Earlier today, the Texas Freedom Network relaunched its Stand Up for Science campaign, the latest installment in our ongoing efforts to ensure Texas schoolchildren receive only mainstream science, and not creationist arguments, in their public school science classes and textbooks.
So why now? Because there are some big decisions coming over the next four months that will determine what public schools students learn in their science classes.
The Texas State Board of Education has begun working on its once-a-decade adoption of science textbooks for Texas classrooms. And for years, an anti-science faction of that board has done all it can to undermine the science of evolution and climate change by giving equal weight to nonscientific beliefs like climate change denial and the idea that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.
We’ve got news for those folks: Big Tex and T-Rex didn’t ride the range together.
It’s time to Stand Up for Science.
Click here to sign our petition and help us reach our goal of 5,000 signatures of Texans demanding that the State Board of Education approve science textbooks that are based on sound, peer-reviewed scholarship.
This fight is personal for me because from an early age, both my kids have loved science. In fact, my oldest son is enrolled in the “tech academy” at his middle school, where he’s learning about cool high-tech careers and honing computer skills that already put me to shame.
But whether you have school-aged kids or not, this fight is too important to the future of Texas and the nation to ignore. With over 5 million students, Texas is one of the country’s biggest buyers of textbooks. And that has an impact on other states because book publishers often follow our lead so that they don’t have to create different versions of the same science books.
I want my kids and every child to have classroom materials based on modern, mainstream science that gets them ready for college and prepares them for those high-tech jobs my son is learning about. Anything less handicaps their future and sets them up to fail.
For our children’s future, let’s win this.
Please take a moment to sign the petition and tell your friends and family to do the same at tfn.org/science.
— Ryan Valentine, TFN Deputy Director
PS You can share the Big Tex/TRex image on Facebook to help us get the word out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK6tkcxAHIw
As an educator and parent of a 4th grader in a Texas Public School, I am disgusted with the extreme’s attempt to DICTATE what material they THINK is appropriate.
The extreme religious right “group” does NOT consider RESEARCH-Based practices NOR the recommendations of TOP science organizations/experts. FURTHERMORE, the extreme is NOT the voice of the INTELLIGENT, so PLEASE EVERYONE SHARE the petition. Our children’s future is worth the fight!
What most Christian conservatives don’t understand is that science is not merely a body of knowledge accumulated over the centuries, it is also the process through which this knowledge is attained. And so simply declaring that something is true because it says so in the Bible (or any other literary source) cannot be construed as science if that “fact” or “idea” was not the result of a valid, structured, self-critical scientific process.
It is not labman57. Watch me do some real science boy:
“The aliquot sample results were inaccurate because the samples were contaminated with acetone and methylene chloride, which were probably residual laboratory contaminants left over from cleaning the beakers.”
Science ain’t no method. Science is about a lingo of high-falutin science words. Master them science words and you is automatically a scientist a doin’ science. It’s the science-soundin’ words that make all the difference. Watch me. I’ll do it again fer ya:
“The localized osseous resorption manifested itself at the iliac-sacral symphysis in the form of a preauricular sulcus, suggesting that at least one difficult parturition had occurred premortem.”