Criticism of school chief now coming from abroad

Scientists from as far away as the United Kingdom are appalled at Arizona Superintendent Diane Douglas’ plan for how to teach our kids about evolution.

The Association for Science Education, which represents the U.K.’s science teachers, says Douglas’ proposal to cast doubt about evolution would “undermine the scientific literacy of Arizona’s students.”

Meanwhile, the New York-based Teacher Institute of Evolutionary Science, or TIES, says Douglas’ revisions to the standards taught in science class “will handicap Arizona students.”

“Those who seek to weaken (evolution’s) teaching are doing so to insert religious ideas into science classrooms, an effort that has been rejected by the courts as contrary to America’s constitutional principles,” wrote Bertha Vazquez, TIES’ director and a middle-school science teacher.

“Why would the leaders of a US state deny this knowledge to their own children?”

TIES is part of the Center for Inquiry, a New York-based non-profit focused on fostering a secular society.

For the past year, several dozen Arizona science teachers have been working to update the state’s science standards. This spring, Douglas’ Department of Education took a marking pen to those updates, striking or qualifying the word “evolution” wherever it occurred.

Science teachers, for example, want their high-school biology students to be able to explain “how the process of evolution result(s) from natural selection.”

Douglas wants students to explain “how the process of evolution may result from natural selection.”

Science teachers have proposed teaching students that “changes resulting from natural diversity within a species lead to the selection of those individuals suited to survive under certain conditions.”

Douglas proposes to say that such changes “are thought to” lead to the selection of those individuals suited to survive.

Douglas has downplayed her revisions, saying she’s just changing a word here and there and certainly not trying to take evolution out of the state’s science standards.

She is, however, calling into question the basic scientific theory that an overwhelming majority of scientists say is the backbone of biology. And there’s a reason for that.

In a campaign forum in November, Douglas called for creationism to be taught along with evolution.

“Should the theory of intelligent design be taught along with the theory of evolution? Absolutely,” she said at the time. “I had a discussion with my staff,

because we’re currently working on science standards, to make sure this issue was addressed in the standards we’re working on.”

This week, she said she was simply expressing her personal beliefs at that forum. Beliefs that scientists say will weaken what Arizona’s kids will be taught in science class. Cue those English scientists:

“The intent of the revision is clearly to ensure that the standards are not committed to the scientific legitimacy of evolutionary theory and to license Arizona science teachers to miseducate their students accordingly,” they wrote. “This is scientifically misleading and pedagogically inappropriate.”

In other words, not something a politician with no background in science — or education, for that matter — should be monkeying around with.

The state Board of Education will vote on the proposed science standards in June. You can comment on what you think of Douglas’ plan through Monday.