At Least Some States Get It Right

Unless you have been under a rock or lost in a jungle you have most likely heard about the Texas Textbook fiasco. Well at least some state are getting right. According to Omaha World-Herald staff wrtter, Joe Dejk Nebraska and several other states are not introducing Intelligent Design into state science standards.

Although advocates of intelligent design enjoyed fleeting success the past decade in Kansas, they have not found Nebraska science classrooms so welcoming.

Three members of the Nebraska Board of Education say they're not aware of any effort by board members or the public to include intelligent design in Nebraska's new science standards.

Nebraska's 253 school districts would have to adopt the state standards, or more rigorous ones, or risk losing accreditation.
The standards take on added importance this year because education officials will use them to design for the first time a statewide science test. That test will be piloted at some schools next spring and implemented at all public schools in 2012.

Nebraska's proposed standards would continue to refer to evolution as theory. California's standards, among the nation's most detailed, do not qualify evolution as a theory. Oklahoma's standards, on the other hand, make no mention of either intelligent design or evolution, but children are taught “biological change over time.”

In Iowa, evolution also is included in state standards.
The Iowa Core, adopted by Iowa lawmakers in 2008, requires high school students to “understand and apply knowledge of biological evolution.”

Iowa high schools must adopt the Iowa Core by 2012; elementary schools by 2014.

... a 2005 federal court ruling that found a Dover, Pa., school board violated the U.S. Constitution when it approved teaching intelligent design alongside evolution.
Although Kansas' standards no longer refer to intelligent design, an introduction to the standards includes a reminder to teachers not to “ridicule, belittle or embarrass a student for expressing an alternative view or belief.”

The National Science Teachers Association opposes mandating the teaching of intelligent design. The association endorses teaching evolution, viewing it “as a major unifying concept.”