctrine. It is disruptive of the tolerance towards diverse religious faiths, or the lack of them, that help maintain amity and civility in our country. We are fortunate here to have avoided the deadly struggles over doctrinal positions that are common elsewhere and that have left their stamp on history. Antievolution efforts include attempts to rewrite the operating principles of science by fiat, and this alone should be sufficient to demonstrate that its promoters are not working for the common weal, but are bent upon achieving their own aims without regard for anything but their own satisfaction.
Second, science education needs to incorporate those concepts that have accountability, that have been proposed, argued, tested, revised, and that have by the record of empirical investigation and substantial engagement of criticism convinced the scientific community of the worth of the concept in question. Evolutionary science has met that high standard, and antievolutionary attacks upon it have no such claim to legitimacy. Science education should not be weakened by spending precious class time on material whose inclusion only serves the purposes of evading those stringent standards of accountability, undermining the principle of science’s ability to wholly reject hypotheses that predict false consequences, and gainsaying well-tested theories without substantiating a basis for such attacks.
It can do no one harm to come to an accurate understanding of what science is, and what has been discovered and supported through the scientific method. Please adopt the new science standards as written by your domain experts and experts in science education, and avoid the error of capitulating to the demands of the antievolution movement that evolutionary science be “balanced†with material that sows broad distrust of scientists and findings in biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology.
The FCAT science standards are, by and large, a disaster. We need to focus first on what every student needs to know in order to live a healthy, productive life, and to preserve what is left of our environment. Then, college and university bound students should be tested on a more rigorous curriculum. A program like the Regents Program in NY is a good guideline. I find it pathetic that the current 11th grade standards include NOTHING on human organs and sytems. but does have questions on quarks, muons, and gluons. This is absurd.
Congratulations!