You don't have to move to Kansas, cause Kansas is coming to get you!

When I finally received my paper today this is what greeted me.

Alaska's science ed standards get an F

This completely put me off my cornflakes. Let's read a little further.

Five years ago, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation -- a private, nonprofit educational think tank -- analyzed state science standards for teaching evolution in public schools.

In the 2000 report Alaska scraped by with a humiliating grade of D. This time the study's author Lawrence S. Lerenr did not let us get off that easy. This time we earned an F. I am so glad that my tax dollars are spent so wisely.

In his independent review of the Murkowski ( I hate this guy) administration's revision of the state's science guidelines -- standards that will face public scrutiny this week before the Alaska Board of Education -- Lerner says the state has fallen to an F, both for its treatment of evolution specifically and its science standards as a whole.
"Within the range of a reasonable set of standards, it was pretty bad," Lerner said recently in a phone interview from his home in Woodside, Calif. "It's clear there are two types of problems. One is, it badly needs a review by experts, people who could go through this and get out these mistakes, and it also needs a copy editor.
"But the big problem is, there is this hypocrisy with respect to evolution. There doesn't seem to be any problem if you use the word 'evolution' in either cosmology or earth science, but suddenly it becomes a nasty word when you're talking about life science. And these sciences are all connected together."
Ultimately, the proposed standards will matter -- once they're adopted by the state Board of Education, which will hold a public hearing on them during a two-day board meeting that begins 8 a.m. Thursday at the Anchorage School District Administration Building on DeBarr Road.
They'll be used to generate questions for science exams (mandated under the federal No Child Left Behind Act) that are due to be administered to public school students statewide beginning in the spring of 2008. And they could matter even more, some educators say, if future science teachers are encouraged to "teach to the test" -- and the test is indifferent to evolution.
Disputes over teaching evolution in Alaska first surfaced in 1993, when the current science standards were drafted during the administration of former Gov. Wally Hickel. At that time, a school board member who worked as a teacher in a private Christian school in Fairbanks proposed adding "creation science" to the standards.
Critics said it would have violated the "separation of church and state" provision in the U.S. Constitution, and the motion narrowly failed on a 3-3 vote. But as a result, the standards the board ultimately adopted down-played the importance of biological evolution, mentioning it only once, in parentheses.
In revising and expanding upon the standards to prepare for the statewide exam, Department of Education and Early Development staffers in the Murkowski administration decided to use the existing guidelines as a starting place. Consequently, some of the same language from the Hickel era carried over -- including the parenthetical reference to evolution.
Lerner thinks the new standards repeat what he considers the old error of marginalizing evolution, then fail in additional ways by ignoring other scientific principles that deserve attention in high school.
"Even if the word were not relegated to parentheses, the (Life Science) standard is still structured as though evolution ... were a side issue or an isolated subject in the life sciences," Lerner wrote in his four-page analysis.
"But in fact, biological evolution serves a purpose in the life sciences parallel to that served by Newton's laws in mechanics or the principle of equivalence in relativity, or the conservation of mass in chemistry or plate tectonics in geology. That is, evolution permeates the entire subject, which cannot really be seen as a scientific whole in its absence."

I have to say that the most upsetting part of this is that I was completely unaware of this problem in our schools. I have much enjoyed making fun of Kansas and its time travel back to the 1600's and all along the problem existed right here in my own backyard.

Well there is going to be a meeting with the schoolboard and yours truly is going to give them a healthy ass kicking. In the mean time I will occasionally look out my window at our majestic mountains to remind myself that we are not in Kansas yet.