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Air Date: Week March 11, 2022
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In the United States, education is primarily a state-and local responsibility. Both the curricula for enrollment and the requirements for enrollment are developed both by the communities and by private organizations. (Photo: Nenaj Stojkovic, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Investigative journalist Katie Worth joins Host Bobby Bascomb to talk about her book Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America. It reveals how fossil fuel companies have access to American children, and how this differs between red and blue states.
Transcript
BASCOMB: And I’m Bobby Bascomb. The United States has become a highly politicized country when it comes to climate change science. That political fight extends into our classrooms. Katie Worth’s book Miseducation, How Climate Change is Taught In America explores the access fossil fuel interest have to American children and how the red state blue divide in climate science education.
Katie Worth, Welcome Back to Living on Earth!
WORTH: Thank you so much. I’m glad to be here.
BASCOMB: What inspired you to write this book on miseducation and climate change within American schools?
WORTH: Years ago, I was talking to you about my trip in the Marshall Islands. I was then a reporter for PBS Series Frontline. And I was assigned a story about the Marshall Islands’ climate change. It’s a Pacific Island country and is extremely vulnerable to climate change. The highest point on the islands is 12 feet above sea level. The entire nation could be affected by climate change. A mere foot or two of sea-level rise could cause a major problem on an island this low. So we went to visit them and were amazed at how fluently they spoke about climate change. Its causes and what it might mean in their lives. One of the kids Izermen was nine years old. He had learned about climate change when he was six years old and had continued to learn about it each year in school. His family was looking to move to Oklahoma, where there was extended family. The question was raised: Okay, so if Izerman and his siblings move to Oklahoma, how will they learn about climate changes there? That was the origin story of this book. I was also reporting on climate denial at the time. I attended a conference hosted at the Heartland Institute, a climate denial organization. They told me that they were sending out packets to all science teachers in the country, and they claimed to have sent out more than 200,000. This included a book called Why Scientists Don’t Agree on Climate Change. They don’t, which we know. A DVD on solar cycles and how recent warming can be explained using solar cycles. Scientists say it can’t. I was struck by the confluence of these two events and realized that there’s a lot of interesting reporting territory. It’s worth looking into.
BASCOMB – You have in your front a map of the United States that shows you just open the page. It shows the United States as a map with Republican-controlled legislative and Democratic states. Overlaid on that is a grade for each state and how they teach climate science. Could you tell us more about the map and its contents?
According to the World Bank sea level rise is expected to threaten 40 percent of Majuro, capital of Marshall Islands. (Photo by Keith Polia, Flickr. CC BY 2.0).
W0RTH: Yeah, sure. So the National Center for Science Education and Texas Freedom Network teamed up to hire a panel of educators who would examine each state’s science standards and academic standards and how they deal with climate change. So academic standards are basically a state’s expectations of what a student will learn in any given year, or subject. Although they sound simple and uninteresting, they are actually very powerful as teachers look to them for guidance on what they will be teaching in a given year. We don’t have a national curriculum, so it all comes down to what each state says. This panel examined each state’s science standards, and how they dealt with climate change. It used four criteria to determine whether a child would be able to learn that climate change is real, that it’s caused humans, and then, if they could learn about the possible solutions. They then rated them, and these ratings were then converted into letter grades. Then, I used the data to map it onto a red, blue, and purple map of the states, based on the control of the state legislatures. We saw a lot of what you would expect. There was no blue state with a lower grade than a B+. There were also great red states. There were actually, I believe, Wyoming got an A and Alaska got an A- or A-. There are a few red states that do this very well. However, the majority of red states did much worse. This question was answered by many states, which received C’s D’s and Fs. That means you can roughly predict what a child will learn about climate change through their education by knowing which political party controls the state legislature. It’s not based on the science. This is problematic because, as you know, the climate crisis doesn’t stop at checking who’s running the state legislature before striking any community. It’s like equal opportunity. It’s going to affect your daily life regardless of where you live. This question is important for children in every state.
BASCOMB: What national standards do we have for teaching climate change? And how are those actually interpreted by the States?
WORTH: There are no national standards. However, there was a group from all over the country of educators who tried to create a set of standards that was better than the ones we had growing up. They also used the most recent pedagogy and how science is taught to kids. They came up with the Next Generation Science Standards. It’s not a federal effort that is then being placed on the states. Every state must approve it. The standards were written by people from all 50 states. They then asked their respective states to adopt the next generation standards. Some did, but some of them rejected it. Some of them even amended it. Oklahoma, for instance, adopted the Next Generation Standards largely, but then they wiped out all standards that had to do with climate change. They didn’t even suggest it to their legislatures. They also removed the word evolution from their standards and replaced it with words like development or change over the time. Because the E word, evolution, is still a hot topic in Oklahoma. So there are many states that did the tweaking that diluted the standards. There are also states that reject the next-generation standards and stick with their processes. Texas is one such state that has stuck with its standards. Texas is one of the biggest purchasers of textbooks across the nation. So textbook publishers should pay attention to what Texas approves. The next generation of textbooks is then created and sold to districts across the country. It’s almost like these things have a national impact. It can also affect children in blue states and sometimes in red states.
In #Miseducation, investigative journalist Katie Worth reveals big inequities in #climateEducation and a gap mirroring state politics. @Revelator_News https://t.co/xY5mnRn2ct
— Daily Climate (@TheDailyClimate) November 17, 2021
BASCOMB : Now, let’s get to the bottom of the fossil fuel industry. In your book, you write that they have a long history in reaching schools directly. Could you tell us more?
WORTH – The fossil fuel industry has transformed their image to say they care about climate change. All of these ads, from Exxon to Chevron, stating that they are working on climate change, and that everyone needs to address it, can be seen at Exxon. But I was in Arkansas reporting on what was being taught in a classroom. A representative of Arkansas State oil and natural gas industry association was there with a PowerPoint presentation to present to the seventh graders. She, it’s her job to go from classroom to classroom and present this PowerPoint slide. You know, it had some great information about Arkansas’ geology and the places you can find oil. It also covered the technology used to extract the oil. That is something students should be able to learn. There was also a section on climate change. She said that students shouldn’t worry about it. It was India and China who were causing it. Even if every fossil fuel emitted from the United States were shut down tomorrow, it would only have a 0.0001% effect on the climate. This is blatantly false. She’s right, and windmills are known to kill birds, so every fuel source has a problem. It’s easy to see how windmills can kill birds as a link to a global crisis that will impact all life on the planet. It was like this: it was the industry’s main talking point, and it was being fed directly to seventh graders. The seventh graders were also deferential to the teacher. They didn’t ask any critical questions.
BASCOMB – To what extent is climate denial being taught to children in schools?
WORTH – I grew up in a small California town, about 15 miles from Paradise. You may also remember that this was the town that was razed to the ground by a massive fire in 2018.
BASCOMB: Yeah.
WORTH : Although the fire was started by a few poorly maintained utility lines, it was actually fueled by climate change. The five hottest summers had all occurred in the five years prior to the fire, and it had rained less that a fifth of an ind in the six months before the fire. It was almost dry. The fire caught, the winds blew quickly and it destroyed 90% of Paradise’s buildings. I returned to Paradise Intermediate School in September, where I attended a seventh grade science class. The school was relocated from Paradise into Chico’s shuttered hardware store. It was very much like a Lowe’s. The students were in the aisles. They also got lunch from the checkout counters. And they played freeze tag at the lumber center. It was surreal and very bizarre.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines environmental education as “a process that allows individuals to explore environmental issues, engage in problem-solving, and take action to improve the environment.” (Photo: Nenaj Stojkovic, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
BASCOMB: Oh gosh.
WORTH : So this teacher teaches climate science every other year and this year was teaching it to children who are arguably climate refugees. I watched him teach it for a few weeks. One of the children raised his hand and said, “Hey, I’m really confused, because my parents tell me this isn’t true.” Climate change is a myth. And you know what? I don’t know whom to believe. I thought Mr. Kessler handled the situation very thoughtfully. He said, “It can be very confusing when you receive different information from different people in you life.” But I’m not here telling you what to believe. I’m only here to provide you with the best evidence I can. That’s science. Science is looking at evidence, making an analysis, and discovering what is going on. And you get that opportunity to do that, you can look at NASA Data, NOAA Data, and think about what is going on. This seemed like a great way to avoid the, you know what I mean, wrong of your parents but to empower the student’s ability to think for himself. He’s more likely to believe what the most important people in his family believe. You know what? The more messages he receives like this, the more he will likely believe it. And when he is a decision-making adult, he may have a new perspective. In fact, Mr. Kessler actually gave the class a prompt to write: Do you think climate change has affected how you live? What do you think will happen to your life in 50 years? The little boy replied, “I don’t believe climate change has affected me at all.” I don’t yet know if it will impact my life in 50-years.
BASCOMB: What does it take? I mean, my home was literally burned down and I was learning in a school in an aisle of a hardware shop. What can parents do if their children are not being taught climate science at school?
WORTH: I think it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on in your children’s school. It’s difficult to imagine a top-down federal effort working because there hasn’t been much evidence of the federal government getting involved with state education. These are just some of the arguments over what is happening. Paying close attention to state standards. The Texas state standards, you know, the fossil fuel industry was at every one of these meetings, and sometimes they were the only ones, or not necessarily the only ones but there wasn’t a big counterweight of teachers and parents saying- “No, this is an important issue, we want our kids to know what the solutions may be. And they need to know that that’s important”. So you know, if there was a bigger voice to that effect. It could have turned out differently.
BASCOMB – Katie Worth is a journalist, author and editor of Miseducation: How climate changes are taught in America. Katie, I am so grateful that you took the time to share this with me today.
WORTH: I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having us.
Links
Learn more about National Center for Science Education
EPA | “Climate Change Resources for Educators and Students”
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