Florida School Districts May Get More Local Control over Textbooks and Curriculum

The Florida state legislature has passed legislation that would allow school districts that excell to have unprecedented control over their own schools, textbooks and curriculum.

“When you have a district that exceeds the state’s requirements and expectations, they must know something,” said Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, the proposal’s leading proponent. “We’re going to allow them the flexibility to keep improving.”

Naturally, there are Darwinian alarmists who are worried that this would open the door teaching intelligent design.

Allowing school districts to choose textbooks that are not on a state-approved list prompted fears. One lawmaker said the proposal would allow schools to buy science books espousing the theory of intelligent design, a teaching that credits the creation of the world to an intelligent being rather than evolution, while remaining silent on subjects such as the Holocaust or black history.

Notice how the paragraph seems to indicate that the textbooks that teach intelligent design (and which textbooks are these, I’d like to know) also are racist? Absurd accusations like this come out all the time, unfortunately, as ID proponents are compared to Holocaust deniers. In fact, it is the Darwinists who now have a track record for whitewashing history. The Kansas State Board of Education dumbed down their state science standards earlier this year. Not only did they censor science curriculum to make sure that students in Kansas remain ignorant of any criticism of Darwinian evolution whatsoever, they also removed a key standard dealing with abuses of science.

The history of science standard had encouraged students to learn about such tragedies as the eugenics movement and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. But studying the misuses of science was apparently too much of a downer for the Darwin-only crowd, so they rewrote the standard to ensure that students would be exposed only to the triumphs of science in history. When asked to defend this Orwellian rewriting of history, the main backer of the change offered phony excuses.

Florida’s experiment with elevating top performing schools to something akin to charter school status will be interesting to watch, and hopefully will result in overall education improvement in the state. Let’s hope that when schools do want to broaden their teaching of the biological sciences, the textbooks available will be adaquate to the task.

Robert Crowther, II

Robert Crowther holds a BA in Journalism with an emphasis in public affairs and 20 years experience as a journalist, publisher, and brand marketing and media relations specialist. From 1994-2000 he was the Director of Public and Media Relations for Discovery Institute overseeing most aspects of communications for each of the Institute's major programs. In addition to handling public and media relations he managed the Institute's first three books to press, Justice Matters by Roberta Katz, Speaking of George Gilder edited by Frank Gregorsky, and The End of Money by Richard Rahn.

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