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In Kansas, Teaching Biology is Survival of Fittest: As Students Challenge Them and Colleagues Mock Them Over the State's Evolution Debate, Educators Get Stuck in the Middle

Posted on: Friday, 30 December 2005, 12:00 CST

By Lisa Anderson, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune

Dec. 30--OVERLAND PARK, Kan. -- Hours after students merrily departed for the long winter break, lights still blazed in Ken Bingman's biology lab at Blue Valley West High School here.

The bright TV lights belonged to the camera crew from "Nick News With Linda Ellerbee," a children's newsmagazine show on the Nickelodeon cable channel. "Nick News" was just the latest in a long line of those seeking the veteran biology teacher's take on the country's most spectacular recurring science squabble: the Kansas State Board of Education's on-again-off-again relationship with Charles Darwin and his theory of biological evolution.

For the moment, that tenuous and tempestuous engagement is off again. And Kansas biology teachers like Bingman once more are caught in the middle of a raging culture war.

On Nov. 8, the board adopted state science standards containing the harshest criticism of evolution in the nation. The standards pointedly cast doubt on Darwin's theory that all life on Earth shares common ancestry and developed through the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection. Repugnant to many religious conservatives, modern evolutionary theory is considered by the vast majority of scientists as a cornerstone of modern biology that has withstood rigorous testing over time.

In an even bolder step that drew international derision, the board redefined science as a discipline not limited to observations in the natural world and opened the door to supernatural explanations. While unspecified, these might include the biblical account of creation in Genesis and intelligent design, or ID, which presents itself as a scientific theory positing that some complexities of the natural world are best attributed to an unnamed and unseen designer. Most ID proponents believe the designer is God; most scientists believe ID is creationism in a lab coat.

The state science standards--which take effect in 2007, unless a more moderate board is elected in 2006 --are not binding on school districts but may be reflected on state assessment tests.

Bingman, 66, has seen it all before. A veteran of 43 years in Kansas biology classrooms, he not only served on the committee that wrote the standards the board just revised, but he also worked on the committee that produced standards another conservative board changed in 1999 to eliminate most references to evolution. In between, a moderate majority board restored evolution to the standards in 2001.

If that seems confusing, imagine the effect on the students, said Bingman as he sat in a classroom festooned with student-crafted models of DNA's double helix.

"They're violating the integrity of science," he said of the current board. "In doing that, they're confusing the students not only about what is science, but confusing them about what is religion. So, it's a lose-lose."

Christopher Iliff strongly disagreed. The Kansas attorney also is a board member of Intelligent Design network, inc., a non-profit organization based in Shawnee Mission, Kan., that promotes "objectivity in origins science" and champions standards critical of evolution.

"What the Kansas standards do is encourage more thorough analysis of the existing scientific basis for evolution. I think what it will encourage is discussion of what I think are huge gaps in the purely materialistic explanation that is offered for evolution," said Iliff.

Steve Case, assistant director of the Center for Science Education at the University of Kansas, said the new standards are "embarrassing, but I'm more worried about the impact of our students being asked about their science education during college interviews."

Case, who also was on the standards writing committee, said he is reconvening the panel in January to complete the work interrupted by the board's decision to ignore the standards recommended by the majority of the committee and to adopt revisions proposed by a conservative minority.

'Worst jobs' listing

The last three months have been rough for many of Kansas' nearly 650 high school biology teachers. In October, "Kansas biology teacher" made the top 10 in Popular Science magazine's annual list of the "Worst Jobs in Science." It came in at No. 3, surpassed only by animal "manure inspector" and the worst job of all: "human lab rat."

On Dec. 7, Kansas earned an F-minus for its science standards--the worst in the nation--in "The State of State Science Standards 2005," a report published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a non-profit group supporting research and reform in K-12 education.

"They took good, solid science standards and they adulterated them. So, I think those low marks were deserved," said Bingman, the son of a Missouri farmer and brother of two biology teachers.

Bingman recalls the 1999 board attack on evolution. "It was academically agonizing. . . . I'm kind of ashamed to admit it but it took me a couple of nights before I had a decent night's sleep--that's how hard it hit me," he said.

But this time around he said it's worse. Given the board's decision, the national political climate and the growing number of religious conservatives active in public education, he said, "I think they will feel very much empowered and this is what I see as different now."

For example, Bingman said, over the years he probably had students who disagreed with evolution; typically 10 percent of his students are creationists. But "those students really weren't vocal. . . . Now, it's in your face, I mean, it's in your face.

"Not only do they say that intelligent design is right, they even talk about your politics and call you a liberal and those kinds of things which I think inappropriate in a classroom," he said.

"I can show you a paper a kid turned in . . . that said that I'm a liberal," he said, plucking an essay from a pile of papers.

Assigned to discuss five solid pieces of evidence for evolution, one 14-year-old student wrote: "Although there is more than one viewpoint on the issue of how we all got here, Mr. Bingman is forcing [us into] believing his views by teaching us one-sided education. This is much as how the liberal media is forcing the public into disowning the war and Pres. Bush's policies. Despite my viewpoints I am forced to write about the theory of evolution."

Said Bingman, "I've never had anything like that before in 43 years of teaching. It's one instance, but it's symptomatic of what we're seeing in some young people."

Close to Kansas City, Blue Valley West, one of the state's best public high schools, is located in booming Johnson County, the most affluent in Kansas. The school educates 1,300 students within its red brick and green glass walls and its teachers are somewhat buffered from anti-evolution pressure, said Bingman.

But in a state where about 80 percent of school districts are small and rural, Bingman said, "I do fear for some of the students in classrooms in smaller areas . . . where I think the real damage can be done.

"I think teachers will probably do a couple of things. One is, they will slight the teaching of evolution and then, when it does come up, I think they will maybe offer their own religious views about how things came to be as they are."

Public polls weigh in

Polling consistently shows a majority of Americans favors teaching both evolution and creationism. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has banned creationism from public schools as a violation of the 1st Amendment's prohibition on state establishment of religion. Only about half of all Americans surveyed are familiar with the term "intelligent design."

Over the last 20 years, polls also consistently find that almost half of all Americans believe God created humans in their current form within the last 10,000 years.

For a biology teacher in a small-town school, Bingman said the anti-evolution pressure could be enormous. "Because you teach all the sciences perhaps, or most of the sciences. Your wife may in fact be a teacher in the school . . . and there can be all sorts of harassment, not only to you, but to your wife and worst of all to your students or to your own children who are students in the school."

Such harassment of teachers and their families occurred in Dover, the rural Pennsylvania school district whose board-mandated inclusion of ID in biology classes was struck down Dec. 20 in a decision by federal District Court Judge John Jones III.

Jones found the policy to be religiously motivated and a violation of the 1st Amendment. He further found ID to be a religious belief, not a scientific theory.

A survey of science teachers in March by the National Science Teachers Association found 31 percent felt pressured to include creationism, intelligent design or other non-scientific alternatives to evolution in their classes; an equal number felt pushed to de-emphasize or omit evolution. Teachers said the pressure comes from parents and students, not administrators.

In the case of Kansas, ridicule is coming from all sides. "How do you feel when you say, 'I'm Ken Bingman and I've been teaching biology for 43 years and I'm from Kansas,'" and you are greeted by peals of laughter, said Bingman, recalling a regional meeting of the NSTA in early December. "It's pretty sad."

Iliff also has heard the snickers. "Obviously I don't like it when my home state is the object of ridicule. On the other hand, 50 years from now when I think intelligent design will be a standard part of the discussion of origins, Kansas may be looked at as the place where it all started."

- - -

Drumroll, please!

"The 10 Worst Jobs in Science," as listed by Popular Science magazine, October 2005:

1. Human lab rat

An industry-funded University of California, San Diego, study paid students $15 an hour to have small doses of a root killer and nerve agent shot into their eyes and noses.

2. Manure inspector

The University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety gathers animal poop to test ways to eliminate dangerous bacteria from animals and our food.

3. Kansas biology teacher

"The evolution debate is consuming almost everything we do," says Brad Williamson, a 30-year science veteran at Olathe East High School.

4. "Extremophile" excavator

A U.S. Geological Survey team works with putrid, stinky mud in California to study an "extremophile" microbe that eats arsenic.

5. Nuclear weapons scientist

The Wen Ho Lee case and other embarrassments at Los Alamos dull the luster of this job.

6. Volcanologist

When a volcano erupts, they rush in, despite dangers that have led to the deaths of dozens of such scientists in recent decades.

7. Semen washer

At sperm banks, they prepare the donations for freezing.

8. Do-gooder

The non-profit Earthwatch Institute charges people to join their scientific expeditions, some of which are romantic (studying the giant statues of Easter Island) and some not (fending off the mosquitoes in Manitoba peat bogs).

9. NASA ballerina

A dancer was hired by NASA to perform next to a robot built to sense the presence of movement nearby and move out of the way.

10. Orangutan-urine collector

Anthropologist Cheryl Knott of Harvard University collects urine samples from endangered primates in Borneo.

lbanderson@tribune.com

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Copyright (c) 2005, Chicago Tribune

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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