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Re: [Phys-l] The Republican "war on science" has moved to the UK.



Thank you. My comment are hardly unique, and Houston, Austin, and NY papers
all have people writing the same things. Yellow journalism is hardly new.
Remember McCarthy? We did go through some "apparently peaceful" political
times in the 40s and 50s, and also between the world wars. We are now in an
era of culture wars, but the younger people really do not have the same
prejudices as their elders. Slowly the fight against evolution is being
lost.

Austin has one of the most liberal papers in the country, The
Austin-American Statesman, which had the services of the late Molly Ivins.
She was one of the funniest political observers in the US. She dished out
opinions with great humor, which seems to be in short supply with most
columnists.
Austin is actually the liberal town in TX, but the legislature is now mainly
Republican. TX is essentially a one party state with all of the problems
that one party domination can bring about. That might change because of
immigration. When students ask if I believe in aliens, I say, "yes, I see
them mowing lawns all the time". Local races are still often not dominated
by party politics. TX voters just approved of keeping the beaches public
property and are against using eminent domain for taking private property
for development purposes. These are just now officially part of the TX
constitution. So public sentiment is in many ways divided.

Many scientists have testified before the state ed. department, but that
seems to have little effect. Feynman could not get improvements in text
books in California, and the standard TX text for middle school and 9th
grade IPC is a disaster. State board of education races are often decided
by a small minority of voters who have a fundamentalist agenda. The same is
true in many states so Kansas see-saws.

With respect to education I see neither party doing rational things. For
example the idea of rewarding teachers for student improvement looks on the
face of it as being a good idea. But it opens the door to punishment of
teachers by giving the unfavored ones the incorrigible students so they
can't get the good evaluations. Psychometricians have pointed out that the
high stakes testing is not designed for teacher evaluation. To judge the
effectiveness of teaching you need to compensate for input. Students with
higher thinking skills are accelerated and will gain much more than lower
students. In addition the high stakes tests are now known to be inadequate
as well as compromised by lowering of standards. No high testing country
uses high stakes testing as a means of rewarding good teachers. Also none
of the high performing countries have used competition between schools as a
means for raising standards, so what evidence is there that it will work?
Japan most certainly does not, as they strongly rely on cooperation and even
go so far as to have 100% social promotion in the lower grades. Japan has a
much higher percentage of students who exhibit proportional reasoning, but
it still falls far short of 85%, as Arons points out is possible. So all
countries are failing to educate to the maximum as Shayer & Adey have shown
in their book "Really Raising Standards".

It is really too bad that education has become a political football with
party politics mixed in. Wouldn't it be better to look at what actually
works and keep at it?

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


Thank you John for an even-handed and outstanding treatise on this
situation. I only wish it would appear in newspapers nationwide (and
certainly in the Texas Capitol city of Austin). Karl