PHOENIX — Teachers, parents and others lined up Monday to urge the Arizona Board of Education to reject Diane Douglas’ efforts to alter — and they say dilute — academic standards.
During a meeting lasting hours, several people testified that Douglas, the state superintendent of public instruction, is seeking to undermine the science standards written by a group of teachers.
They specifically took aim at last-minute changes Douglas and her staff made in language dealing with climate change and in references to evolution.
They also told the board to ignore Douglas’ bid to adopt charter school standards crafted by Hillsdale College, a private Christian school, for all public schools in the state.
“Those are standards coming from a politically conservative, religiously conservative school with a Eurocentric sort of base to the world,” said Karen McClelland, a member of the Sedona-Oak Creek school board. “We need our students to have equal emphasis on the rest of the world.”
The state board took no action, deferring any final vote for at least a month.
Hillsdale says charter schools using its standards will “train the minds of and improve the hearts of young people through a rigorous, classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civil virtue.”
But the standards themselves have a religious bent. For example, the standards for sixth-grade history include references to what the college calls “basic ideas in common,” including “the nature of God and humanity” and the Old Testament. The standards also say students should learn the “important stories” of creation, the Tower of Babel and The Ten Commandments.
The New Testament is also included, with lessons about the Nativity, the baptism of Jesus, walking on water, and the Resurrection.
Douglas called Hillsdale’s plan the “gold standard for K-12 academics.” She also said it’s needed to deal with what she called failures in Arizona to educate students while, in her words, simply making them into “worker bees.”
“We’ve stopped caring about making kids citizens and giving them the knowledge they need to be successful as citizens in this country,” said Douglas, a Republican who was defeated for reelection this year.
“It’s become all about ‘what’s your career going to be,’ ” while the citizenship part has been neglected to say, “we’ll just job train you enough to get you a job,” she said.
But while Douglas’ focus on the Hillsdale standards is based on an increased focus on history and citizenship, her attempt to have them adopted is linked to her fight over the science standards.
More than 100 people took part in writing the new science standards, which would be the first upgrade in 15 years. But in a series of back-and-forths with Douglas’ Department of Education, some things were altered.
Some of those changes occurred in the last few months, after Douglas appointed Joseph Kezele, a biology teacher at Arizona Christian University and president of the Arizona Origin Science Association, to the review panel.
Kezele did not testify Monday. But he told Phoenix New Times reporter Joseph Flaherty that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that there was “plenty of space on (Noah’s) Ark for dinosaurs.”
Douglas, a member of the board, sat silently while science teachers from across the state urged the board to rescind those last-minute changes.
Sara Torres, executive director of the Arizona Science Teachers Association, said returning the standards to what was first proposed “will ensure that teachers of science are not put in the position of teaching nonscientific ideas.”
It’s not just a question of whether the teaching of evolution is being undermined.
Eileen Merritt, a teacher at the Arizona State University College of Education, said there are some very specific examples of what was removed, she believes improperly.
One would require students to “analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate change models to make evidence-based predictions of the current rate and scale of global or regional climate changes.”
“Also removed, the idea that science and engineering will be essential both to understanding the possible impacts of global climate change, into informing decisions on how to slow its rate and consequences for humanity as well as for the rest of the planet,” Merritt said.
Douglas told board members that if they’re unwilling to adopt the standards in the form she presented them, then they should scrap them all — and the years of work that went into them — and simply adopt the entire Hillsdale-created standards.
That suggestion annoyed Tara Guerrero, curriculum coordinator at Crane Elementary School District.
“It is both disheartening and demoralizing to hear that this body of work that Arizona educators have committed to may be dismissed by the adoption of a single school district’s curriculum,” she said.
Douglas’ bid to adopt the Hillsdale standards had some supporters, including Bob Branch, who teaches at Grand Canyon University, a Christian college. Branch recently ran against Douglas in the Republican primary for state schools’ superintendent; both lost to Frank Riggs, who will face Democrat Kathy Hoffman in the November general election.
Corrine Haynes, who described herself as a mother, grandmother and retired teacher, said Arizona students need what Hillsdale created.
“It has become alarmingly evident that we are a nation without its sense of history,” she testified. “What unites us as Americans has been under attack for decades in our educational system ... and we are now experiencing the consequences.”
Not all of the objections to both the Douglas-altered science standards and adoption of the Hillsdale plan came from the academic community.
The Rev. David Felter, pastor at The Fountains United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, urged the board to construct a strict line between education and religion.
And even if they choose not to, Felter said, “We believe that evolution is something that needs to be promoted, that it is not, in fact, in conflict with the Bible,” he said of Methodist beliefs.
Felter took a shot at those who would put creationism or the modified form of “intelligent design” into science standards. “This board is about to take the advice of people who believe the Earth was created in six days and the Earth is only 6,000 years old,” he said.
