Florida: The Standards Decision

Today, the Florida Board of Education met. One of the items on the agenda: the proposed new science standards. These were politically controversial because they included “evolution” and benchmarks concerning concepts in evolutionary biology.

The Board decided last week to allow a limited amount of public comment at this meeting. I have a brief description of how that went down, modulo the poor webcast availability, at my weblog.

The consideration is ongoing now. I’ll update this later today.

OK, it’s over. Florida adopted amended standards. We know from prior experience that when one agrees to language from the anti-science advocates, they have some angle for exploitation of that language. While Florida standards now do mandate the teaching of evolutionary science, they also have the antievolution back-door installed. There will be further years of dealing with antievolution efforts in Florida because of this action.