I can appreciate the fact that education policy can be complicated, but when Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who has a reputation for policy expertise, talks to the New York Times about a national controversy, she should know what she’s talking about.<\/p>\n
Spellings sat down with the Times for a Q and A<\/a> published in yesterday’s Sunday magazine. Most of the interview was pretty mundane, except for the part when she suggested states ignore a Supreme Court ruling on teaching creationism.<\/p>\n What do you make of the current controversy in Kansas over whether creationism should be taught along with evolution?<\/i><\/p>\n I can tell you that in Texas we did go through this issue, when Bush was governor and I was working for him. We ended up — the curriculum says basically that both points of view are taught from a factual basis. <\/p>\n How can creationism be taught from a factual basis? Are you implying that events in the Bible should be taught in the public schools as literal history?<\/i><\/p>\n I’m not implying anything. I’m just saying that my recollection from my Texas days is that both points of view were presented.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Wrong answer. If as a state education official in Texas, Spellings helped create a curriculum that presented both biology and creationism in public schools, she was ignoring the law. In 1987, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that offered students a “balanced treatment” between evolution and creationism. It’s unconstitutional, the justices said<\/a>, for public schools to promote and endorse religious ideas in science classes.<\/p>\n And yet, here’s Spellings, the nation’s top educator, effectively saying that she ignored the Supreme Court while in Texas, and what’s worse, pointing to that example as a solution for other states grappling with similar debates.<\/p>\n Maybe Spellings could clarify her thoughts on this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can appreciate the fact that education policy can be complicated, but when Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who has a reputation for policy expertise, talks to the New York Times about a national controversy, she should know what she’s talking about. Spellings sat down with the Times for a Q and A published in yesterday’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}