Florida Education Commissioner Henry Mack used the last public session on the state's proposed K-12 science standards to push back on critics who say the draft sidelines evolution and leaves out human-caused climate change.
The session was held Tuesday at Lake Buena Vista High School in Orange County, Central Florida Public Media reported. The draft would be Florida's first comprehensive update of science and health benchmarks in 18 years; the current set dates to 2008.
The commissioner's case
Mack said the concepts are in the draft even where the familiar scientific terms are not spelled out in individual benchmarks. "It's my commitment that students are not going to walk away with anything other than a robust, real, grounded understanding of scientific truth that includes climate science, that includes climate change, that includes evolution and evolutionary biology," he said.
He added that the department wants evolutionary biology to be stated more clearly in the draft, but does not want to teach evolution by natural selection and random mutation as "settled science." Central Florida Public Media noted that the word evolution is not defined in the draft high school life science standards.
What critics said
Joshua Garrett, who teaches in Orange County's public schools, said today's middle school standards refer to evolution by name as a scientific theory, while the draft talks about change in living things and the planet across time but does not use the word consistently. He also objected to dropping language on how theories are built and how experiments are repeated.
Stephana Ferrell, an Orange County parent, said counting how often the word "climate" appears in the high school standards is "not the same as teaching a subject." An elementary teacher asked how more than 100 kindergarten standards could be covered in a 180-day year.
