Oklahoma Legislators Don’t Want Their Schoolchildren To Learn About Science

The state’s legislature is overrun with climate change deniers, and and they are also denying allowing children in their state to learn the truth about greenhouse gasses an human-caused climate change.

In 2011, notes the newly released US National Climate Assessment, the state suffered from its hottest summer on record. For Oklahoma and Texas, the related drought, exacerbated by high temperatures, cost $10 billion in agricultural losses. And the report states as plainly as you can that climate change was involved…

Nonetheless, Oklahoma is known for its indigenous climate denial—witness its senior senator, James Inhofe—and now, it looks like some in the state want to prevent good climate science education from getting to Oklahoma’s kids.

Earlier this week, reports the National Center for Science Education, a committee of the Oklahoma House of Representatives voted 10 to 1 to reject a set of proposed “Oklahoma Academic Standards for Science” that have already been adopted by the state board of education. “A rejection of the proposed education standards by the legislature is unprecedented and at this point the real impact and implications are unknown,” says the Oklahoma Science Teachers Association…

“You basically have a couple of members on this committee who are second-guessing a panel of science educators who spent more than a year working on these standards,” says Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education. “And on the basis of a half an hour hearing, they decide to block what science educators in Oklahoma overwhelmingly regard as a major advance for science education in Oklahoma’s public schools.”

But there’s no reason to let facts get in the way of ideology.

D.B. Hirsch

D.B. Hirsch is a political activist, news junkie, and retired ad copy writer and spin doctor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.