March 19, 201610 yr Creationist bills have evolved to include climate change "[The analysis] lets you say not only do these bills share some kind of family resemblance, but these legislatures probably copied their bill from this specific bill," Matzke tells me. "Early on, Alabama bills were the source. After that, Louisiana and Tennessee — places where these policies passed — it’s pretty clear that they inspired further policies." Matzke's analysis shows the biggest leap creationist legislation took is when a policy proposed in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, in 2006, broadened the language to encompass other contentious scientific topics like human cloning and global warming. "The tactic appears to be an attempt to circumvent earlier legal decisions suggesting that targeting evolution alone is [on the face] evidence of religious motivation and, thus, unconstitutional, perhaps also motivated by the dislike of climate change research by economic and religious conservatives," Matzke writes in Science. After the Ouachita proposal, similar language popped up in a dozen other proposals. After a federal court banned teaching intelligent design in 2005, policies promoting "academic freedom" began to circulate. "These don’t mention creationism," Matzke says. "These don’t mention intelligent design." In 2008, Louisiana passed a bill that advocated for "open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." In 2012, Tennessee passed a similar resolution. By encouraging "academic freedom," these bills presumably give teachers who want to discredit evolution or students who won't hear any of it some protection. "You can make a more specific analogy to diseases," he says. "We know that microbes evolve. They evolve to get around the immune system. They evolve to become sneakier. Animals evolving camouflage to avoid predators and stuff like that. We’re really seeing that happen with these creationist bills. The more obvious forms of these bills got shot down." But sneakier bills — ones couched in terms of "academic freedom" — can still get passed. How creationist legislation has evolved, in one chart - Vox
March 20, 201610 yr Here's an easier path. Just sign up to go to school in Texas. You would probably get a better education than in your average KY school based on TX school ratings compared to KY's.
March 20, 201610 yr You would probably get a better education than in your average KY school based on TX school ratings compared to KY's. I don't doubt it. We've got TB&G teaching advanced science.
March 20, 201610 yr You would probably get a better education than in your average KY school based on TX school ratings compared to KY's. You are not looking at the right data. Texas students perform at the bottom or near. Kentucky is mid pack. That will change though as legislatures mess with it in KY.
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