Copywrite Protecting Science in Schools

(from slashdot.  quoting original article: http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2005/1027kansas.shtml)

[ regarding a standards document for educators in the state of Kansas: ]

For many months, national science groups have been urging Kansas officials to revise the draft standards. The standards both single out evolution as a controversial theory, despite the wealth of evidence supporting it, and delete a previous reference to science as a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena.

AAAS has long held that students are ill-served by any effort in science classrooms to blur the distinction between science and other ways of knowing, including those concerned with the supernatural.

After carefully reviewing the latest version of the standards, the leadership of the National Academies' National Research Council and the National Science Teachers Association have decided they cannot grant the Kansas State School Board permission to use substantial sections of text from two standards-related documents: the research council's National Science Education Standards and Pathways to Science Standards, published by NSTA.

...

Among the problems with the current draft of the Kansas standards, according to Roseman:

• An introduction to the standards document singles out evolution as being controversial, indicates there are legitimate scientific concerns about the theory and overstates the number of scientists who disagree with the theory. The introduction also refers to "intelligent design," the dogma that some biological structures are irreducibly complex and could only be the result of intervention by an intelligent agent, as simply a "scientific disagreement" with evolution. It leaves open the option of teaching the non-scientific concept of intelligent design in science classrooms, a step scientists vigorously oppose.
  
  
• Language in one section states that "biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process." The use of the word "postulates" makes it sound as though evolution lacks evidence, Roseman said, and that the theory relies on assumptions rather than solid scientific evidence from thousands of peer-reviewed papers.
  
  
• Several modifications to a section of the standards on "patterns of cumulative change" make it appear that evolutionary theories have more uncertainty associated with them than other well-accepted scientific theories such as plate tectonics in geology.