Texas Citizens for Science

[Wise Young]

Bravo for Texas
http://www.texscience.org/about.php

What is Texas Citizens for Science?

Texas Citizens for Science is a statewide, grassroots organization dedicated to maintaining the professionalism of science education in Texas public schools, the integrity of science in the Texas public school curriculum, and the accuracy of science in Texas government agencies and institutions. Our members include both working scientists and citizens interested in preserving the quality of science education in Texas. We model ourselves after the successful Kansas Citizens for Science and Ohio Citizens for Science, and organized for the same reason they did: to oppose the organized forces of unreason in our state that wish to degrade the quality of science education in our schools and ignore the use of accurate science in state government agencies.

Our activities include the following:

• Ensuring that the scientific integrity of science textbooks used in Texas schools and the Texas science curriculum in TEKS are not compromised by keeping them free of political, ideological, and religious influence.
  
• Preserving the state law that prevents the State Board of Education from censoring science textbooks--as it has in past decades, by forcing publishers to make changes in their science textbooks that modify or remove scientifically-accurate information in order to make the content palatable with some State Board members' ideological biases and prejudices--by allowing only changes that ensure that science textbooks are "free from factual errors."
  
• Working to prevent some SBOE members from using even this small power to compel publishers to modify science textbooks in the guise of "editing" scientifically-valid content to make them "free of factual errors" that are not really scientific errors, but are only "factual errors" in the minds of ideologically-motivated State Board members.
  
• Participating in SBOE textbook hearings to ensure that creationists don't succeed in removing scientifically-accurate information or including scientifically-false topics in science textbooks by claiming that the changes would better enable students to "analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information" as required by TEKS.
  
• Keeping pseudoscientific concepts such as creationism and intelligent design out of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS--the Texas school science curriculum), and out of science textbooks used in our state's public schools.
  
• Ensuring that Texas government agencies, committees, and institutions always use accurate science and scientific reasoning in their deliberations and to reach conclusions that affect the lives and welfare of Texas citizens.

[wheelchairTITAN]

Wise, I support the truly, important principles stated in the quote you provided. Curriculum independence and scientific principles should be left to the real sciences and hypothesizing about truth to politics.

I do have concerns about politics and curriculum in any context. I see too much interference on a daily basis and find the lack of independence by all governments and from individuals of any party persuasion to be abhorrent.

Two somewhat, picayune issues:

I went to the original website and my concern with the arguments made in the earth sciences section arise from the authours stated interest in earth sciences becoming the "fourth" science taught in Texas. I didn’t read the other science page arguments and so I may be overstating my personal conclusion based on incomplete information on my part; and,

additionally, if the authour of this section in the Texas Citizens for Science documents was a reasonable writer of the English language I might have been more convinced as to his/her arguments.

This is undoubtedly a significant change in Texas science education, for it gives Science the same importance as that held by English and Social Studies, for which students are required to take four courses.

"for it gives" huh

I will wait for someone to parse (trash?) my writing or lack of writing skills so that I can learn from my mistakes.

My undergrad and grad studies are in earth sciences and I have been teaching earth sciences for a long time. This of course followed my own bias after kindergarten graduation during the my "plasticene age" of the 1960s.