Monday, September 30, 2013

Suit Challenges Kansas' Adoption of National Science Standards

Citizens for Objective Public Education (COPE) on Friday announced that it has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the adoption by the Kansas State Board of Education of the National Academy of Sciences Framework for K-12 Science Education  and the Next Generation Science Standards based on that Framework. The complaint (full text) in COPE v. Kansas State Board of Education, (D KA, filed 9/26/2013) contends that these:
will have the effect of causing Kansas public schools to establish and endorse a non-theistic religious worldview ... in violation of the Establishment, Free Exercise, and Speech Clauses of the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment....
The F&S take impressionable children, beginning in Kindergarten, into the religious sphere by leading them to ask ultimate religious questions like what is the cause and nature of life and the universe - "where do we come from?"...
Instead of explaining to students that science has not answered these religious questions, the F&S seek to cause them to accept that controversial materialistic/ atheistic answers are valid.
The Huffington Post, reporting on the lawsuit, describes it as a suit by an anti-evolution group challenging a science curriculum that teaches evolution.