Dover, Pa., voters want a clean slate on
'Intelligent Design'
Backers of controversial school policy ousted in
Pennsylvania district

Advocates of intelligent design in public school science courses received a rough introduction to a new discipline in November—political science.

All eight Dover, Pa., school board incumbents who had vigorously backed mandated instruction of the controversial theory in ninth-grade science classes suffered defeat in a local election that drew national attention.

Voters in the 3,800 student district replaced them with challengers who sided with such groups as the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association in opposing the teaching of intelligent design in regular science classes.

“The Dover community spoke loud and clear in this election—they want a school system driven by the best standards in the field and not by a narrow, divisive ideology,” says John Tarka, executive vice president of AFT Pennsylvania and a member of the AFT Teachers program and policy council. The winning slate of school board members took the position that elective courses offer the only appropriate school vehicle for discussion of intelligent design, a theory that draws from perceived shortcomings in evolutionary science as a basis for arguing that life must stem from the design of an intelligent creator.

Dover schools were the focus of a widely watched legal battle over intelligent design, one that challenges the outgoing school board’s decision to adopt a policy statement that calls evolution “not a fact” and mandates instruction in intelligent design. On Dec. 20, a federal judge vacated that policy. The school board’s real purpose was to promote religion in the classroom through intelligent design, the judge wrote.

The court battle was shopped around the states by a Michigan-based conservative nonprofit group before it found a willing customer in the outgoing school board. “The Thomas More Law Center, a Michigan nonprofit formed to ‘protect Christians and their religious beliefs,’ spent years looking for a school district willing to challenge evolution,” Teacher Magazine reports. “School boards in West Virginia, Michigan, Minnesota and elsewhere declined the group’s offer of free legal services before the Dover board consented—over their own lawyer’s objections.”

The AFT weighed in on the battle over intelligent design last summer when President Bush suggested that the concept should be taught in the nation’s science classrooms. “Even President Bush’s top science adviser, John H. Marburger III, has acknowledged that ‘evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology’ and that ‘intelligent design is not a scientific concept,’” observes AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese.

Finger-pointing triumphs over solutions
Flawed study blames unions for staffing issues in urban schools

The well-worn argument that the union contract is to blame for staffing woes in public schools got another undeserved 15 minutes of fame in November.

The New Teachers Project report, “Unintended Consequences: The Case for Reforming the Staffing Rules in Urban Teachers Union Contracts,” rolled off the presses in late 2005 and rolled out many of the same tired arguments that have been dispelled in recent years. These arguments have deflected attention away from the real causes of and remedies for hard-to-staff schools. The report implicates teacher contracts as an impediment to school improvement in urban education and cites contract language as an obstacle that prevents urban schools from hiring good teachers.

The study not only is short on constructive answers to teacher shortages but also suffers from flawed researching and hazy reporting. Among the more glaring deficiencies are its failure to provide specific examples of contract language, its failure to make intrastate comparisons of districts with and without collective bargaining, and its failure to interview any union representatives.

“If TNTP had bothered to contact the unions, they would have found that AFT contracts in a number of urban districts clearly and effectively deal with teacher transfer procedure and teacher quality concerns,” says AFT executive vice president Antonia Cortese.

“Almost 50 percent of new teachers leave schools within five years,” Cortese observes. “If we want to solve this problem, we need to spend more time on retention strategies like peer mentoring and other supports, and less on human resource management issues like how the districts are managing teacher transfers.”

Many of the problems cited by the TNTP report are addressed in at least a dozen major AFT publications spanning more than a decade. A catalogue of these reports, tackling such subjects as effective induction for beginning teachers, recognition for outstanding educators and teacher education are available at www.aft.org in the “Publications/Reports” section.

The New Teachers Project report “Unintended Consequences” is available at www.tntp.org/newreport.