Science education in Texas

We have definitely entered the new Dark Age:

Christine [Castillo Comer] has worked in the Texas education system for 36 years. She spent 27 years in the classroom and 9 of them as the Texas Education Agency’s director of science. While working as the director of science she discovered that evolution doesn’t affect everyone equally.

Christine received an e-mail message from the National Center for Science Education announcing that Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University would be giving a talk in Austin. National Center for Science Education is known as a pro-evolution group that thinks evolution happened in the past and is continuing. She sent that notice to a group described as an “online community. That got her fired by Lizzette Reynolds.

Lizzette was a deputy legislative director for then Governor George W. Bush. Following her boss to Washington, Lizette joined the U.S. Department of Education. Tiring of the life in Washington she moved back to Texas and joined the Agency where Christine worked. When she learned of Christine’s e-mail she was upset. She said that notifying people about a speech pertaining to evolution “assumes this is a subject that the agency supports.” Coming from George Bush’s Washington one might at first conclude that having observed those with whom Mr. Bush consorts, she took it as proof that were it anything other than a misguided theory neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney could be where they are today. That is not what motivated her.

She knew that Barbara Forrest testified in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005 on behalf of the plaintiffs in a case dealing with intelligent design vs. evolution. In that case the court found that intelligent design was not to be included in curricula as part of scientific education. When Lizzette and others in the agency learned of the e-mail sent by Christine they instructed her to retract the e-mail even though retracting the e-mail did not make the lecture disappear. The lecture went on as scheduled. Lizzette wanted the retraction because, said she, notifying people of a lecture was taking a position on “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.” Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the agency elaborated saying that by sending the e-mail announcing the lecture Christine was injecting her personal opinions and beliefs into the evolution vs. intelligent design debate.
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Notwithstanding Christine’s e-mailed retraction, an act that in the time of heretics frequently would save the heretic’s life, the retraction did not save Christine’s job. The offense, said Lizzette, is an offense “that calls for termination.”

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