slide to global backwater status accelerates (cont'd)

Creationism Persists in American Science Classrooms
Chronicle of Higher Education
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

A significant fraction of high-school biology teachers acknowledge teaching some form of creationism, according to the first large national survey to probe how that issue is handled inside American classrooms. At the same time, teachers with the most college-level biology credits were likely to spend the most time teaching evolution, indicating that college training shapes the way teachers treat this cornerstone of scientific thought.

One in eight teachers said they taught creationism as a "valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species," reports a team led by Michael B. Berkman, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. The survey results, published in the journal PLoS Biology on Monday, also reveal that one in six biology teachers believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."
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The Penn State researchers surveyed 939 high-school biology teachers who were randomly selected from a list that includes most of the biology teachers in the country. They found that treatment of evolution varies widely: Some 38 percent of teachers devote more than 11 hours to the subject, while 11 percent provide less than 2 hours for the topic, if they cover it at all.

A quarter of teachers said they discussed creationism or intelligent design for at least an hour, but nearly half apparently bring it up to criticize it, say the survey authors. Some 40 percent of the teachers who raise the topic of creationism say that when they talk about it, they describe it as a valid religious perspective that is inappropriate for a science class.
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Randy Moore, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, has conducted his own surveys of high-school biology teachers and also of college students, to see what they learned in high-school biology classes. His findings and those of other researchers suggest that 15 percent to 30 percent of biology teachers are teaching creationism, which federal courts have deemed a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In a study published in The American Biology Teacher in February, Mr. Moore found that 27 percent of the 1,465 college freshmen he surveyed had encountered creationism in a high-school biology class. A previous study found that 15 percent of biology teachers do not accept evolution as scientifically valid.