slate | A large, publicly funded charter school system in Texas is teaching creationism to its students, Zack Kopplin recently reported in Slate. Creationist teachers don’t even need to be sneaky about it—the Texas state science education standards,
as well as recent laws in Louisiana and Tennessee, permit public school
teachers to teach “alternatives” to evolution. Meanwhile, in Florida,
Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, taxpayer money
is funding creationist private schools through state tuition voucher or
scholarship programs. As the map below illustrates, creationism in
schools isn’t restricted to schoolhouses in remote villages where the
separation of church and state is considered less sacred. If you live in
any of these states, there’s a good chance your tax money is helping to
convince some hapless students that evolution (the basis of all modern
biological science, supported by everything we know about geology,
genetics, paleontology, and other fields) is some sort of highly
contested scientific hypothesis as credible as “God did it.”
