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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Monkey business

Hey kids!  There’s a really interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the U.S. Department of Education!  Unfortunately, because the Chronicle is subscriber-only, you can’t get to it from this humble blog.  But thanks to the wonders of “copy/ paste,” I can excerpt part of it for you!  Of course, you know what happens when I excerpt news articles— sometimes I embellish ‘em a little below the asterisks.  But that’s OK, kids, because it makes learning fun!

So, without further ado:

Educators Question Absence of Evolution From List of Majors Eligible for New Grants

By Sam Kean

Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages.

That absence apparently indicates that students in the evolutionary sciences do not qualify for the grants, and some observers are wondering whether the omission was deliberate.

The question arises at a time when evolution has become a political hot potato at all levels of education. While the theory of evolution has overwhelming support from scientists, some conservative Christian groups argue for alternative explanations of the origins of life, including “intelligent design,” which holds that an intelligent agent guided the creation of life.

Even President Bush has weighed in, advocating teaching “both sides of the debate.”

The awards in question—known as Smart Grants, for the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent program—were created by Congress this year, with strong support from the president. The grants are worth up to $4,000 and are awarded in addition to Pell grants.

Recipients must be college juniors or seniors enrolled in one of the technical fields of study that the Department of Education has deemed eligible for funds. Many different topics, as varied as astronomy and Arabic, qualify.

But evolutionary biology is absent.

The department has an index of classification numbers—referred to as “CIP codes,” for the Classification of Instructional Programs—for all academic areas of instruction.

Under that classification scheme, there is a heading for “Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology,” under which 10 biological fields are defined. For instance, ecology is 26.1301, and evolutionary biology is 26.1303.

But on a list that defines majors eligible for the grants, issued by the department in May, one of those 10 is missing. On that list, the classification numbers rise in order from 26.1301 to 26.1309—with the exception of a blank line where 26.1303, or evolutionary biology, would fall.

***

A spokesman for Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings insisted that the Smart Grants had never included a 26.1303 classification number for evolutionary biology.  “26.1302, Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography, has always been followed by 26.1304, Aquatic Biology/Limnology, and we have recently revised all our past publications to reflect this,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.  “Evolutionary biology is a speculative field, a ‘theory,’ not a scientific area of study, and the federal grant structure has always acknowledged this fact.”

Intelligent Design advocate Phillip Johnson hailed the news.  “People who believe in the secular religion of ‘evolutionism’ don’t need Smart Grants. They think they’re so bright, they can apply to one of those godless-humanist foundations for ‘Bright Grants’ if they really want to indoctrinate high school students into their little cult.”

In related news, the Department of Education announced that Daniel Dennett had been added to the department’s List of Unpersons, joining Stephen Jay Gould, P. Z. Myers, and Clarence Darrow.  The List of Unpersons, like Classification 26.1303, does not exist, according to high-level sources within the department.

This story will be modified in the future to meet evolving U.S. Department of Education standards.

Tomorrow, we’ll have another post about Science!

Posted by Michael on 08/22 at 01:31 PM
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