Alabama keeps evolution disclaimer on textbooks
By The Associated Press
11.09.01
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MONTGOMERY, Ala. — There was plenty of debate when Alabama began putting stickers in its students’ biology textbooks warning that evolution is a “controversial theory.”
That was in 1996.
Yesterday, when the Alabama Board of Education voted to put the disclaimer on the front of 40,000 new biology textbooks bound for public school classrooms, there was no dissent.
The teaching of evolution, the theory that humans and other living beings evolved into their present form over millions of years, has been debated by school boards in several states. But no other state has used a disclaimer sticker in textbooks statewide, said Eric Meikle, outreach director of the National Center of Science Education.
In Alabama, the state Board of Education approves several biology textbooks from different publishers, and the local public school boards select which books will go into their schools, most often into 10th-grade classrooms.
The stickers that will be added to those books say, in part, that evolution is “a controversial theory. ... Instructional material associated with controversy should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”
The board included the same statement in course guidelines for science teachers.
The decision was actively supported by the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum, groups that seek more religious activity in public schools.
John Giles, state president of the Christian Coalition, said the new sticker is not as strong as the old one, but he had been concerned that the board might drop the sticker entirely.
“The insert they approved does provoke the child to think through the process,” he said.
The earlier sticker contained questions students should ask about evolution, such as: “Why do major groups of plants and animals have no transitional forms in the fossil record?”
At a 1995 board meeting to approve the original disclaimer, then-Gov. Fob James impersonated an ape to poke fun at evolutionary theory.
Other states where school boards have tried to de-emphasize evolutionary concepts include Arizona, Kansas, Illinois, New Mexico, Texas and Nebraska.
Earlier this year, the Kansas Board of Education voted to restore the teaching of evolution as a central theory in science classes there. The move came 18 months after the board caused an uproar by voting to omit references to many evolutionary concepts in the science curriculum. Gov. Bill Graves had called the 1999 vote “terrible, tragic, embarrassing.”
In Oklahoma, the State Textbook Committee decided in 1999 to put a disclaimer sticker similar to Alabama’s in its textbooks, but the state attorney general said the committee lacked the authority to do so.
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based education organization, last fall gave 19 states D’s or F’s in an evaluation of how public schools teach evolution.
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