| MISEDUCATION How Climate Change Is Taught in America Katie Worth New York: Columbia Global Reports, November 2021 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-7359136-4-3 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-7359136-4-2 | 180pp. | SC/GSI | $16.00 | |
There was a time when states left it up to local schools to design their own curricula. That changed during the Reagan administration, when a national commission was charged with studying the nation's education system and recommending improvements. The commission recommended "rigorous and measurable standards," and states formed panels of educators to design such standards. Once they finished, the draft standards went to the state's legislature where, if approved, they became state law. It was no surprise that the results differed greatly among individual states.
Nor was it surprising when contention over the content of the standards persisted. The GW Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law, which tied test results to state standards, made this contention hotter. Most incendiary among the content of the standards were matters of science: specifically evolution and climate change. In 2012, the National Research Council released its "Framework for K-12 Science Education," which embodied a more participatory method of teaching science, as opposed to the traditional method of memorizing things like Newton's laws. A team of educators derived from this a set of model standards that states could use in bringing their standards up to date: the Next Generation Science Standards.1 These standards accepted the modern consensus on evolution and climate change. They were published in April 2013.
Here is a compilation of where some states stand on the matter and how they got there, drawn from chapter 4 of the book.
Six years later, Oklahoma's science standards came up for review again. Ms. Worth traveled to Oklahoma City to observe the procedure. The NGSS-based standards now contained the word "evolution" and the phrase "climate change," and they passed the first step, the state Board of Education, on a 5-1 vote (the one was really an abstention, by a BP employee.) She never found out how the legislature would have dealt with this version; it recessed when the WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic. When it reconvened two months later, it was in no mood to debate science standards. They quietly passed into law.
As of 2021, twenty states and the District of Columbia had adopted the NGSS whole cloth. Twenty-four other states had adopted a modified version, though many included "tweaks" like Oklahoma's. The remaining six states stuck to their own standards. Because those six include populous states like Texas, Ohio, and Florida, they represent 29 percent of the nation's student body. – Page 72 |
From early in the twentieth century, industries benefiting from fossil fuels have paid for programs in public schools. These industries included not only the producers of coal, oil and natural gas, but automakers (and, probably, the railroads which transported the coal.) The schools, strapped for funding, were eager to accept the polished materials and lesson plans, as misleading as they might be — and they often came with perquisites. For example, teachers who completed Oklahoma's OERB unit could receive $300 or more for equipment. Unsurprisingly, schools in states where fossil fuels are economically important enjoy most of the largesse.
Three passages taken from Chapter Six of the book illustrate how this works.
| Passage from the Book | Page Source | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| The American Petroleum Institute was making the case for marketing to children as early as the 1940s, according to archives reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity. A survey of 10,000 people had indicated the industry's reputation could use some rehabilitation, and a "well-directed program of public education" could help. To that end, API teamed up with DuPont and by 1954 had trained 600 oil industry workers to give a show-and-tell program called "The Magic Barrel" to schoolchildren. | 107 | The Hagley Library maintains an archive of DuPont materials. It provides a 1957 version of "The Magic Barrel" on YouTube, and notes that DuPont's purpose in making the film was to "familiarize people with the wonder world of petrochemistry, in which crude oil and natural gas are transmuted into thousands of useful organic compounds." |
| Industry education programs in Kansas, Ohio, Illinois and Oklahoma are actually supported and sanctioned by those states' governments. The most sophisticated is the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, a "privatized state agency" voluntarily funded by oil and gas companies. The OERB has produced a series of videos by "Professor Leo," a goofy Bill Nye knockoff who educates students about the state's oil and gas resources. Teachers can ask for "PetroPros" to come and speak to their classes, or tap into a library of glossy lesson plans ready-made for any age or subject. Classes that complete an OERB curriculum are treated to field trips to certain museums. A field trip to a children's museum in Seminole features a new two-story exhibit: "The lower level is dedicated to what one might find underground to discover oil. The upper level includes a refinery, Christmas tree, and a working mini-pumpjack." | 109-110 | Oklahoma again shows its colors. From the days of Kerr-McGee through the fracking boom, it has been one of the most blatantly biased in favor of drawing wealth from natural resources at the expense of the land and people involved. Robert S. Kerr served as Oklahoma governor 1943-1947 and was a US senator 1949-1963. Throughout his time in public office, he chaired the board of Kerr-McGee. See also Kerr-McGee (Wikipedia) and Fracking is responsible for the earthquakes in Oklahoma; they are triggered by the injection of wastewater deep into the ground (Janine Acero, Fracking News, 19 February 2019). As of 2015, Fracking Bans Are No Longer Allowed In Oklahoma (Emily Atkin, Thinkprogress, 1 June 2015), and while the government has been forced to tighten regulations, industry people are wary of journalists. Difficult research on fracking in Oklahoma (David Signer, GetToText, 25 June 202). |
| Some funding for energy education comes from the US Department of Energy. Their grants often go to conservation programs, like Montana's "SMART schools" competition, which rewards schools that save energy. But taxpayer money has also been used to promote industry interests. In one such incident, elucidated by an Austin American-Statesman investigation, a federal grant seeded a program called the Energy Education Project. The project was the brainchild of State Rep. Jason Isaac, who had spotted a question in his child's schoolwork that asked, Which of the following fossil fuels causes global warming:oil, gas, coal, or all of the above?" Isaac, who sits on the board of the Texas Natural Gas Foundation and whose campaigns received $43,501 in donations from the oil and gas industry between 2013 and 2017, said the question made his blood boil. "It should have been none of the above, in my opinion," he told the Statesman. "It's such a biased question. It's making their minds up for them. It's very negative. You're striking fear in children that oil and gas and coal are bad." The foundation applied for and was awarded $165,000 in federal grants, administrated by the state of Texas, to develop new classroom materials. The resulting curriculum told students that it remains unclear whether renewable energy is actually better for the environment than nonrenewable energy, and declares that ending our dependence on oil and gas would be "devastating to us socially as well as economically." A science education expert who reviewed the material for the Statesman described it as "notable for its lack of actual science content." |
111-112 | Formosa Plastics, a Taiwanese firm, was fined by Texas for pollution released in the Gulf Coast town of Port Comfort in 2021. Texas law allows part of such fines to go to "supplemental environmental projects," and the Texas Natural Gas Foundation (TXNG) has qualified as a SEP since 2015. Thus, Formosa paid half of its $267,000 fine to TXNG. With that money, TXNG intended to raise $8 million to convert state-owned diesel trucks and buses to run on natural gas. And this is not the first instance of fossil-fuel fines going to TXNG. Questions are being raised — as they should be. I've summarized this story, which has a lot more to it. See In Texas, thousands in fines paid by oil and gas polluters benefit the fossil fuel industry (Amal Ahmed, Floodlight, 25 April 2022) |
These efforts, and others documented in the book, show that the propaganda war supporting expanded use of fossil fuels continues apace. Indeed, there is a great deal more pro-carbon propaganda than this book could cover, from congressional hearings featuring testimony from Christopher Monckton and Michael Crichton, to goofy ads2 touting clean coal, to the recent series of YouTube lectures by Judith Curry, Tom Harris and others, sponsored by the Creative Society.3
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.