Hasn’t this debate come to an end? Seems to me we’re no longer discussing the legality of a university making a decision based on high school curriculum standards.
Amazing. A month or two back we had a GD over the highly dubious proposition that an understanding of evolution was fundamental to an understanding of biology, and now we’re to agree that if ID’s on the curriculum then you don’t know dick about any science at all?
Please tell me you’re not suggesting that Kansas will be teaching that ID is bollocks.
My point is that it seems very likely that the science classes in Kansas will be preaching…er, teaching that ID is another theory, another scientific theory in opposition to actual science.
This article states that ID is to be taught in KU, but not as science. Quite interesting.
College admissions certainly do weight the quality of different schools. Well, many of them do. Some just use a grade/test formula. Certainly coming from a school system known for its quality education is a few points in your favor (in the Chicago area we think New Trier, Stevenson, Oak Park River Forest … ) and coming from a school system known for a lack of quality discounts the importance of your grade point and is a few points against you.
Coming from a school system that teaches that the supernatural is part of science is a reasonable demerit on your application. Does it disqualify it as science credit? Maybe, maybe not. Colleges do not need to accept credits. I doubt that is indicated, but it is not an unreasonable conclusion. A school that choose to do so is not out of bounds.
magellan01, the putz smiley is considered a direct insult when aimed at another poster and its use (as directed toward another poster) is limited to the Pit.
[ /Moderator Mode ]
Indeed, colleges weighing down the value of a schools system’s credits does stand up if they can show that they provide the same kind of weighing for graduates of similar schools or curricula, based on an evaluation of what kind of content is adequate preparation. However, they must be careful to avoid doing so in such a way that it looks like an act of “how-dare-you” censure. IOW, the colleges will have to take a look at the Kansas curriculum and evaluate how well it DOES cover their admissions requirements, NOT just whether ID is mentioned at all.
That said, I would suggest that pseudotriton ruber ruber and everyone take a deep breath.
This is one of the more lightweight points on which to get riled up in GD. ID is not going to displace more than a couple of minutes of teaching out of an entire semester because there is nothing there to teach. It is hollow posturing by people with philosophical objections to science and there is no body of literature that can actually be formed into a substantial bullet point on a syllabus.
It tends to show up as a simple statement that gets inserted into the class along the lines of “some people think that life is too complex to have developed out of random acts and believe that there must be a designer behind the cosmos.” The Kansas Board of Education did not actually select any text books to support ID and did nothing more than say that the teacher is supposed to mention that there is opposition to Neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory.
There are already teachers across the country who are either glossing over or ignoring the sections in biology texts that discuss evolution. Unless someone proposes that we hunt each one of them down and censure them, we are not going to eliminate ignorance of that area of biology by shutting down Kansas for a three-minute recitation, (a recitation that a good biology teacher would preface by a statement such as “The Board of Education has insisted that I mention some unscientific opposition to this science. OK. I will mention it, then we will go back to studying what scientists have discovered.”)
Now, I do not like people imposing their religious views on the scientific curriculum any better than anyone else, but in the real world, the actions of the Kansas School Board will not have an effect on any actual teraching, with good teachers continuing to dismiss the silly little insertion, relegating it to three minutes of class time while some religiously motivated teachers, inside and outside Kansas, will continue to downplay or ignore the teaching of scientific evolutionary theory.
On the day that a state board of education selects a biology text that seriously compromises the actual teaching of science, substituting ID or Creationism or anything else, then we could consider examining more closely the students matriculated from those schools. Until then, the OP is a rather lightweight issue over which to get irate. (Nothing wrong witht the OP: it just does not seem to me to justify all the heavy-handed righteous indignation I’ve seen displayed, here.)
There are two aspects to consider in regards to Kansas students’ possible admissions to universities. The first is that all public schools go through some form of accreditation, usually through regional groups like WASC. The accreditation organizations look at the curricula taught in the school for all required subjects and electives. As the Kansas state board of education has rejected standard scientific notions of biology and is having to rewrite their entire science curriculum because the National Science Teachers Association and other national level science organizations have denied the Kansas state board the right to use their copyrighted material in the science curriculum, each high school will be under especially keen scrutiny when it’s time to be re-accredited by the regional accreditation organization. If any high schools are denied accreditation, then their students’ chances of being accepted into any public university are pretty much toast.
That being said, even if accreditation does not become an issue (and the time frame will determine, as most schools are on a 3- or 6- year cycle), universities can still look at the problems with the science curriculum and decide to 1) require all students from Kansas high schools to take a refresher biology course, 2) require all Kansas students to take a standardized Science test (which the SAT doesn’t cover, and neither does the ACT to my knowledge) similar to an AP exam, or 3) a combination of the first two with a possible weighing factor that subtracts points from Kansas high school students affected by the state board’s decision.
My opinion? It’ll get loud and ugly and then evaporate. Biology is usually taken in the sophmore year. This will be the first year it might possibly be affected. Students worried about university acceptance have already taken biology. Sophmores and freshman this year may well delay or retake their biology once this has been sorted out. Kansas went through this cycle once before. No one pays any attention to state school board elections, so a very motivated minority was able to get their candidates on the board. Once the ruckus started, they were immediately voted out of office. Kansans are sensible people. They don’t like being made to look like idiots to the rest of the world.
I do have hope that ID will be glossed over in many classrooms in KS. I say this as someone who went to Catholic school for 13 years and never heard anything disparaging about homosexuality and was taught about condoms, STDs, & birth control. Sure, there were religiously-influenced requirements, but they were always classfied as religion classes and were taught by smart people who were there to educate, not to preach. And were never presented as a replacement for other fact-based parts of the curriculum.
Hopefully the teachers of Kansas will have the same sense.
Not really sure what I’m being singled out here for, Tom, but this is a very silly point you’re making at great length. If all we were discussing was a couple of minutes added to the curriculum, in practice, those couple of minutes are already budgeted in every single science class’s curriculum: do you really suppose that there’s not already in every school district a single q-and-a every semester with at least one wiseguy/argumentative fundamentalist/genuine curious student/Falwell clone about “How come we don’t consider that Gawdamightyy jus’ made the whole thing up with his own hands, teacher? Huh?” and a few more minutes of explaining to him that, “Yes, while some people believe that, this is a course in science where we don’t and can’t account for unscientific thinking”?
You really think the state of Kansas went out of its way to look like foolish bumpkins in front of everyone just to accomplish what they already had? Don’t be silly. This is a license to espouse anti-scientific thought at great length (in some school districts) with the blessing of the state.
The least that the scientific community could do in the rational section of the country (that is, everywhere but Kansas) would be to express its formal disapproval of such arrant and presumptuous nonsense in the appropriate and legal settings, among which I number the admissions boards of private schools of higher learning.
No. I think a small group of dedicated Fundamentalists made a concerted effort to get on the School Board to implement their religious views–and failed to actually make a difference in teaching.
So I do find your position an overreaction.
Well, in classes that were already disinclined to discuss ID at great length, sure, they might have failed. But in classes whose teachers felt free to yammer on and on about it, but didn’t because they could have gotten in trouble, the Kansas law will certainly allow them to yammer and preach and discuss this specious and offensive anti-scientific nonsense all they want.
I really don’t see how you get to “It makes no difference” unless you’d closely monitored the classroom teaching in a few thousand Kansas schools.
[QUOTE=pseudotriton ruber ruber]
You seem to misunderstand where the burden of proof lies here, and it would be too tedious to explain that point to you, especially since you seem determined to resist it.
I’m sorry you seem to think the burden of proof lies anywhere other than in your lap. I’m thrilled that you won’t be attempting to explain otherwise.
Drat! Oh well, so much for me being thrilled.
Kansas makes a change. Let’s call it X. And simply by virtue of that fact you want to institute some draconian penalty against the children there. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, your desire to do so is based on X being of a certian size. And just because you have somehow concluded that X is big, really big, you want the world to accept that. No. It is certainly not the case that ANY change to the science curriculum in the direction of accommodating ID merits the action you recommend—or ANY action, for that matter. You have to show both that the change will be negative (that some science principles will, in fact, be abandoned or ignored) and that it is large enough to have the detrimental effect you fear. If you impose your penalty without first knowing these things (and others) you are being careless and knee-jerk.
When you try to convince others of the wisdom of the corrective/punitive actions you recommend, it falls to YOU to offer more than your assumptions and fears.
My apologies, to both SDMB and pseudotriton ruber ruber.
My apologies for stating the obvious, but a private college doesn’t have to admit anybody, so those institutions could refuse to admit students from Kansas if they so chose. I’m sure it would be much tougher for a public school.
Well, is a University admissions board allowed to consider one high school education superior to another? If it were up to them to decide whether to admit a student from Stuyvesant Meadows Private Preparatory Academy or me from South Goatsnout Alternative K-12 and Technical High with the same GPA as the first, both of which are accredited equally (that is, accredited or not) is the admissions committe to make a judgement call on who likely has a superior education? (honest question)
All other things being equal, they can. They don’t HAVE to – they may be “looking for diversity” in their incoming classes so South Goatsnout Alternative gets the advantage – but they can.
Private colleges may not have to admit anyone, but if they get any federal money, including scholarship/grant money, they are held to some nondiscrimination standards. So they would at least have to deal with discrimination lawsuits. I’m not ready to speculate on whether they would win or lose the suits, but the can of worms is there to open.
I can definitely see science faculty proposing for their university not to accept Kansas biology credits as science, to make a point. But if a university were to adopt that, I’d say a workaround would emerge pretty quickly. Maybe some way students could demonstrate they understand evolutionary theory in an AP test format, or students taking more physics or chemistry or geology and less biology in HS.
They can and they do. The University of Michigan, for example, looks at both the curriculum a student chose to take, and the curriculum offered by (and general quality of) the high school attended. So they could choose to judge any and all school in Kansas inferior, and/or they could choose to judge the science courses taken by the students to be inadequate.
Do I think they would? No. I believe that colleges and universities would not judge students’ preparation as inadequate in science. I don’t believe the strong assertions by some in this thread that any mention of ID renders an entire year’s worth of instruction meaningless, unscientific, and unrigorous.
Let us remember that many students come to college with uneven preparation. The few weeks or hours spent covering ID are probably not a greater handicap than other problems with education.
Some, even some who aren’t from Kansas, will also come to college believing in astrology, or that not changing their soccer socks will make them score more goals!
To be honest, many public universities are not terribly selective. It would foolhardy to cut off an entire population of prospective college students over this issue.