{"id":2142,"date":"2014-06-09T19:38:30","date_gmt":"2014-06-09T23:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.flascience.org\/wp\/?p=2142"},"modified":"2014-06-09T19:38:30","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T23:38:30","slug":"journal-interview-published","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=2142","title":{"rendered":"Journal interview published"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was interviewed about Going Ape: Florida’s Battles over Evolution in the Classroom<\/em> for the June edition of the journal Evolution: Education & Outreach<\/em>. You can download a free PDF of the relevant pages here<\/a> or click on the “view article” link there to read it on their website.<\/p>\n

From the article:<\/p>\n

A highlight of Going Ape<\/em> is the detailed description of the Hillsborough County School Board\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1980 adoption of a policy requiring equal time for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153scientific creationism.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Can you say a bit about its rise and fall?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It started with a determined retired chaplain who regularly toured school board meetings in a few neighboring counties. For years, he tried to get the boards to counterbalance evolution with some form of creationism. Finally, he struck a chord with a majority bloc of Hillsborough County board members. Once they voted to teach scientific creationism alongside evolution, the school district sank into chaos. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still amazed how much power duly elected yet misinformed school board members can have. The entire science department fought against the policy, but the board members were so sure of themselves that the protests never stood a chance. The committee assembled to create a curriculum was locked in constant conflict as its members fought over every single thing, big or small. There was even a fight over whether Charles Darwin should be called a scientist. Their final product was such a convoluted mess that the director of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study in Boulder, Colorado, wrote a letter to the Hillsborough schools science supervisor to express his exasperation. He said it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153comes across as completely incomprehensible.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But the board was happy and all set to move the new curriculum into the classroom. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when the federal court decision in McLean v. Arkansas, which ruled that mandated balanced treatment for creation science was unconstitutional, derailed Hillsborough\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s implementation. The school board reluctantly tabled the curriculum and it was never mentioned again. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sad that so much time and energy was wasted on a project that should never have started in the first place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was interviewed about Going Ape: Florida’s Battles over Evolution in the Classroom for the June edition of the journal Evolution: Education & Outreach. You can download a free PDF of the relevant pages here or click on the “view … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcZNLl-yy","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2315,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=2315","url_meta":{"origin":2142,"position":0},"title":"Blast from Hillsborough’s past","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"June 19, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"In the early 1980s Florida\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own Hillsborough County School Board had voted to mandate the balancing of evolution with scientific creationism. The curriculum was written, approved and ready to go for classroom use when, just a few weeks before implementation, two court cases brought everything to a screeching halt. One\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 5 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 5 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=2315#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1718,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1718","url_meta":{"origin":2142,"position":1},"title":"Hillsborough school board election in the spotlight","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"October 21, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"A runoff election for a spot on the Hillsborough County School Board is an interesting one. Carol Kurdell is facing off against a person well known to us here at Florida Citizens for Science: creationist Terry Kemple. Hard-working insider, conservative with an agenda facing off in Hillsborough School Board race:\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1718#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":985,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=985","url_meta":{"origin":2142,"position":2},"title":"Florida’s Greatest Menace VI: Misconceptions, misinterpretations and misinformation","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"April 3, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"(This is the sixth part in the Florida\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Greatest Menace series. For an introduction to the series, go here.) Status report Rev. C.E. Winslow was a busy man as 1979 rushed to a close. He hopped from school board meetings in Hillsborough County to meetings in Pinellas County while also\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 7 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 7 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=985#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1000,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1000","url_meta":{"origin":2142,"position":3},"title":"Florida\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Greatest Menace VII: Causing the Nation to Fall!","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"April 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"(This is the seventh part in the Florida\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Greatest Menace series. For an introduction to the series, go here.) \u00c2\u00a0Non-scientific theories The April 22, 1980 meeting of the Hillsborough County school board was a marathon one. The meetings the previous December paled in comparison to the flood of people wanting\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 2 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1000#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1086,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1086","url_meta":{"origin":2142,"position":4},"title":"Workshop: Controversial Issues in the Science Classroom","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"July 8, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Several of us from Florida Citizens for Science will be heading over to Hillsborough County to participate in a Controversial Issues in the Science Classroom workshop next week. The four-day event for science teachers features talks by folks from Hillsborough County Public Schools, the University of South Florida College of\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 3 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 3 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1086#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1629,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1629","url_meta":{"origin":2142,"position":5},"title":"Campaign websites","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"July 20, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Terry Kemple, a current candidate running for a seat on the Hillsborough County School Board, was a very vocal antievolution advocate during the 2008 Florida science standards fight and subsequent \"academic freedom\" bills fight in the state legislature. He then tried to get onto the Hillsborough County School Board in\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 2 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1629#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2143,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142\/revisions\/2143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}