Tag Archives: education

No, Congress Never Intended to Limit Obamacare Subsidies to State Exchanges

by BennyBoyes Posted on January 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court will soon hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, in which conservatives will argue that the text of Obamacare limits federal subsidies only to people who buy insurance from state-run exchanges, not from the federal exchange. Roughly speaking, there are two prongs of the conservative argument:

  1. The law contains text that explicitly limits subsidies to state-run exchanges. Democrats may not have intended this, but they screwed up in the rush to get the bill passed. That’s too bad for them, but the law is the law.
  2. Democrats actually did intend to limit subsidies to state-run exchanges. This was meant as an incentive for states to run their own exchanges rather than punting the job to the feds.

The argument over #1 revolves around textual interpretation of the statute as a whole, as well as previous Supreme Court precedent that provides federal agencies with broad latitude in how they implement regulations. The argument over #2 relies on trying to find evidence that limiting subsidies really was a topic of discussion at some point during the debate over the bill. That’s been tough: virtually no one who covered the debate (including me) remembers so much as a hint of anything like this popping up. The subsidies were always meant to be universal.

But the recollections of journalists aren’t really very germane to a Supreme Court case. The real-time analyses of the Congressional Budget Office, however, might be. This is an agency of Congress, after all, that responds to questions and requests from all members, both Democrats and Republicans. So did CBO ever model any of its cost or budget projections based on the idea that subsidies might not be available in certain states? Today Sarah Kliff points us to Theda Skocpol, who took a look at every single CBO analysis of Obamacare done in 2009 and early 2010. Here’s what she found:

CBO mostly dealt with overall budgetary issues of spending, costs, and deficits — or looked at the specific impact of health reform proposals on Medicare beneficiaries, health care providers, and citizens at various income levels. The record shows that no one from either party asked CBO to analyze or project subsidies available to people in some states but not others. In a June 2009 analysis of a draft proposal from Democrats in the Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee, CBO treated subsidies as phased in. But even that proposal, which did not survive in further deliberations, stipulated that subsidies would be available in all states from 2014 — and CBO calculated costs accordingly.

After the Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010, members of Congress, especially Republican critics, continued to raise issues. In its responses, CBO continued to model exchange subsidies as available nationwide. No one in either party objected or asked for alternative estimations assuming partial subsidies at any point in the 111th Congress.

It’s unclear whether this is something the Supreme Court will find germane, but it’s certainly closer to being germane than the recollections of a bunch of reporters.

It’s also possible, of course, that the court will focus solely on argument #1 and never even get to questions about the intent of Congress. Nonetheless, this is an interesting review of the CBO record. The conservative case that Democrats actively intended subsidies to be limited to state exchanges has always been remarkably flimsy. Skocpol’s review exposes it as all but nonexistent.

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No, Congress Never Intended to Limit Obamacare Subsidies to State Exchanges

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South Carolina Law Would Make Kids Study Second Amendment for 3 Weeks Every Year

by GwendolY49 Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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In August of last year, a 16-year-old high-schooler in Summerville, South Carolina, turned in a creative writing assignment about shooting his neighbor’s pet dinosaur. The school’s “zero tolerance” policy for guns prompted a search of the student’s belongings that turned up no weapons. Nonetheless, he was arrested and suspended for what he said was a joke, if one in questionable taste.

South Carolina state Rep. Alan Clemmons hopes to use that incident to force public schools to dedicate three weeks each year to teaching a gun-focused curriculum developed or recommended by the National Rifle Association. Traditionally, zero tolerance policies have applied to students bringing weapons to school or simulating their use with toys or hand gestures—not to academic discussion of guns. Still, in the bill Clemmons filed in the state legislature last month he states that these NRA-approved lessons are needed to combat an “intolerance for any discussion of guns or depiction of guns in writing or in assignments in public schools, which is an affront to First Amendment rights and harshly inhibits creative expression and academic freedom.”

“If anything comes up in a school setting that has to do with firearms, then it’s a suspendable offense and criminal charges could ensue,” Clemmons told WMBF News. “The second amendment should be freely debated in schools and instead the second amendment is being squelched in our schools.”

If passed, the Second Amendment Education Act would require that three consecutive weeks of each year in elementary, middle, and high school be spent studying the second amendment. As Ian Millhiser at Think Progress points out, that’s an enormous chunk of the school year, especially given that some South Carolina schools devote just two weeks to slavery and a week and a half to World War II.

The law would also require that every December 15—the day after the anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook school in Newtown—be designated “Second Amendment Awareness Day.” To celebrate the occasion, schools will be required to hold mandatory poster or essay contests at every grade level, with the theme “The Right To Bear Arms; One American Right Protecting All Others.” The South Carolina Legislative Sportsmen’s Caucus will be in charge of choosing first, second, and third place winners in both contests.

Both chambers of South Carolina’s legislature are Republican-controlled, and Gov. Nikki Halley has an A+ rating from the NRA. Still, this bill may be too extreme to pass:

“Even amongst a conservative constituency in South Carolina, I think they can rate that they have more abiding problems than this,” says Dr. Dave Woodard, a political science professor at Clemson University who’s long served as a political consultant to Republican candidates in South Carolina.

“Most people are more concerned with math and science, and the fact that historically, South Carolina’s rankings in education have been abysmal. Nobody, I think, would say ‘The best way to improve education is to have a three-week segment on the Second Amendment. Boy, that’ll move us up in the national rankings!'” says Woodard.

The bill includes a list of gun-related topics that must be worked into the curriculum. Several—including the individual right to bear arms—are straight out of the revisionist interpretation of the Second Amendment that the NRA and its supporters have helped popularize since the 1970s.

The curriculum would require students from first grade and up to get into the weeds of constitutional scholarship on the Second Amendment. Students will be asked to study Supreme Court cases “including the United States v. Cruikshank, the United States v. Miller, the District of Columbia v. Heller, and McDonald v. Chicago.” (The majority arguments in Heller and McDonald grew out of the push by pro-gun researchers to redefine the Second Amendment.) The bill also mandates that students learn about “the constitutionality of gun control laws,” the causes of mass shootings, and “the impact of legislative reactions to gun violence on Constitutional rights and the impact on reducing gun violence, if any.”

Clemmons identifies as a Second Amendment advocate. He has repeatedly received an A rating from the NRA, and has taken part in events with the group in his state. In 2013, he was featured on the NRA’s website after taking a trip to Connecticut to convince gun manufacturers, put off by tightening gun control legislation in the state post-Newtown, to move their operations to South Carolina.

It’s unclear if Rep. Clemmons or his cosponsors have hashed out the logistics of the NRA’s involvement in developing or approving a curriculum: Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the NRA, tells Mother Jones that the NRA has not made any recommendations on the syllabus envisioned by the bill, nor have South Carolina legislators made plans with the NRA about the group’s future role. Attempts by Mother Jones to contact Rep. Clemmons have not been answered, but we will update this story if we receive a response.

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South Carolina Law Would Make Kids Study Second Amendment for 3 Weeks Every Year

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Is There Any Relief in Sight for Our Overtested Kids?

by ChanelChavarria Posted on January 13, 2015

Mother Jones

On the second day of school, instead of playing get-to-know you icebreakers, the students in Room 202 were hunched over worn test booklets filling in bubbles in Scantron sheets. At the time, Michigan, where I taught fifth grade Language Arts and Social Studies from 2010 through 2013, administered its annual tests in October. In a desperate attempt to raise its scores, the underperforming school where I worked announced that September would be dedicated solely to test preparation. What made this mandate unusual was the way it was enforced: Fearing dissent, the superintendent decreed that students would return to their homerooms from the prior year, pretty much stepping back a grade, for the first month.

If you’re contemplating ways to suck the spirit out of a school, this is an effective one. Studies have shown the importance of the first few weeks of school for fostering relationships and building motivation in children. Instead, we were forced to take a route that was sterile and demoralizing—a school-wide lobotomy, if you will. Each morning my former students would trundle into my classroom to submit to an onslaught of questions whose responses were restrained to an A,B,C,D paradigm that rewarded compliance and rote memorization at the expense of creativity and critical thinking.

“This is wack!” Ashton, a chubby sixth grader with a habit of speaking out of turn declared amid one of our many drills. “Ms. Gross, this question doesn’t even make sense!” After hushing his giggling classmates and reminding everyone that they only had two more minutes before “pencils down,” I looked over the contentious question. Ashton was right. Depending on how you interpreted it, there were at least two potential right answers, but only one that would work-work. Smiling, I told Ashton to try and pick the one that made the most sense to him. Instead of complimenting this 11-year old on his ability to think analytically, I gave him ambiguous, impersonal feedback—which at the time felt like the only appropriate response to a question about an ambiguous, impersonal test.

So who’s to blame for this scenario—or any of the countless frustrating testing scenarios a teacher could tell you about? Select the best answer and fill in the appropriate bubble with a No. 2 pencil. (Even though many state tests are now administered by computer.)

A. Administrators and staff who neglect children’s learning needs in favor of a “teach to the test” approach?

B. Testing companies that create confusing multiple-choice questions and have a financial stake in maintaining the testing status quo?

C. The states, which spend an average of $27 per student on testing—which encourages a fast-food approach to learning: a cheap and not necessarily satisfying or informative experience?

D. George W. Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy, which ushered in an era of high-stakes testing by holding schools to the awesome but unrealistic expectation that all students would be 100 percent proficient in math and English by 2014, and then holding schools accountable by tying Title I federal funding to test scores?

E. President Obama waivers that release states from the strict restrictions of NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress goals but which do ask states to tie teacher evaluations to test scores?

F. The recently introduced Common Core State Standards, which attempt to create more rigorous academic benchmarks but also come with new, harder and longer mandatory exams.

G. All the above.

While the answer is technically G, it also cannot be boiled down to seven multiple choice options—let alone four. America’s testing zeitgeist is complicated and nuanced and, like any thoughtful assessment, requires a complete unpacking with space for overlaps and contradictions.

That’s where The Test, the latest book by NPR education blogger Anya Kamenetz, comes in. Kamenetz does the heavy lifting for us, deftly deconstructing America’s education landscape and the perverse incentives that amplify our obsession with assessments. In the first half of the book, she gets readers up to speed, breaking down the history and policies that led to our current predicament. In the second, she offers solutions for parents and teachers who want to stay above the fray. “I think it’s important for parents to realize that their kids don’t have to take all the tests, and there are a lot of tests that you can sit out without many consequences,” she told me.

Anya Kamenetz

Kamenetz is quick to point out that she’s not against accountability or metrics. Rather, she’s interested in improving the ways we hold schools and teachers accountable—specifically by being more critical, humble, and curious when it comes to evaluating how we test, the data we collect, and how we use it. “Big data is very popular,” she says. “People like the idea of making objective decisions that are data-driven, but if you’re going to put so much emphasis on data, you have to be sure that the data you’re choosing is good. And you have to be very clear about admitting its limitations…The psychometricians, the people that build these tests, are really great scientists, some of them, and they didn’t mean for the tests to be attached to all these consequences.”

By digging in with the individuals who create the tests and the testing policies, Kamentez manages to humanize a subject that’s dry and wonky by nature. We’re reminded, for example, that the architects of No Child Left Behind had good intentions. Indeed, it’s easy to forget the bipartisan support the policy garnered early on because of its goal of decreasing the achievement gap between black and white students. Asking states to break down test data by subgroups such as race was intended to make it harder for struggling kids to fall through the cracks.

“This was a way of saying we care about their performance and we’re not going to hide it behind the average for a school,” Kamenetz says. “This country has high levels of inequality, persistent levels of poverty, and a really painful racial past that is at the forefront of lot of people’s minds right now. The promise that we could address those problems by improving educational services, that somehow whatever happens between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on a school day is going to erase the legacy of poverty, the legacy of racism in this country—that is something that is very seductive to a really wide range of people.”

Alas, as I witnessed with Ashton and his peers in Room 202, good intentions can be distorted. Because test scores can result in grown-up consequences like school closures, layoffs and budget cuts, my students were forced to sit through ‘teach-to-the-test’ styled lectures and forgo the excitement of a new school year. And it’s not just schedules that are getting reshuffled in the name of the tests, budgets are being reworked as well. At my school, students had to take additional district assessments three times a year, and since there weren’t enough computers, the middle-school kids were bused to a nearby computer center at a cost of $17,900—money that could have been put toward an arts program or a part-time social worker. It’s just a small illustration of how a test-centric model can skew priorities and lead to kids missing out or even still slipping through the cracks.

The Test couldn’t be coming out at a more critical time for public education. The book’s release was originally pegged to the fact that 44 states will be taking Common Core-aligned “accountability tests” this spring. (These more-rigorous new exams are expected to result in proficiency drops that have been dubbed the “Common Core Cliff.”) But the bigger news is that Congress is looking to reauthorize No Child Left Behind and loosen some of its restrictions—it could, for example, eliminate the mandatory state testing requirement at the crux of the 2001 policy. How this will fit in with Common Core is anyone’s guess, but mere talk of such a bill is already reviving debate around testing and accountability.

While it’s difficult at this point to imagine a world without standardized tests—even people who decry overtesting tend to use poor test scores as evidence of why teaching to the test is ineffective (talk about meta)—Kamenetz points to her 2010 book, DIY U, which looks at the rapid transformation of higher education. “One of the reasons I feel hopeful is the enormous amount of attention that’s starting to be given to what are called social and emotional skills or mindsets, what I call ‘Team Monkey’ in the book,” she told me. “It sometimes seems in education, especially K-12, that nothing ever really changes because we are still having the same debates that were having 150 years ago about poor kids, about opportunity and all these types of things, but things can change pretty quickly.”

How, in a mere 30 years, we became a nation obsessed with standardized tests could be a good example of that.

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Is There Any Relief in Sight for Our Overtested Kids?

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Two Promising Factlets About American Schools

by WDCIsmaeltjydj Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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So how are our schools doing? Here are two factlets that crossed my radar yesterday.

First: Neerav Kingsland says that SAT scores of new teachers are rising and that most of them are staying in teaching for at least five years. He comments: “If I was going to bet on whether American education will improver, flatline, or get worse — I would look very hard at the academic performance of teachers entering the profession, as well as how long these better qualified teachers stayed in the classroom. The aforementioned data makes me more bullish on American education.”

Second: Adam Ozimek says we’re selling charter schools short when we say that on average they do about as well as public schools. That’s true, but there’s more to it:

I would like to propose a better conventional wisdom: “some charter schools appear to do very well, and on average charters do better at educating poor students and black students”. If the same evidence existed for some policy other than charter schools, I believe this would be the conventional wisdom.

….The charter sectors’ ability to do better for poor students and black students is important given that they disproportionately serve them….53% of charter students are in poverty compared 48% for public schools. Charters also serve more minority students than public schools: charters are 29% black, while public schools are 16%. So not only do they serve more poor students and black students, but for this group they relatively consistently outperform public schools.

It’s been a while since I took a dive into the data on charter schools, so I’m passing this along without comment. But it sounds right. I continue to believe that as long as they’re properly regulated, charter schools show substantial promise.

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Two Promising Factlets About American Schools

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Will West Virginia Schools Have to Teach "False Science"?

by BevRosmanfd Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The West Virginia State Board of Education (SBOE) has drawn the ire of science education groups after voting on standards that encourage students to debate the causes of climate change.

As first reported in The Charleston Gazette, a member of the state board of education requested last year that alterations be made to a blueprint of new science standards, suggesting in particular that climate change not be treated as a “foregone conclusion.” After the state Department of Education drafted those changes and made the standards available for public comment, the SBOE voted in December to officially adopt them.

The science standards are based on guidelines from the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a set of curriculum benchmarks for schools. The NGSS was developed by a consortium of 26 states, including West Virginia, in an effort to make sure students around the country are being taught rigorous coursework.

According to the Gazette, the original standards asked students to assess the reasons for the rise in global temperatures over the past century. The new version, however, asks students to assess the “rise and fall” in global temperatures. Additionally, while the original standards asked students to use data to make an “evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change,” the new standards ask students to assess the credibility of “geoscience data and the predictions made by computer climate models…for predicting future impacts on the Earth System.”

In 2013, climate scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that they are 95 percent certain that humans are causing global warming. Similarly, a 2013 report from the Institute of Physics found that 97 percent of scientists believe climate change is being driven by humans.

Lisa Hoyos, director and co-founder of the group Climate Parents, a group that advocates for climate change education, told The Huffington Post that she does not think science class should be treated like a “debate club,” since scientific teaching is based on evidence. She said her organization will be putting out a petition to try and “revoke the false science from West Virginia.”

“There’s an ethical expectation that parents have of Board of Education members—that they are committed to ensuring that kids are taught actual, accurate science,” Hoyos told HuffPost this week.

Mark McCaffrey, programs and policy director for the National Center for Science Education, also said in a statement that he thinks “a few board members have been allowed to ride roughshod over the scientific consensus on climate reflected in the NGSS.”

Gayle Manchin, president of the state Board of Education and wife of US Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), noted that people didn’t seem to take issue with the standards during the public comment period. However, after receiving negative feedback about the standards more recently, she said the board will hold further discussions on them.

“I believe that our board members are motivated to think about what will be best for the students of West Virginia, and I value their expertise in different areas,” Manchin told HuffPost.

She said she does not think the substance of the standards has changed, and she said the new standards “encourage children to think more critically and evaluate all the information that’s out there.”

According to The Charleston Gazette, board member Wade Linger was among the people leading the effort to change the science standards, and was the one to suggest replacing the phrase “the rise,” as in the rise of global temperatures, with “the rise and fall.” However, Linger told HuffPost that he was not the only voice calling for the revisions.

“The press has given me way too much credit for this,” said Linger. “This was a board decision, not a single-person decision.”

Linger said he is pleased with the new standards because they “teach kids how to think, not what to think.”

Still, Marie Hamrick, co-president of the West Virginia Education Association’s Raleigh County affiliate, told The Register-Herald that she thinks the state board ignored scientific evidence when voting to change the standards.

“This group thinks that they are smarter and wiser than the scientific community that designed the questions,” Hamrick said.

The new standards will be implemented in West Virginia schools for the 2016-2017 school year.

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Will West Virginia Schools Have to Teach "False Science"?

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Leave it to West Virginia to confuse its students about science

by RicoGwynne Posted on January 5, 2015

Leave it to West Virginia to confuse its students about science

By on 5 Jan 2015commentsShare

The campaign by special interests and right-wing politicians to inject climate skepticism into public school classrooms has gone on for years. In 2014, it hit Texas, Kansas, and Wyoming. Now West Virginia has become the latest science-education battleground.

Members of the state school board were unhappy with the national Next Generation Science Standards, a blueprint for teaching science in schools, even though it had already been watered down on the topic of climate change to the satisfaction of the climate change–denying Heartland Institute.

One board member was concerned about the effect that teaching climate science would have on the coal industry, reports The Charleston Gazette. Another took issue with the science itself: “There was a question in there that said: ‘Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century,’” school board member Wade Linger told the newspaper. “If you have that as a standard, then that presupposes that global temperatures have risen over the past century, and, of course, there’s debate about that.”

No, there’s not. There’s no question that temperatures have risen over the past century. Any “debate” is over why temperatures have risen — and it’s hardly much of a debate, as 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human activity is the primary cause.

Well so anyway, because the opinions of the world’s scientists are, cumulatively, worth slightly less than those of Mr. Wade Linger, the board made some changes, detailed here by Ryan Quinn of The Charleston Gazette:

The changes, for example, added “and fall” after “rise” to a proposed standard requiring that sixth-graders “ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.”

The other changes West Virginia Department of Education staff members made in response to Linger’s concerns were:

Original ninthgrade science requirement: “Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.”
Adopted version: “Analyze geoscience data and the predictions made by computer climate models to assess their creditability [sic] for predicting future impacts on the Earth System.”
Original high school elective Environmental Science requirement: “Debate climate changes as it [sic] relates to greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”
Adopted version: “Debate climate changes as it relates to natural forces such as Milankovitch cycles, greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”

Milankovitch cycles are long-term changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun, and some who do not believe in man-made global warming use that theory as the basis of their assertion that the Earth is simply in a natural warming period.

Never a good sign when a newspaper has to insert “sic” more than once into a state’s teaching requirements.

The school board’s break with mainstream science is concerning to education advocates and many parents. One nonprofit, Climate Parents, will petition the school board to throw out its inaccurate changes before they’re implemented in 2016.

Source:
Climate change learning standards for W.Va. students altered

, The Charleston Gazette.

Climate groups oppose changes to W.Va. science standards

, The Charleston Gazette.

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Leave it to West Virginia to confuse its students about science

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UAB Faculty Senate Considers Vote Against All That Annoying Faculty Stuff

by LatashaBuckingh Posted on December 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Earlier this month, Ray Watts, the president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, announced that UAB would be dropping its Division I football program, the first university to do so in 20 years. I haven’t paid much attention to the fallout, but today the LA Times summarizes the swift reaction:

Watts said the decision was strictly financial: After spending $20 million each year subsidizing an unsuccessful team, it was time for UAB to cut its losses and put academics before athletics.

….These are fighting words in Alabama. After announcing his decision Dec. 2, Watts needed police officers to escort him through a crowd of angry fans outside Legion Field, the school’s outdated off-campus stadium, where he met with Blazer players and coaches.

….All of a sudden, almost everyone is a football cheerleader: The City Council passed a motion in support of UAB football; the university’s Faculty Senate drafted a resolution of no confidence in Watts.

Look, I get that the football players are angry. I even get that all the boosters who hadn’t stepped up before are now swearing that they would have donated millions of dollars to keep the program alive if only Watts had asked them. But the Faculty Senate? At a bare minimum, shouldn’t they have had the back of a president who wanted to stop draining money from academics into football, even if no one else did? Yeesh.

Anyway, the gist of the story is that without a consistently losing football program to rally around, UAB is now certain to wither away and die. Why would anyone want to be be a student there, after all? What’s left? A bunch of hoity toity classes and labs and stuff? What a waste of some perfectly nice property in the middle of town.

UPDATE: Apparently my reading comprehension is weak today. As the Times story says, the Faculty Senate is considering a no-confidence motion in Watts, but hasn’t actually voted on it yet. That won’t happen until January 15.

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UAB Faculty Senate Considers Vote Against All That Annoying Faculty Stuff

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This Is the Stupidest Anti-Science Bullshit of 2014

by BaileyD94oaqflt Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

2014 had its fair share of landmark scientific accomplishments: dramatic cuts to the cost of sequencing a genome; sweeping investigations of climate change impacts in the US; advances in private-sector space travel, and plenty more. But there was also no shortage of high-profile figures eager to publicly and shamelessly denounce well-established science—sometimes with serious consequences for public policy. So without further ado, the most egregious science denial of 2014:

Basically everything said by Donald Trump:

You can always count on The Donald to pull no punches. He got started early this year, when he pointed to freezing temperatures in parts of the country as evidence that “this very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop” and then told Fox News that the global warming “hoax” was merely the result of scientists “having a lot of fun.”

In September, Trump went on a Twitter screed linking vaccines to autism. A month earlier, he fanned the flames of unscientific Ebola panic when he objected to efforts to bring American health care workers infected with the virus back the the US for treatment. “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” he tweeted. “People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!” Health care experts, meanwhile, insisted that the risk was minimal; the two patients Trump was talking about were ultimately brought back to the US and successfully treated without infecting anyone else. Let’s just stick to real estate and beauty pageants, Donald, shall we?

Unnecessary Ebola quarantines:

Reporters and state police keep watch outside of nurse Kaci Hickox’s house in Maine. Robert F. Bukaty/AP

Trump wasn’t the only one to catch a heavy dose of science denial fever in the midst of the Ebola crisis. The plague of denial started in West Africa, as efforts to stem the outbreak were stymied by persistent rumors that Ebola was a myth propagated by the World Health Organization and Western powers. When Ebola hopped the Atlantic and landed in the United States, a host of (mostly Republican) lawmakers clamored for travel bans and visa restrictions—even though America’s leading public health officials repeatedly explained that those steps would be ineffective. In October, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) forced Kaci Hickox, a nurse who had been treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, to stay in an isolation tent in a Newark hostpital for two-and-a-half days, despite the fact that she had no symptoms of the disease and therefore posed no threat to others. When Hickox finally escaped New Jersey, she was quarantined again in her home state of Maine. Doctors Without Borders, an NGO on the front lines of the Ebola crisis, issued a statement at the time declaring that the “forced quarantine of asymptomatic health workers…is not grounded on scientific evidence and could undermine efforts to curb the epidemic at its source.”

Lamar Smith’s war on the National Science Foundation:

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) Jay Mallin/ZUMA

Republican Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas took his opposition to basic science straight to the source: The grant-writing archives of the National Science Foundation. In an unprecedented violation of the historic firewall between the lawmakers who set the NSF’s budget and the top scientists who decide where to direct it, Smith’s researchers pulled the files on at least 47 grants that they believed were not in the “public interest.” Some of the biggest-ticket projects they took issue with related to climate change research; the committee apparently intended to single out these projects as examples of the NSF frittering money away on research that won’t come back to benefit taxpayers. The investigation is ongoing, and the precedent it sets—that scientific research projects are only worthwhile if they directly benefit the American economy—is unsettling.

Battles over Texas textbooks:

Citizens gathered outside a 2010 Texas State Board of Education meeting to protest changes to the state’s social studies standards. Larry Kolvoord/Austin American-Statesman/AP

The Texas Board of Education has long been a hotbed for science denial, as conservative activists and a handful of textbook reviewers have sought to influence textbook-writing standards in an effort to muddle the basic science around issues such as evolution and climate change. What happens within the pages of Texas textbooks matters because the publishing market there is among the nation’s largest; what gets printed in Texas is likely to wind up in classrooms nationwide. Early this year advocates for better textbook oversight won a victory when the board announced it would give teachers’ input priority in determining curricula. But by September, the battle was back on, with a raft of revisions that contained obvious biases against mainstream climate science—one McGraw-Hill textbook inaccurately claimed that scientists “do not agree on what is causing the change,” and a Pearson text similarly alluded to scientific disagreement. Bowing to public pressure, in November Pearson altered its text to more accurately reflect the scientific consensus on climate change, but the McGraw-Hill text still portrays climate science as an open debate. Meanwhile, a parallel battle played out in Oklahoma over new standards to improve climate science education.

Bill Nye schools creationist Ken Ham; John Holdren schools Congress:

Veteran science educator Bill Nye’s live-streamed takedown of outspoken creationist Ken Ham was perhaps the year’s most amazing barrage of scientific badassery. Nye piled on the evidence for why the Earth can’t possibly be just a few thousand years old (as Ham believes) and why the fossil record does, in fact, prove the theory of evolution. That spectacle was followed by another killer takedown, as White House science adviser John Holdren explained elementary school-level concepts related to climate change to members of the House Science Committee:

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Senate overrun by climate deniers:

James Inhofe (R-Okla.) Louie Palu/ZUMA

Science denial on Capitol Hill is set to get even crazier next year. When Democrats (and environmentalists) got a sound whooping in the midterm elections, a new caucus of climate change-denying senators swept in. Almost every new Republican senator has taken a position against mainstream climate science, ranging from hardline denial to cautious skepticism. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the incoming majority leader, has vowed to make forcing through an approval of the Keystone XL pipeline his top agenda item in the new year; he also wants to block the Obama administration’s efforts to reign in carbon pollution from coal plants. And the incoming chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is none other than James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who actually believes that global warming is a hoax orchestrated by Barbra Streisand. You can’t make this stuff up.

“I’m not a scientist”:

2014 saw the proliferation of a particularly insidious talking point for those politicians who have realized that denying climate science is untenable but are unable to publicly accept the scientific consensus: “I’m not a scientist.” Possible 2016 presidential contender Jeb Bush used that line back in 2009, and in 2014 it reached new heights: McConnell, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), and Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) are among the guilty parties. It’s a cop-out that is at best exhausting, and at worst dangerous.

Anti-vaxxers are still a thing:

Marlon Lopez MMG1 Design/Shutterstock

The first five months of 2014 saw the more measles cases than comparable time periods in any year since 1994; the CDC reported that 90 percent of those cases were among people who hadn’t been vaccinated. In May, a Tennessee hospital reported a disturbing spike in cases of infants with a rare bleeding condition that could have been prevented with a routine vitamin injection; doctors there blamed anti-vaccination fears for parents avoiding the injection. Yes, it’s not just Jenny McCarthy—a surprising number of people across the country continue to be preoccupied with the totally debunked fear that vaccines will lead to autism or other maladies.

Contraception ≠ abortion:

A Hobby Lobby location in Stow, Ohio. DangApricot/Wikimedia Commons

The year’s biggest court battle over reproductive rights, in which the craft store Hobby Lobby objected to the Obamacare requirement that it provide contraceptive coverage for its employees, was premised on terrible science. The company’s owners, who have a religious objection to abortion, claimed that intrauterine devices and the “morning-after” pills Ella and Plan B cause abortions. But scientists say that these methods of contraception work by preventing pregnancy; they don’t result in abortion. If it’s not surprising that Hobby Lobby’s owners would come out against the science, it is a surprise that conservative justices on the Supreme Court would back them up, despite ample testimony from leading gynecologists. As Molly Redden reports, battles over science denial in reproductive rights are only going to heat up in 2015.

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This Is the Stupidest Anti-Science Bullshit of 2014

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Obama’s Executive Action Will Protect 5 Million Undocumented Immigrants

by LibbyPritchett Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday evening, President Barack Obama announced his hotly anticipated executive action on immigration, which will keep nearly 5 million undocumented residents from being deported. Even though the sweeping measure has elicited threats of retaliation from congressional Republicans, Obama said he moved forward because comprehensive immigration reform is unlikely to go anywhere in the GOP-dominated Congress next year.

“I know some of the critics of this action call it amnesty,” the president said in his speech. “Well, it’s not. Amnesty is the immigration system we have today—millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules, while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time. That’s the real amnesty—leaving this broken system the way it is.”

A year and a half ago, a bipartisan immigration bill passed in the Senate but died in the House. The bill likely had enough Republican and Democratic votes to pass in the House, but Speaker John Boehner, catering to his tea partiers, refused to bring the measure to the floor. If signed into law, the legislation would have provided legal status to about 11 million undocumented immigrants. Here’s a look at who benefits most from Obama’s executive action—and who has lost out, thanks in part to GOP obstructionism.

Winners
Undocumented parents of children who are US citizens or permanent residents: “Undocumented immigrants…see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart,” the president said. “It’s been this way for decades. And for decades, we haven’t done much about it.” His executive action will offer temporary legal status to the undocumented parents of children who are US citizens or permanent residents and allow them to apply for work permits—as long as they have lived in the United States for at least five years, pass a background check, and pay taxes.

DREAMers: The president’s move will broaden the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which had temporarily protected from deportation some 1.2 million young people who were brought into the country illegally as children—as long as they entered the country before June 15, 2007. Now, children who came to the United States before January 1, 2010, will be eligible to apply for deferred-action status. The so-called DREAMers (named after the proposed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) can apply for employment visas, though there is no direct path for them to lawful permanent residence or citizenship. To the dismay of immigration activists, the executive action does not extend benefits to the hundreds of thousands of parents of DREAMers.

Families: Often US citizens and legal permanent residents are separated for long stretches of time from family members who are awaiting legal permanent resident status. The executive action will expand a waiver program that will reduce the time these families spend apart.

Noncriminal undocumented immigrants: Obama’s executive action shifts all of the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement resources toward deporting undocumented immigrants who are criminals—instead of deporting undocumented immigrants who pose no such threat. “We’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security,” Obama said. “Felons, not families.” The president’s order also guts an existing program called Secure Communities, which requires police to share arrestees’ fingerprints with federal immigration officials, who can use the information to deport suspects who are here illegally, even if they turn out to be innocent. The program will be replaced with another devoted to deporting only those convicted of criminal offenses.

Highly skilled workers: Skilled workers who have had their legal permanent resident application approved often wait years to receive their visas. Obama’s order will allow these people to move and change jobs more easily.

Immigrants with pending cases: As part of the president’s executive action, the Justice Department will implement immigration court reforms to quickly process the massive backlog of cases.

Immigrant victims of crime: Obama is directing the Department of Labor to expand the number of visas available for victims of crimes and human trafficking.

The Border Patrol: Obama’s executive action shifts resources to the border, though it doesn’t specify how much more money will be flowing to Customs and Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement along the southern border. (The Senate bill would have allotted some $30 billion over 10 years to hiring at least 19,200 extra border patrol agents.)

Entrepreneurs: The executive action will make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs—who show a potential to create jobs in the United States and attract investment—to immigrate to the US, though there was no mention how the administration will achieve this.

Losers
Undocumented immigrants who have been here since 2011: The failed Senate immigration bill would have allowed immigrants without papers—and their children and spouses—to apply for provisional legal status, if they have been in the United States since the end of 2011. These immigrants could have eventually applied for citizenship.

Undocumented agricultural workers: Under the Senate bill, undocumented agricultural workers would have been eligible for legal immigrant status if they had worked at least 100 full days between 2010 and 2012. The bill would have created a path to citizenship for these farmworkers.

Ag workers with papers: The Senate bill would also have created a new temporary work visa called the W visa for farmworkers. The new program would have permitted these laborers to eventually apply for permanent resident status without an employer’s sponsorship. Less-skilled non-farmworkers could have also applied for a W visa.

Other types of legal immigrants: The Senate bill would have set up a new system that would grant visas to up to 250,000 foreigners a year. Foreign nationals would have accumulated points based on their skill level, education, and employment background. The new system would have cleared the current backlog of applicants for family-based or work visas.

Foreigners attending American universities: More foreigners graduating from American universities in the fields of science, math, and technology would have been able to apply for permanent visas.

Immigrant detainees: If the Senate bill had okayed by the House, unaccompanied minors, mentally disabled immigrants, and other vulnerable people going through the detention and deportation process would have been granted free legal representation. The bill would have limited the use of solitary confinement in immigrant detention facilities.

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Obama’s Executive Action Will Protect 5 Million Undocumented Immigrants

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Arizona School District Cutting Contraception from High School Biology Text

by MartinCrofts Posted on November 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Via Steve Benen, here’s the latest from Gilbert, Arizona:

School district staff here will “edit” a high-school honors biology textbook after board members agreed that it does not align with state regulations on how abortion is to be presented to public-school students.

….The book in question, Campbell Biology: Concepts & Connections (Seventh Edition), has a chapter that discusses abstinence, birth-control methods, tubal ligations and vasectomies and drugs that can induce abortion.

….The board made its decision after listening to a presentation from Natalie Decker, a lawyer for Scottsdale-based Alliance Defending Freedom….Decker did not recommend a way to change the book but said it could be redacted or have additional information pasted in. “The cheapest, least disruptive way to solve the problem is to remove the page,” board member Daryl Colvin said.

This whole thing is ridiculous, and the prospect of taking a razor blade to p. 547 of this textbook is cringe-inducing. Hell, as near as anyone can tell, the book doesn’t even violate Arizona law, which requires public schools to present child birth and adoption as preferred options to elective abortion. Apparently there are just some folks in Gilbert who don’t like having the subject presented at all.

Still, ridiculous as this is, I do have a serious question to ask. I checked, and this is not a “Human Sexuality” text or a “Health and Family” book. It’s straight-up biology: photosynthesis, genes, evolution, eukaryotic cells, vertebrates, nervous systems, hormones, the immune system, etc. etc. So why, in a generic biology textbook, is there a special boxed page devoted to specific technical means of contraception in human beings? That really does seem like something pasted in to make a point, not because it follows naturally from a discussion of reproduction and embryonic development in class Mammalia.

So….what’s the point of including this in the first place? To annoy conservatives? To satisfy some obscure interest group? If this book were used in a sex ed class, that would be one thing. It would clearly belong. But in a standard biology text? I don’t really get it.

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Arizona School District Cutting Contraception from High School Biology Text

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