The big news this morning is the resignation of Texas Education Agency’s Science Curriculum Director, Chris Comer, just a few scant months before the State Board of Education is slated to review the science portion of the state curriculum. Word is that the resignation comes on the heels of a move to fire Comer for blasting out an email advertising an upcoming presentation by a famous anti-creationism author and speaker.
It seems that Lizzette Reynolds was forwarded the promotional email and became unglued. Reynolds used to work for the US Dept. of Ed., and was also a senior legislative advisor to #43. She just joined TEA as an advisor in ’statewide initiatives’ in January. She writes:
“This is highly inappropriate,” Reynolds said in an e-mail to Comer’s supervisors. “I believe this is an offense that calls for termination or, at the very least, reassignment of responsibilities.
“This is something that the State Board, the Governor’s Office and members of the Legislature would be extremely upset to see because it assumes this is a subject that the agency supports.”
What I gather from all of this is that there is to be a big top-down push in a couple of months to force creationism into public schools. Reynolds is there to make sure the groundwork is appropriately laid. It’s her job to tell the congresscritters and party wanks that the state education agencies would be delighted to support “Intelligent Design”. So it’s a huge embarrasment to her when the head of the science curriculum indicates otherwise.
My favorite line out of the article was this:
The memo adds, “Ms. Comer’s e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker’s position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.”
I’m not sure if I’m getting something right, because I would think that there should indeed be a bias at the state education agency towards teaching science over fiction. Unless, of course, there’s a movement from the top to push ID into the curriculum, and then it all makes sense.
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