Under Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher program, considered the most sweeping in the country, Louisiana is poised to spend tens of millions of dollars to help poor and middle-class students from the state’s notoriously terrible public schools receive a private education. While the governor’s plan sounds great in the glittery parlance of the state’s PR machine, the program is rife with accountability problems that actually haven’t been solved by the new standards the Louisiana Department of Education adopted two weeks ago.
For one, of the 119 (mostly Christian) participating schools, Zack Kopplin, a gutsy college sophomore who’s taken to Change.org to stonewall the program, has identified at least 19 that teach or champion creationist non-science, and will rake in nearly $4 million in public funding from the initial round of voucher designations.
Many of these schools, Kopplin notes, rely on Pensecola-based A Beka Book curriculum or Bob Jones University Press textbooks to teach their pupils Bible-based “facts,” such as the existence of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster and all sorts of pseudoscience that researcher Rachel Tabachnick and writer Thomas Vinciguerra have thankfully pored over so the rest of world doesn’t have to.
Some of the ‘facts’ pointed out in the article:
- Dinosaurs and humans probably hung out
- Dragons were totally real
- “God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ.”
- Africa needs religion
- Slave masters were nice guys
- The KKK was A-OK
- The Great Depression wasn’t as bad as the liberals made it sound
- SCOTUS enslaved fetuses
- The Red Scare isn’t over yet
- Mark Twain and Emily Dicksinson were a couple of hacks
- Abstract algebra is too dang complicated
- Gay people “have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”
- “Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world’s richest nations.”
- Globalization is a precursor to rapture
Louisiana survived Katrina and had the nation and the world rooting for it. Not sure it can survive a decade of this kind of education.
I was about to post this and sarahlee310 beat me to it. haha
Awesome that public tax money will go to teaching evangelical Christian revisionist history.
