Louisiana’s new voucher program will kick in during the upcoming school year, giving students in failing public schools the funds to attend certain highly rated public schools and private institutions.
Some of these private schools will be spreading ignorance to their
students by using curriculum that openly clashes with modern science.
One textbook used by many private schools makes the creationist claim
that no transitional fossils showing evolutionary changes have ever
been found, which is simply not true. ”This
gradual change from fish to reptiles has no scientific basis,” the book
reads. “For the change, to have taken place many transitional forms
would have been developed. However, no transitional fossils have been or will ever be
discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and
reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among
them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsman fashioned them all”
[poor reasoning and use of commas theirs; emphasis ours].
This excerpt comes from a high-school science book used in the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum, an educational tool in
many Louisiana schools, like the Eternity Christian Academy in
Calcasieu Parish, which is offering spots for 135 voucher students.
British musician Jonny Scaramanga, who attended an ACE school while
growing up as a Christian fundamentalist, has published this and other alarming textbook passages on his blog, Leaving Fundamentalism, including the creationist claim that the second law of thermodynamics disproves evolution.
ACE isn’t the only company whose
unscientific lessons stand to get a big boost from public funds turned
loose in Louisiana. Some institutions, such as New Living Word in
Lincoln Parish (which currently invites 315 scholarship students worth
$2.7 million in state support), instead use the A Beka Book homeschooling program. Over at the Talk to Action blog, researcher and writer Rachel Tabachnick has recorded certain unscientific claims in
A Beka Book’s educational material. Science texts describe evolution as
belief-based rather than scientific, and the 1994 edition of an
8th-grade science textbook claims that “Creation, not evolution, is
based on a reasonable faith.” In addition to creationism, one economics
textbook denies global warming, calling it “simply not supported by
scientific evidence…Global environmentalists have said and written
enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous
economies of the world’s richest nations.” And environmentalists aren’t
the only ones to watch out for—other excerpts contain hostility towards
non-Protestant religions and non-conservative politics.
One of the nice things about publishing creationist textbooks based
on the unchanging Bible is that when you put out new editions, you don’t
have to worry about modifying the text to include any new, inconvenient
discoveries, like the “fishapod” Tiktaalik roseae, an amazing transitional fossil
showing a key part of one fish lineage’s evolutionary journey onto
land. When asked about whether ACE made any recent, substantive changes
to Biology 1099, a science textbook now in its third edition, a
staff member at the customer information desk said, “Most of our
curriculum is solid. Most of our updates are cosmetic—as we grow as a
company we’re able to update the look of [a book] more than the content
sometimes.”