Utah Balks On National Science Standards Over Qualms About Climate Change

ADVANCE FOR MONDAY FEB. 17 AND THEREAFTER This Monday Jan. 27, 2014 photo shows Laura Cullen, a teacher at the New Haven Elementary School, participating in the Trout in the Classroom project explain the importance o... ADVANCE FOR MONDAY FEB. 17 AND THEREAFTER This Monday Jan. 27, 2014 photo shows Laura Cullen, a teacher at the New Haven Elementary School, participating in the Trout in the Classroom project explain the importance of clean water to her second-grade students in New Haven, W.Va. The program allows students to raise trout from egg to juvenile size, and then release the young trout into streams where they can grow to adulthood. (AP Photo/The Charleston Gazette, John McCoy) MORE LESS
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The Utah state Board of Education on Thursday put new science standards on hold due to concerns over local input and topics like climate change, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The school board’s Standards and Assessment Committee had planned to release the new standards this month to the public for review. However, the committee instead sent them back to the State Office of Education, which drafted the standards.

Utah based its new standards for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade on the Next Generation Science Standards, which address climate change and ask students to discuss the causes of global warming. The standards have been adopted by 13 states and Washington, D.C.

The Utah Teachers Association supports the standards, but parents were worried that the state used the standards drafted by national experts without much state input.

Standards committee member Vincent Newmeyer complained about lack of parental input and claimed that the standards took a position on climate change and evolution, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

“That is true with global warming, that is true with Darwinian evolution and a number of other things,” he said. “It’s not a science class in these areas. It’s an indoctrination class.”

State Office of Eduction official Sara Young told the Salt Lake Tribune that the standards ask teachers to address disagreements in the scientific community on issues like global warming.

The Next Generation Science Standards were also met with opposition in West Virginia. When the state decided to adopt the standards, state school board member Wade Linger pushed West Virginia to alter the standards to express skepticism about man-made climate change. After national outcry over the changes, West Virginia reversed Linger’s edits.

Notable Replies

  1. Where do these mo-fo’s come from? They must pop up out of some sinkhole that connects to the bowels of the earth.

    Please, Utah, West Virgina and other sates of their ilk do us all a favor and secede. And the rest of us should let them go. Trust me, they’re not worth fighting over; they’re why we can’t have nice things. We should accept any and all refugees with open arms, rehouse them and find them jobs.

    They could name their new country Freedumbia, elect Louis Gomert and Mike Huckabee as president and vice-president, repespectively and make Donald Trump the Secretary of State.

    I am so done with these bog-people!

    PS. And all the citizens of Freedumbia would be required to own shitloads of guns and weapons including at least one 120mm recoil-less howitzer and each border entrance would be surmounted by a 250 meter tall statue of Jesus wearing camo fatigues, brandishing a AR-15 assault rifle, one leg raised, stomping on a giant marble depiction of Darwin’s “The Origin Of Species”.

  2. I can just imagine when these kids try to get jobs or respect and they can’t get either because of a substandard education.

  3. Well, you’ll see this stop when kids from certain states start getting blackballed from being hired because they think things like “the earth is 6,000 years old.”

    Anecdotally, I remember a guy who was four-square for charter schools. He was completely dismissive of the public school system…until he got his charter school and it refused to teach evolution to his daughter. Suddenly he was at EVERY meeting saying “I did not take my daughter out of public schools so she could get a substandard education.” It was hilarious to watch.

  4. “That is true with global warming, that is true with Darwinian evolution and a number of other things,” he said. “It’s not a science class in these areas. It’s an indoctrination class.”

    What about with the solar system? That’s what I want to know. Do the standards properly “teach the controversy” or do they indoctrinate our children with the cruel hoax that the earth races around the sun at a ridiculous 67,000 mph? (Better buckle your seatbelts if you buy into “orbits” and the rest of the planetary motion alarmism.)

  5. If you really want to understand the root cause of this, simply replace the word “state” with “LDS Church” in each instance. You’ll then understand what’s going on in Utah.

Continue the discussion at forums.talkingpointsmemo.com

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