USA TODAY, September 27, 2000, Wednesday, Pg. 11D

HEADLINE: 19 states get a bad grade for their teaching of evolution

BYLINE: Mary Beth Marklein

BODY: More than one-third of the states (19) do an "unsatisfactory to
dreadful job" of including evolution in public school science standards,
including 12 states that shun the "E-word" and four that avoid the
subject, says a study out Tuesday.

    The rest do "at least a satisfactory job," says the study, "Good
Science, Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States," published by the
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and presented at a meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.

    In some cases, weak treatment of evolution reflects poor science
standards overall, the study says. But author Lawrence Lerner, professor
emeritus at California State University at Long Beach, says states with
large populations of Protestant evangelicals are most likely to "find it
necessary to wrestle with the teaching of evolution."

       While critics of evolution are diverse, many of the weakest state
standards, he says, reflect the views of creationists, who argue that God
created humans whole.

     But some skeptics of evolution say Lerner and other supporters of
evolution oversimplify the debate.

    "They like to define the debate in a way that favors their position,
so any critic of Darwinism is called a creationist," says Jonathan Wells,
a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle non-profit group
that supports research critical of Charles Darwin's theories.

    In his book Icons of Evolution, to be published in October by Regnery
Publishing, Wells evaluates 10 biology textbooks used in U.S. schools and
finds all of them biased. "Even worse than not teaching evolution is
teaching them falsehoods masquerading as evidence," he says.

    In a statement, the Discovery Institute says the Fordham study
"encourages precisely the sort of bad science it pretends to criticize."

    Kansas, which made national news last fall when the state school board

removed references to evolution from state standards proposed by a group
of scientists, fared the worst in the Fordham study, earning an F-minus.
Lerner calls the standards there "a disgraceful paean to antiscience."

    That could change. Voters in August ousted some of the board's
anti-evolutionists in a Republican primary, and new candidates are
promising to change the standards.

     Lerner graded state standards in 49 states and the District of
Columbia (Iowa does not write statewide academic standards in any
subjects). His grades were based on nine criteria, including whether the
term evolution is used; how biological, human and geological forms of
evolution are treated; whether creationist language is used; and whether
teachers are required to issue a disclaimer when they discuss evolution in
class.

    Aside from Kansas, his state grades, with sample comments:

     * A. California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana ("exemplary
and straightforward"), New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode
Island, South Carolina.

     * B. Arizona, Colorado, District of Columbia, Idaho, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah,
Vermont, Washington.

     * C. Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska ("decent treatment of evolution
marred by the incursion of creationist notions"), Nevada, New Mexico, New
York, Texas.

     * D. Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Virginia, Wisconsin.

     * F. Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire,
North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming.

POWRÓT