The Best Curriculum Money Can Buy—The Real Climategate Coming to a School Near You

When internal documents from British scientists were leaked to the press, inaugurating “Climategate,” the Heartland Institute was one of the myriad right-wing climate-denial conspiracy organizations that cherry-picked quotes from the scientists and demanded punitive action against them. The scientists have since been cleared of any wrongdoing and their research has been vindicated, but Heartland Institute has continued its attack.

Now internal documents have been leaked from the Heartland Institute itself, revealing its funding of leading climate change skeptics and a plan to teach climate change skepticism in schools. The documents were published by DeSmogBlog, which said that “the climate denial machine relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from U.S. businesses, including Microsoft, Koch Industries, Altria (parent company of Philip Morris), RJR Tobacco and more."

Heartland will be paying Dr. David Wojick $5,000 per module, or about $25,000 a quarter, to develop curriculum for high school and middle school. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. According to MSNBC, Dr. Wojick considers the reliability of climate models to be controversial and questions whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant. According to others, Wojick has no scientific or educational background, especially in climate science, only a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science to lend credibility to Heartland’s efforts.

Heartland has worked for years to lend credibility to tobacco-industry scientists and help tobacco companies sow public doubt about the dangers of tobacco and secondhand smoke. Coal and petroleum companies have emulated many of the tactics of Big Tobacco, such as hiring their own scientists to come up with bogus data that supports their interests and creating fake public interest organizations. Thus, it should come as no surprise that tobacco companies would help fund such efforts by carbon-emitting industries.

Here's a copy of the group's fundraising plan, with a list of donors.

Gutting Regulation Sickens Your Guts

By now, with the regularity of food recalls and epidemics of food-borne illness in the U.S., one might have good reason to agree with Der Spiegel’s reclassification of the U.S. as a third world banana republic. After all, everyone knows you shouldn’t eat unwashed fresh produce in Honduras and Guatemala.

Of course the difference between poor countries and the U.S. is that we actually have the infrastructure to deliver clean food and water. However, with the growing percentage of agricultural land being gobbled up by corporate factory farms that cram together tens of thousands of hogs, chickens or cattle along with speedups and lax oversight and cleanliness at processing plants, it is inevitable that illness provoking germs would increasingly find their way into our foods.

The problem has only been worsened by the gutting of federal oversight, which has reduced the number of available agents to inspect food producing and processing sites.

Giving Corporate Crooks A Free Pass

According to Democracy Now, federal officials have now acknowledged that they knew about the dangerous bacteria found in Cargill ground turkey products well before this month’s recall, one of the largest meat recalls in U.S. history. This is no trivial blunder, as one person has already died from Salmonella, and 76 others were sickened from turkey products traced to Cargill’s processing plant in Springdale, Arkansas.

A dangerous form of Salmonella was discovered by the USDA in Cargill turkey at least once last year and another four times this year. Despite the risk to the public, the USDA allowed Cargill to continue to sell potentially tainted meat until the recent outbreak occurred.

Our Product is Sowing Doubt

Big Tobacco was caught with their pants down when a memo was leaked suggesting they were in the business of sowing doubt about their product’s safety. Many industries, however, have been engaged in a similar game. For example, they hire their own scientists to do biased studies that appear to draw into question accepted scientific facts. Their lobbyists then use this data to gain watered down regulations and allow them to sell dangerous products.

It would appear that poultry producers have done the same. According to Democracy Now, the USDA claims that according to their own rules they do not consider Salmonella contamination as a health risk until the meat actually sickens or kills someone.

Dairy Industry Lies to Fatten Profits (and Children)

"Bubbles" by John Isaac, 2003 (photographed by Grahamc99)

A report by the Associated Press last week said that a number of professional and medical groups, including the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), had issued a “joint statement” favoring flavored milk in the schools. Their statement supposedly asserted that “the nutritional value of flavored low-fat or skim milk outweighs the harm of the added sugar.” (See OB Rag)

In reality, no such “joint statement” was ever made. The AP was scammed by dairy industry propaganda designed to keep chocolate milk in the schools. In fact, many medical groups have come out against the practice of feeding kids sugared milk drinks precisely because the added sugar contributes to obesity and tooth decay. AHA and AAP both denied signing the joint statement.

Two of the organizations cited in the AP story (the School Nutrition Association and the American Dietetic Association) have financial links to the dairy industry and have been key players in the effort to keep chocolate milk in the schools. The School Nutrition Association includes dues-paying members from the dairy lobby, including The National Dairy Council and the Milk Processors Education Program, according to the OB Rag story.

The School Nutrition Association worked with the dairy lobby to promote a biased “study” that supposedly showed that kids would not drink milk if it wasn’t flavored. This tactic is highly reminiscent of attempts by the Tobacco industry to sow doubt about the dangers of cigarettes by co-opting scientists and producing their own “scientific” studies to counter the legitimate ones linking smoking to cancer and heart disease. Petroleum and coal companies have done the same to sow doubt about climate change. (See Merchants of Doubt, numerous articles by Robert Procter, The Republican War on Science, among other sources).

NCLB is Killing Science

Valerie Strauss just posted “Why NAEP science scores were so low,” which points out what should be obvious: we’ve gutted content and good teaching practices in order to raise NCLB test scores.

“What is surprising about the newly released science scores in the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the nation’s report card, is that anybody is surprised that they were, on average, so low.

Over the past decade, the accountability system of No Child Left Behind has pushed schools to focus on reading and math because those were the subjects on which students were tested and the results used to grade schools and teachers. That results in less time for other subjects, including science.

No Child Left Behind did require that science be annually assessed in various grades starting in 2007-08, but the entire testing regime came under criticism when it became obvious that states were lowering standards to ensure higher test scores.”

I teach science in California, where 52% of students scored below basic. Much of what Strauss mentions in her article I experience firsthand. Science budgets have been slashed, making it extremely difficult to do hands-on, inquiry-based lab activities with students. My entire science department has a budget of only $1,000 to share between seven teachers, and this must cover office and lab supplies. There is no way to buy equipment or even repair it for this amount.

However, it is not just that schools are spending less time on science. Many have entirely abandoned teaching science in grades K-5. With pressure to raise NCLB test scores, science is often tossed out the window, along with arts, foreign languages and physical education. Kids who do not have any science in the lower grades enter secondary schools with an enormous disadvantage. They may start middle school without any formal experience with microscopes, the metric system or the ability to distinguishing between variables and controls. As a result, NCLB actually creates an achievement gap in science.

Another salient point that Strauss does not mention is the growing attacks on reason and scientific thought by both the religious right and corporations. This tendency reached new heights under the second Bush administration, and continues today with the ascendency of the Tea Party movement. It includes young Earth creationists and intelligent design advocates, who push doubt about Natural Selection and evolution, as well as corporate doubt mongers, like Big Tobacco, Big Petroleum and Coal, which try to convince us that smoking is harmless and that climate change is not a serious problem. While purely anecdotal, it seems like I’m getting increasing numbers of students who believe that scientific knowledge in general (not just evolution) is simply a matter of opinion, or one of many possible explanations, and all are equally valid. Under such conditions, it should not be surprising that students would do poorly on science exams. This tendency also influences teachers and is one reason why so few teach evolution well (if at all).