Chris Comer's Fight vs Creationism in Texas

Only in Texas could the state science director be fired for insisting on teaching only good science.

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Texas Attorney General's Office

I was just on the Attorney General's website trying to contact them. It does not look like contact info. is available on their website.

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TCS

Texas Citizens for Science was formed in January, 2003, to promote the use of accurate and reliable science in Texas public education, government, and institutions.
...
Fourth, Republican Governor Rick Perry, Republicans in the Texas Legislature, and Republicans on the State Board of Education are currently attempting to completely reform the character of Texas public education in far-reaching ways. Teacher qualifications have already been weakened so that new teachers are no longer required to have the usual Education School pedagogical training. Abstinence-only sex education was recently mandated in health textbooks. School financing will be significantly changed, perhaps in ways that inhibit communities from raising property taxes to adequately support their local schools, and some districts may not sufficiently funded as in the past. More ominously, Republicans hope to add vouchers for religious and private schools, and hope to create virtual charter schools to support home-schooling at state expense. These new state-funded vouchers and virtual schools would not be subject to the same curriculum and instructional requirements as the public schools. Since religious schools and home schools almost all intentionally use curricula that distort modern science in favor of non-scientific religious beliefs such as creationism, intelligent design, flood geology, and a young Earth, some of these proposals will greatly damage reliable science education in Texas. Since many thousands of Texas students--who now receive an adequate if not exemplary science education--would find themselves subject to inferior faith-based pseudoscientific instruction under the new Republican plan for Texas public schools, this issue must be taken up by Texas Citizens for Science. (Note added, Jan. 2005: TCS is still working on this one!)

Did Texas Restoration Project Improperly Fund Gov. Rick Perry’s reelection campaign in 2006

The Rev. Laurence White and his wife are two of three directors on the Niemoller Foundation’s governing board. White is also chairman of the Texas Restoration Project. The foundation reported income of about $1.3 million in 2005 and spent all but about $29,000 in that year.
Expenditures covered Texas Restoration Project activities – including more than $700,000 for the six pastors’ events – and payments to organizations tied to the Texas Restoration Project.

Other ties between the Perry campaign and the Niemoller Foundation/Texas Restoration Project include the following:

• The Niemoller Foundation’s expenditures in 2005 included nearly $475,000 paid to San Jacinto Public Affairs, an Austin-based firm that organized the Texas Restoration Project’s events. The firm earned at least $4 million from work for the Republican Party of Texas and electoral candidates between July 2003 and November 2007.

• The Perry campaign subsequently communicated directly with thousands of pastors recruited by the Texas Restoration Project, suggesting coordination between the campaign and the Restoration Project.

• Press reports in 2005 indicated at least one of Gov. Perry’s pastors’ briefing speeches was considered a campaign event, with the Perry campaign releasing the transcript of his speech. (“Perry mobilizes evangelicals as gov’s race heats up,” Matt Curry, Associated Press, June 11, 2005)

• The Niemoller Foundation doled out $200,000 to Plano-based Free Market Foundation and San Antonio-based Justice at the Gates in 2005. The two groups helped recruit pastors to Texas Restoration Project events. Free Market Foundation president Kelly Shackelford and Justice at the Gate director Susan Weddington served on Gov. Perry’s reelection steering committee.

• Days before the gubernatorial election in November 2006, the Texas Restoration Project sent e-mails to pastors on its mailing list, encouraging them to participate in a statewide conference call (which took place the following week) to “discuss what we can do this election cycle to motivate our pews to vote their values.” Shackelford and David Barton, who until June 2006 had served as vice chair of the Texas Republican Party, were among the organizers and prominent speakers on the call.

Documents related to the Texas Freedom Network’s complaint to the IRS can be found at www.tfn.org/religiousright/irstxrestorationproject/index.php.

The Lie of the Texas Miracle

So, the Nation's Report Card for 2005 has just been released.
The most striking thing about the national report card is how it is just total bullshit.
Additionally, the politicians that employ these so-called measures of accountability are cynically exploiting schoolchildren to pad their accomplishments, as was seen in Virginia in the last decade. First you introduce a bullshit test that no one is prepared for. All the results are totally crappy, and the politician who introduced says, "Look at the state of our schools! The previous administration failed Our Children! Blah blah blah!" The next year teachers teach to the test (and/or they weaken the standards) and scores dramatically improve. The politician then says, "It's an education miracle! Look at what my administration did!" Meanwhile, by any meaningful metric of success nothing significant has changed, except the kids have gotten better at taking pointless standardized tests.
This is the source of the so-called "Texas Education Miracle" that Bush used in 2000 to represent himself as a champion of education. In fact, the Texas educational miracle was one of the greater frauds perpetuated against the American people by a state government. Bush's accountability scheme, rather than actually changing anything, focused on pointless measurement and threats of loss of funding rather than real improvement. The result? Texas schools hide their massive dropout rates rather than honestly addressing them. Bush claims a reduction in drop-outs from 40% to 1% in 4 years, but they couldn't hide the data for long. An independent study of graduation rates by the conservative Manhattan Institute found the real graduation rate in Texas is somewhere between 57-67%. Real success in education usually takes a decade to appear, and any claim to the contrary should be immediately suspect.
Check out this map of a real metric of educational success. The lesson? Try to educate your kids in the hard-core red states and there is a high probability they will never graduate.


Also see: Michael
Dobbs, Education Miracle Has a Math Problem:Bush Critics Cite Disputed Houston Data, The Washington Post, November 8, 2003.
And Dan Rather, The Texas Miracle™, 60 Minutes II, August 25th, 2004.
posted by Rev. Dr. at 8:41 PM, permalink,

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60 Minutes II Investigates Claims That Houston Schools Falsified Dropout Rates

All in all, 463 kids left Sharpstown High School that year, for a variety of reasons. The school reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding, them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country.

“That’s how you get to zero dropouts. By assigning codes that say, ‘Well, this student, you know, went to another school. He did this or that.’ And basically, all 463 students disappeared. And the school reported zero dropouts for the year,” says Kimball. “They were not counted as dropouts, so the school had an outstanding record.”

Sharpstown High wasn’t the only “outstanding” school. The Houston school district reported a citywide dropout rate of 1.5 percent. But educators and experts 60 Minutes checked with put Houston’s true dropout rate somewhere between 25 and 50 percent.

“But the teachers didn’t believe it. They knew it was cooking the books. They told me that. Parents told me that,” says Kimball. “The superintendent of schools would make the public believe it was one school. But it is in the system, it is in all of Houston.”

Those low dropout rates – in Houston and all of Texas - were one of the accomplishments then-Texas Gov. George Bush cited when he campaigned to become the “Education President.”

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A Million Texas Children between 1996-3003 Did Not Graduate

"In 2001-02, Texas schools enrolled 364,270 freshmen – and 225,756 seniors. The state's official annual dropout rate: 1 percent." (Source: The Dallas Morning News - August 31, 2003)

Hundreds of thousands of Texas students never made it to graduation from their high schools in the past seven years, but the reported dropout rates of many Texas school districts came through in small single digits.

A miracle? Hardly. More like a disgrace, a statistical sleight of hand that does more to cover up failure than demonstrate success.

The Texas ATTRITION RATE (on the right) provides a far more revealing (and harsh) portrait of what actually happens to many Texas students.

Where are those thousands of children today? Were they simply LEFT BEHIND? Discarded? Many were lost, forgotten, neglected and in some cases even PUSHED OUT. Push out the weak students and you will see test scores skyrocket.

If you were running for President or Secretary of Education, which number would make you look better, the dropout rate or the attrition rate?



Enrollments for the Houston ISD in 2001-2002

Source: The Dallas Morning News - August 31, 2003

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Failure of No Child Left Behind

ScienceDaily (Feb. 16, 2008)

A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas' public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation -- a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, Latino and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students.

...60 percent of African-American students, 75 percent of Latino students and 80 percent of ESL students did not graduate
...The discrepancy between the official dropout rates, in the 2 to 3 percent range, and the actual rates can be attributed to the state's method of counting...
The study has been published in the peer-reviewed policy journal "Educational Policy Analysis Archives"

Another Response to TEA's Forced Resignation of Christien Comer

Letter from Texas University Biology Professors
Defending Biological Evolution as a Central Pillar of Modern Science Education

Galveston Independent School District wants to Sue Blogger

This just makes them seem guilty, public officials should not sue citizens. Lets hope there actions are fully exposed and that they not be reelected.

The Galveston Independent School District (GISD) is attempting to sue
Sandra Tetley, the mother of a student in the district, for defamation.
Tetley runs the blog GISDWatch.com, which tracks and comments on the activities of the local school board.

Email from Don McLeroy

Could there be a worst qualified school board member? Read the email below. It just gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

October 30, 2003
The Glencoe Motion

My Personal Confession

Given all the time in the world, I don't think I could make a
spider out of a rock. However, most of the books we are considering
adopting, claim that Nothing made a spider out of a rock.

I don't think I share a common ancestor with a tree. However, most
of the books we are considering adopting, claim as a fact that we all
share a common ancestor with a tree.

Discussion

Has science made its case that Nothing made a spider out of a rock
and that we share a common ancestor with a tree? I say NO, there are
too many difficulties with their case, therefore, I am making these
motions.

Evolution science is predominantly historical science; it is not
observable or testable empirically, it must be inferred. For example,
even the empirical research on embryology and the sequences of
proteins and DNA only give rise to historical speculations. Thus, the
argument for evolution is not deductive, but inductive; in an
inductive argument, scientists weigh evidence to see what is most
probable to have occurred. On this basis, most scientists hypothesize
that Nothing made a spider out of a rock and that we share a common
ancestor with a tree. However, other scientists find serious flaws
with those hypotheses.

In most of the books we are considering adopting, our students are
not being presented both sides; the minority viewpoint is being
withheld. This means that these books do not conform to our
standards.

In fact, most of the books assert the majority view as a fait
accompli. While all the books contain some "qualifiers", Glencoe's
Biology, the Dynamics of Life comes the closest to meeting Texas'
high standards and is the most "qualified" book up for adoption.

The Motions

Therefore, I plan to make the following motions at our November
board meeting.

First, I will move that we separate out the regular biology books
from the commissioner's recommendation.

Second, I will move that we adopt Glencoe's Biology, the Dynamics
of Life as conforming and adopt the rest of the regular biology books
as non-conforming.

Last Thought

This action would approve all the books up for adoption, plus
reward the book that most closely follows our standards. It does not
negatively single out any book but fulfills our responsibility of
standards conformity.

Don McLeroy

Just wrong on so many levels.

Dr. McLeroy is apparently a dentist. My advice is to avoid him if you have dental problems. Anyone who does not believe in evolution is so incompetent in biology as to not be trusted in medicine.

Texas leads U.S. in teen birth rate - Yahoo! News

Texas leads U.S. in teen birth rate - Yahoo! News

Texas had the nation's highest birth rate among teenagers ages 15 to 19 in 2004 a rate of 63 births per 1,000 teens. Texas law also requires school districts to emphasize abstinence in sex education classes. Don McLeroy is the president of the State Board of Education says "...it's more of a societal problem than it is a school problem."


Time to get rid of this guy.

Trans-Texas Corridor

Trans-Texas Corridor

Yahoo! News - Texas Governor Seeks to Build Megahighways

Yahoo! News - Texas Governor Seeks to Build Megahighways