Despite winning court battles at every turn, advocates for teaching evolution as the unshakable bedrock of high school biology courses have been losing on the ground to an astonishing degree.
In a recent essay in Science, Penn State political scientists Eric Plutzer and Michael B. Berkman reported that their survey of U.S. public high school biology teachers show that only a relative small minority unambiguously teach the mainstream scientific view of evolution. Only 28 percent of the 926 instructors surveyed consistently implement the recommendations of the National Research Council, which calls on high school biology instructors to present without qualification the overwhelming evidence for evolution. About 13 percent of these public school instructors are active advocates for creationism or Intelligent Design as “valid scientific alternatives” to evolution — and, says Plutzer, “an additional five percent of teachers take the same position, though typically in brief responses to student questions.”
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