Records show teachers and school board members conspiring to teach creationism in public school science class.
Louisiana’s education tribunal: Gov. Bobby Jindal, Jesus Christ, and state Rep. Valarie Hodges.
Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo. Photos courtesy Office of the Governor/State of Louisiana; James Shepard, Alex Beynon, Sanjeev Beekeeper/Flickr; Louisiana House of Representatives
When I was a high school senior in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2010, I began a campaign to repeal my state’s “creationism law,” which allows teachers to sneak religion into public school science classes by using materials that criticize evolution. Seventy-eight Nobel laureates and many other prominent scientists and educators have joined me in calling for the repeal of this law, officially known as the Louisiana Science Education Act, and tens of thousands of people have signed petitions against it over the past four years, but so far we’ve failed. Louisiana teachers can still bring religion into public school science classrooms, legally.
The Louisiana State Legislature has voted to keep this law despite repeated challenges, in part because it has a fig leaf: No one has managed to demonstrate what is going on inside Louisiana classrooms. In 2013, as I was testifying before the Louisiana Senate Education Committee in support of a bill to repeal the law, Sen. Conrad Appel, the committee chairman, asked me, “Do you have any evidence of school districts or individual schools that are physically teaching creationism?”
There has been plenty of evidence, but it hasn’t been direct. For example, inTangipahoa Parish, in 2011, school board member Brett Duncan requested that guidelines be developed “for the review of supplemental materials to be used by teachers for discussing evolution, creationism, and intelligent design.” That same year a pupil progression plan (an outline of what a school district intends to do that year) for Terrebonne Parish said that under the creationism law, teachers will “deliver facts for both arguments”—both evolution and creationism.
Gov. Bobby Jindal was asked about this law by NBC’s Education Nation and said, “I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism.” That is in fact why he signed the law.
But none of this was enough. I couldn’t name a single teacher who was teaching creationism. “You talk about a back door [to teaching creationism],” Appel said. He told me that I had no evidence “that indicates such a back door is actually being used.” The Senate Education Committee voted against the repeal.
“I just want to get this message out there that Louisiana doesn’t support or promote the teaching of religious doctrine in the classroom,” Appel said. “Period.”
Yet in the fall of 2013, at Negreet High School, in Sabine Parish, teacher Rita Roark insulted the religion of C.C. Lane, a Buddhist student in her sixth-grade science class. Roark told the class that evolution is a “stupid” theory that “stupid people made up because they don’t want to believe in God.” Roark’s science tests included a fill-in-the-blank question that said, “ISN'T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _____________ HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and students were expected to write in “LORD.”
When confronted with these episodes, Appel said he didn’t believe that they had happened because Louisiana’s creationism law allows them.
Now I have evidence that it’s not just one teacher. I have evidence that religion, not science, is what’s being taught systematically in some Louisiana school systems. I have obtained emails from creationist teachers and school administrators, as well as a letter signed by more than 20 current and former Louisiana science teachers in Ouachita Parish in which they say they challenge evolution in the classroom without legal “tension or fear” because of pro-creationism policies. I’ve found the back door.
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Courtesy of theOuachita Parish School System
I requested a copy of the teacher-signed letter from the Ouachita Parish School Board. The first signature is from Robert Webber, the superintendent of Ouachita Parish Schools, but the school system’s lawyer, Elmer Noah, told me that the letter was not a “school board document” and that the school system didn’t possess it. “I object to your characterization of the document as a public record,” he said.
Noah told me that Darrell White, a retired military judge from Baton Rouge, had the last remaining copy of the letter. When I called White and asked him for a copy, he said he wasn’t willing to do an interview and hung up on me.
I had met White four years earlier at a hearing of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to approve new biology textbooks for Louisiana schools—books that included evolution. Standing at the witness table, White held a cane in one hand and with the other was shaking a shirt that read, “natural selection.” According to White, it was the same as the shirt that Columbine murderer Dylan Klebold hadCreationism in Louisiana public school science classes: School boards and teachers teach the controversy.:
