Recently in Education and Legal Category

Under that headline, Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science magazine, announced the first of 15 winners of the Science Prize for Inquiry-based Instruction. The first winner, An Inquiry-Based Curriculum for Nonmajors, describes “an inquiry-based curriculum designed to increase the scientific literacy of those who are not science majors and to impart a fundamental understanding of the nature of scientific investigation.” The curriculum uses a series of independent modules in which the students design their own experiments. The curriculum described in the paper is Light, Sight, and Rainbows. It Includes a scattering experiment and a solar oven experiment designed by the students, and looked to my (optical) eye like very sound pedagogy.

Given some dispute and confusion in comments earlier, I asked Ken Lane, an attorney friend of mine who has considerable prosecutorial and civil law experience, especially in legal issues associated with local governments and administrative agencies, to write a paragraph or two on the role of appellate courts in cases like Freshwater’s appeal of his termination by the Mt. Vernon City Schools Board of Education. His excellent and helpful response is below the fold.

I’ve learned that leave has been granted for acceptance of the amicus briefs from the Dennis family and NCSE. The briefs in the case are now complete (see NCSE’s compilation). I’m told that Freshwater requested an expedited hearing, meaning that only the initially submitted briefs–plaintiff’s, defendant’s, and the two amicus briefs–will be in play. The case has been submitted to the appeals court where it will be heard by a three judge panel. They may or may not schedule oral arguments. If they do, I’ll try to be there.

Update: The Dennis family’s amicus brief is now up on NCSE.com.

The two main briefs in John Freshwater’s appeal of the Knox County Court of Common Pleas’ decision to uphold Freshwater’s termination by the Mt. Vernon Board of Education are now up on NCSE’s site. The two amicus briefs, from NCSE and the Dennis family, have not yet been accepted by the court. NCSE’s brief is on the site linked above; the Dennis’ brief is not yet available online, though I’ve read a copy.

I’ll briefly (!) summarize what I see as the core arguments of the briefs here, and go into more detail below the fold.

Freshwater’s appeal brief: Basically argues that (a) Freshwater only taught “alternative scientific theories”, (b) there are good pedagogical reasons to do so, and (c) he has free speech and academic freedom rights to do so. Also argues that the moves against Freshwater are motivated by religious animus, though it’s silent about specifically who feels that animus.

Board’s response brief: Argues that because student attendance is required and the public school has an interest in protecting itself against the consequences of illegal actions by teachers, Freshwater, as an agent and employee of the public school, does not have unfettered free speech or academic freedom rights. Also argues that the Common Pleas court did not abuse its discretion when it elected to not hold public hearings in view of the extensive record generated by the administrative hearing.

NCSE amicus brief: Puts Freshwater’s behavior in the context of the history of attempts to teach creationism in the public schools, and argues that his teaching was both pedagogically and scientifically unsound.

Dennis family brief: Reviews Freshwater’s impermissible injection of religion into his teaching, and disputes his de-emphasis of the Tesla coil incident, pointing out the inconsistencies in Freshwater’s stories about the incident.

The case is not yet scheduled for oral arguments. I’m told that Freshwater requested an expedited hearing, which I understand means that there will be no back-and-forth, no rebuttals and rejoinders, in the paperwork. What’s there now is what the appeals court will use to make its decision.

Some remarks and elaborations below the fold

My high school, Athens Academy in Athens, GA, is currently offering an Evolutionary Genetics course to 11^th graders (16–17 year olds). They are mostly using an curriculum from the University of Georgia funded through a grant for K-12 evolutionary education development.

Take that creationists.

As I reported a month ago, the Rutherford Institute, acting on behalf of John Freshwater, appealed Judge Otho Eyster’s decision in the Court of Common Pleas to the Ohio 5^th District Court of Appeals. Eyster ruled that the Mt. Vernon Board of Education’s termination of Freshwater was justified on the evidence of the administrative hearing.

Now additional documents are becoming available. The first to be publicly available is NCSE’s amicus brief (pdf). Yet to come are an amicus brief being filed by the Dennis family and the school board’s brief. The deadline for filing is today, January 13, and I expect that final copies will be publicly available soon. When they are I’ll write a longer post summarizing them after I have a chance to read them all.

The case is not yet scheduled for oral arguments before the Court of Appeals. The Court’s schedule is published through February, 2012.

Can you believe it’s been SIX YEARS since Judge Jones issued a devastating anti-“Intelligent Design” ruling?

Ah, the memories of Kitzmas past. Remember “Waterloo in Dover”? “Cdesign proponentsists.”? The “breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision”?

Merry Kitzmas, everyone!

Mt. Vernon, Ohio, as most PT readers know, has been the site of three years of legal maneuvering over John Freshwater. As a consequence of that, several creationists are running for school board here. There are three vacancies with six candidates, including two incumbents who voted to terminate Freshwater. One candidate is Steve Kelly, an official with the local Salvation Army.

Kelly is obviously a creationist. In an email response to a questioner, he wrote

I do not believe that the opening chapters of the book of Genesis belong in a science classroom. I do, however, believe that there is considerable scientific evidence that challenges the assumptions of the old-earth/evolutionary model. There is also significant scientific evidence for which the theory of an intelligent designer seems to fit the evidence better than random chance over a lengthy period of time. (I will be happy to cite some examples if you so desire.)

Our students deserve to have all theories of the origin of the world and species presented, along with evidence for and against each theory. (Quotes from religious texts do not constitute “evidence”.) All presentations should be consistent with the Scientific Method. Students can then decide for themselves which evidence seems more convincing. This is teaching our children to be independent thinkers rather than just absorbers of official dogma.

That said, the School Board has no right to abridge or abrogate any curricular requirements set by the State of Ohio. Where requirements exist, I will , if elected, follow the law.

That last sentence is all well and good, but the preceding two paragraphs are real problematic. So another person pressed Kelly about those “examples.” In response Kelly wrote

Here is a link to a page at Conservapedia.com. While I do not necessarily endorse everything on that website, this is a helpful compilation of counterexamples to an old earth. See all of the references at the bottom of the page for source material. > > http://www.conservapedia.com/Counte[…]an_Old_Earth

Gack! So I was forced to respond to Kelly’s claim in an open letter first published on Facebook (Parts 2-4 are in the comments to Part 1: Facebook posting limits and formatting regularly defeats me). I’ll reproduce that open letter below the fold with very light editing to correct a couple of typos and more substantial editing to correct an error.

A while back I mentioned that one of the legal proceedings initiated by John Freshwater in aid of his quest to regain his teaching job was a complaint to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission alleging religious discrimination by the school district in his firing. I’ve finally learned that the Commission dismissed that complaint way back last June, saying

Based on the investigation conducted in this matter, the Ohio Civil Rights Commission has determined that there is No Probable Cause to believe that the Respondent [the school district] engaged in an unlawful discriminatory practice under section 4112 of the Ohio Revised Code and hereby orders that this matter be Dismissed. (bolding in the original)

Still in progress (if that’s the right word!) are Freshwater’s complaint (on the same ground) to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and his appeal of Judge Otho Eyster’s decision on Freshwater’s appeal of his termination in the state court system.

Today Judge Otho Eyster of the Knox County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas denied John Freshwater’s appeal of his termination as a middle school science teacher by the Mt. Vernon City Schools. In his ruling (Page 1 and Page 2, both PDFs at the Mount Vernon News site), Judge Eyster wrote that “Based on the number of witnesses and exhibits presented at the Referee’s hearing held over a period of twenty-one (21) months, the Court finds Freshwater’s request that the Court conduct additional hearings is not well taken.” Further, the Judge wrote, “…there is clear and convincing evidence to support the Board of Education’s termination of Freshwater’s contract(s) for good and just cause,…”.

In the decision Freshwater was ordered to pay the costs of the proceeding.

As I understand it, Freshwater still has the option to pursue an appeal of Judge Eyster’s ruling up the ladder of the state courts. As far as I know he still has the support of the Rutherford Institute. No public comments by Freshwater and/or that Institute concerning the Court’s ruling have as yet been made.

UPDATE As foreshadowed just above, The Rutherford Institute today (Oct 6) issued a press release saying it will appeal Judge Eyster’s decision to the Ohio 5^th District Court of Appeals. (Hat tip to Accountability in the Media, a site operated by Freshwater supporters.)

I’ve seen a report originating with an anonymous member of the public who attended the Springboro Board of Education meeting on Tuesday of this week. According to the report, approximately 12 members of the public, including at least one representative of the local teachers union, spoke against the proposal to explore including creationism in the Springboro school curriculum. No one spoke in favor of the proposal, and at least one board member was reported to have claimed that the whole thing was taken out of context and that they were just asking questions. It appears that the board is moving on, abandoning the issue at least for the time being.

Kelly Kohls, the nutritionist and school board member in Springboro, Ohio, who advocated teaching creationism in that district, has revised her position. She now says that she

…wants parents of students in public schools to have options if they want their children to learn about theories like intelligent design.

and that

… parents should have the choice of using state funds to send their children to other schools if they want to learn about creationism and intelligent design.

A potential route, she thinks, is school vouchers, where state money is paid to parents to send their children to private, often sectarian, schools.

Read more in the Dayton Daily News. One parent quoted there has exactly the right idea:

Tina Gangl, who has a daughter in Springboro elementary school and a son at the nearby Catholic Bishop Fenwick High School, said public schools should not teach religion.

“We need to educate our children about science,” Gangl said, “If I want to teach my religion to my kids I’ll send them to a religious school. There is no place for it in public school.”

Springboro, Ohio, described by Wikipedia as “an affluent suburb of Cincinnati and Dayton,” has a school board on which two members are pushing for the inclusion of creationism in the district’s science curriculum. The Dayton Daily News reported today that BOE members Kelly Kohls and Scott Anderson, elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility, are one vote away from a creationist majority on the Board. According to the story, Kohls requested that

… the district’s curriculum director look into ways of providing “supplemental” instruction dealing with creationism.

It goes on

“Creationism is a significant part of the history of this country,” Kohls said. “It is an absolutely valid theory and to omit it means we are omitting part of the history of this country.”

Consistent with Lenny Flank’s law, though, Kohls makes the motivation for her advocacy of creationism clear:

Kohls is the head of the Warren County Tea Party. Although she said her desire to teach creationism is not directly related to the emerging political movement, it’s not inconsistent with Tea Party ideals.

“My input on creationism has everything with me being a parent and not a member of the Tea Party,” she said. “We are motivated people who want to change the course of this country. Eliminating God from our public lives I think is a mistake and is why we have gone in the direction of spending beyond our means.”

Nice.

There’s some support for the push from another source:

John Silvius, a former biology professor at Cedarville University, a Christian institution that teaches both evolution and creationism, said the two theories can co-exist, even in a public school classroom.

Cedarville is a Baptist young-earth institution; it even has a young earth geology program, taught, it is claimed, from “both naturalistic and young-earth paradigms of earth history.”

I trust that the curriculum director will read documents like Edwards v. Aguilar, McLean v. Arkansas, and Epperson v. Arkansas, not to mention Kiztmiller v. Dover. I also hope that the Board’s legal advisers have their wits about them.

The two creationism-pushing board members were supposedly elected on a fiscal responsibility platform. How fiscally responsible is it to expose the district to expenses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars by advocating a bankrupt religious approach in public schools? The Mt. Vernon, OH, and Dover, PA, boards could provide Springboro with some advice on just how “fiscally responsible” pushing creationism is. The same sort of shenanigans cost those districts on the order of $1m each.

In a Columbus Dispatch story we learn that John Freshwater has recently sold his home and small farm to pay legal costs associated with his effort to retain his job as a middle school science teacher in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. That saddens me. While I disagree vehemently with the various shenanigans in his classroom described during the 38 days of administrative hearing on his termination, it gives me no pleasure at all to know that Freshwater is no longer on his land tending to his apple trees and evergreens and selling apples and Christmas trees in town in their season.

A while back I noted that the Ohio Department of Education had sent John Freshwater a letter of admonishment concerning his use of a Tesla coil in his middle school science classroom. Freshwater objected, and the Rutherford Institute joined his defense.

Now the Rutherford Institute has posted a press release announcing that the letter of admonishment has been removed from Freshwater’s record by the Ohio DOE. Apparently it’s to ascertain whether ODE’s procedures were followed in issuing the admonishment. From the press release:

In its letter, the ODE stated that it is investigating The Rutherford Institute’s charges that the admonishment against Freshwater was issued in defiance of Freshwater’s due process rights and in violation of the Department’s own rules. Institute attorneys insist that the ODE’s issuance of the admonishment violated Freshwater’s due process rights because the teacher was not given proper notice or an opportunity to defend himself against the charges.

I’m also informed that a new 5-year professional teaching license to teach high school, for which Freshwater had applied early this year, was issued by the Ohio DOE on April 8, 2011. So the Department of Education has apparently taken a complete pass on any disciplinary action concerning Freshwater.

The fact that the winner of the Miss USA competition (Miss California, yay) supported evolution, whereas most of the other contestants did not, has gotten a lot of attention in the newspapers and blogs. But I’m not sure how many people have actually watched the answers that the Miss USA contestants gave to the evolution question. Here it is:

I haven’t watched every last answer yet – gotta go to post-Evolution 2011 bar-hopping – but I wasn’t amazingly impressed with even Miss California’s answer (she is at 1:52 if you want to skip there). Sure, she says she’s a science geek (and she used the words “history geek” in answer to another question…good line I guess), and supports evolution. And unlike most responses she doesn’t do a “yes, teach evolution, but teach both sides” sort of answer. But I guess it would asking too much for one of the contestants to say, “Actually, I’m a [scientific field] major and I know that evolution is the central organizing theory of biology, and everyone should learn it as part of a complete basic science education.”

Anyway, it is educational for us evonerds and academics to watch the video. The answers are closer to the kinds of default answers you get when journalists spring the evolution question on politicians. The Miss USA contestants are much closer to where the general American public is at than we are.

PS: Lauren Carter, Vermont, at 13:20 has the only decent answer I’ve heard on this video.

Hat tip: My friend Ashley Eden, who’s awesomer than this whole collection put together.

Dale McGowan calls our attention to the plan of the Fulton County, Georgia (part of the Atlanta metro area) Board of Education to eliminate (not amend or revise, but eliminate) both its current policy and procedures concerning church/state issues in the schools and its policy on the teaching of religion. There’s some question about whether the elilmination is motivated by something beyond bureaucratic housecleaning, but the (lack of) responses from board members that McGowan reports is not an auspicious sign.

McGowan makes a couple of recommendations. First,

If you are a resident of Fulton County, Georgia and agree that these policies and procedure should remain in place, find out who your board member is and write a concise, reasonable but firm email expressing your strong conviction that these two policies and one procedure should stay right where they are. If you have kids in school, name the school.

Please don’t harass them, especially if you’re not a resident of Fulton County.

Second, he makes a recommendation that I’m going to follow up on:

If you are in a district that has been embroiled in church/state messes, you might drop a note to tell my district how helpful clear policy can be. It means less head-butting, fewer lawsuits, and fewer distractions from the education of our kids.

I will surely do that, given the Freshwater affair in my own district.

As I posted in March, the Ohio Department of Education issued a Letter of Admonishment to John Freshwater (PDF of the letter) for using a Tesla coil on middle school students.

Freshwater, through his attorney R. Kelly Hamilton, objected to the Letter of Admonishment. In a lengthy (188 page PDF!) objection, he argued that the local district’s action settled the issue, that Zachary Dennis was lying in his testimony, and that the Letter of Admonishment was “erroneous, defamatory and unwarranted.” (Mount Vernon News story.)

The Dennis family recently filed a rebuttal (PDF) arguing not only for the retention of the Letter of Admonishment but also that Freshwater’s teaching certificate (which expired last year) should not be renewed. (Mount Vernon News story.)

Still pending are Freshwater’s appeal of his termination in the Knox County Court of Common Pleas and his complaints to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission and to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I have no information on their progress (or lack thereof).

As I noted in a comment a few days ago, federal judge Gregory Frost remanded John Freshwater’s appeal of his terrmination back to the Knox County Court of Common Pleas. Now according to a press release today, April 11, the Rutherford Institute has agreed to assist Freshwater in the appeal of his termination.

The press release says

The Rutherford Institute is defending a Christian teacher who was allegedly fired for keeping religious articles in his classroom and for using teaching methods that encourage public school students to think critically about the school’s science curriculum, particularly as it relates to evolution theories.

More below the fold.

According to a recent tally by the ever-vigilant National Center for Science Education, nine anti-science bills have been introduced in various states since January. Most of them use the “critical analysis” ploy, also known as the “strengths and weaknesses” ploy. Some bills specifically state that teachers may not be penalized in any manner for “helping” students to understand the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. Most recently, the Tennessee House passed a bill that would allow teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review … the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories.” By an odd coincidence, the scientific theories with which students evidently need the most help include evolution, global warming, origin of life, and human cloning, just those topics which so bemuse the extreme right. Where, you may ask, is homeopathy or “alternative” medicine, subjects that are desperately in need of critical analysis? Certainly not singled out in any of the bills. You may read more details and find relevant links at the NCSE website.