[RSCT] Schools foster climate illiteracy

[BBPDX at aol.com]

Dear Rethinking Schools friends,

This past Sunday, Portland's daily newspaper, The Oregonian, published my 
article, "Schools Foster Climate Illiteracy," below, about the inaccuracies, 
distortions, and omissions in high school textbooks' treatment of global 
warming. The entire letters section in yesterday's Oregonian was devoted to the 
issue. The texts I look at are McDougal Littell's MODERN WORLD HISTORY, and 
Pearson/Prentice Hall's PHYSICAL SCIENCE: CONCEPTS IN ACTION.

(The letters can be found at: 
http://blog.oregonlive.com/myoregon/2009/07/letters_claim_of_climate_illit.html#more)

I encourage Rethinking Schools readers to research how your school 
districts are dealing with climate change. What texts are used? How adequate are 
these? Are there teacher- or district-developed alternatives? Please post your 
results to the RSCT listserv. Given the urgency of the issue, now is the 
time for us to argue for a process of collaborative curriculum development by 
teachers, scientists, and environmental justice activists to address the gaps 
and distortions in the standardized text materials. 

As we mention in our special summer issue of Rethinking Schools, "Teaching 
for Environmental Justice," these are themes that we plan to continue to 
cover in the magazine, so if you have writing ideas, please let me know.

Best,

Bill Bigelow
bbpdx at aol.com
Curriculum Editor
Rethinking Schools
www.rethinkingschools.org


Schools Foster Climate Illiteracy
By Bill Bigelow
Sunday, July 19, 2009
The Oregonian
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/07/schools_foster_climate_i
lliter.html


While visiting Portland recently, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray 
LaHood proclaimed that "Portland is the green capital of our country." Well, 
maybe when it comes to streetcars and light rail, but not when it comes to the 
public school curriculum.

Today's most pressing environmental issue is climate change. James Hansen, 
chief climatologist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 
warns of "a potential for explosive changes with effects that would be 
irreversible -- if we do not rapidly slow fossil fuel emissions over the next few 
decades." Climate change, noted environmental writer/activist Bill McKibben 
declares, is "the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans 
have ever faced."

And yet the textbooks used in the Portland area -- texts that are playing a 
larger and larger role in the curriculum -- adopt a Rush Limbaugh-like 
skepticism toward global warming.

In Oregon, high school students take only one required class devoted to the 
state of the world: Global Studies. The textbook for this course in many 
area school districts -- Portland, Beaverton, Reynolds, Tigard-Tualatin, 
Sherwood, among others -- is "Modern World History," published by McDougal 
Littell, a subsidiary of the giant Houghton Mifflin. "Modern World History" buries 
its discussion of climate change on Page 679. The second of its puny three 
paragraphs devoted to the issue begins, "Not all scientists agree with the 
theory of the greenhouse effect."

This is simply false.

French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier discovered the 
"greenhouse effect" in 1824, and today no scientist disagrees with it. The textbook 
writers likely intended to say that not all scientists agree with the theory 
that the climate is changing as a result of human-created greenhouse gases. 
But even if we forgive the book's sloppy scholarship, why are Portland-area 
schools endorsing material that calls into question the human role in global 
warming?

The rest of the book's three paragraphs is little better. Acknowledging 
that the Earth's climate is "slowly warming," the Global Studies textbook tells 
students that, "To combat this problem, the industrialized nations have 
called for limits on the release of greenhouse gases. In the past, developed 
nations were the worst polluters." They still are. Per capita greenhouse gas 
emissions of the wealthy nations far exceed the emissions of any of the 
so-called developing countries. Instead, the textbook turns poor countries into 
eco-villains: "So far, developing countries have resisted strict limits."

Remember, this is not one of those tattered textbooks of yesteryear. This 
book is copyright 2007 and was adopted by Portland during Vicki Phillips' 
tenure as superintendent. (Portland purchased these books for all high schools, 
whether or not teachers wanted them.)

And it's not only social studies texts that adopt a ho-hum attitude about 
global warming. In the widely used Pearson/Prentice Hall textbook "Physical 
Science: Concepts in Action," high school students don't meet the concept of 
climate change until Page 782. The few paragraphs on the human causes of 
climate change are littered with doubt. The section begins: "Human activities 
may also change climate over time." May? And then in boldface as the key to 
the section: "One possible climate change is caused by the addition of carbon 
dioxide and certain other gases into the atmosphere."

Possible climate change? The text is thick with a mealy language of 
"might," "could" and "may": "Carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles, power 
plants, and other sources may contribute to global warming."


Last year, NASA's Hansen said the CEOs of large fossil fuel companies 
should be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature for spreading 
disinformation about climate change. Hansen said these distortions would end 
up in school textbooks. He could pay a visit to schools in the USA's 
supposed "green capital" to find evidence for his indictment.

What makes all this even more troubling is that increasingly school 
districts regard the textbooks not as curricular supplements but as the curriculum 
itself. In fact, after about 25 years as Global Studies, Portland 
administrators renamed the course Modern World History, adopting the exact name of the 
McDougal Littell textbook. And Portland Public Schools' Office of Teaching 
and Learning has announced the development of uniform course guides built 
around the textbooks, along with assessments to make sure that teachers toe 
the line.

Recently, I met with Portland's high school social studies specialist Rick 
La Greide to talk about what students should learn in Global Studies/Modern 
World History. La Greide showed me the list of "eligible content" for the 
course assessments -- i.e., material that might end up on districtwide tests 
for students. It's a laundry list that includes Social Development, 
Nationalism, the Industrial Revolution, the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the Mexican 
Revolution of 1911-17, World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, Nazism, 
the Holocaust, Japanese Expansion and Indigenous Populations, among other 
topics. Although the list includes a broad category called Physical 
Environment, there is no mention of arguably the most pressing issue of our time: 
global warming.

Because the school district plans to build a common teaching guide and "set 
of assessments" around this content, it will encourage a wide and shallow 
curriculum, one that seems designed to keep students away from urgent 
environmental concerns.

Fortunately, many teachers and schools have not waited for official 
approval to teach about climate issues. For example, last April, Sunnyside 
Environmental School, a public school in Southeast Portland, held a weeklong, 
schoolwide teach-in for its middle school students that featured speakers, 
discussions, a writing contest and a field trip to the Bagdad Theatre to watch the 
PBS "Nova" film "Extreme Ice."
And teachers at Franklin and Lincoln high schools, as well as LEP High 
(Leadership & Entrepreneurship) and Trillium charter schools have also taught 
innovative curriculum on the implications of our warming planet -- 
highlighting the stark inequality that those who are most immediately at risk from 
climate change are the least responsible for its causes.

But this important teaching takes place in spite of, not aided by, school 
district leaders. How can this change? Individual teachers will continue to 
create imaginative and relevant curriculum in their own classrooms, but 
teachers alone cannot transform the curriculum. This will require parents and 
activists demanding that children encounter lessons on today's environmental 
challenges -- especially climate change -- that go well beyond the biased and 
simple-minded descriptions in district-adopted textbooks. And while we're at 
it, let's find alternatives to these Exxon-friendly materials.

We can't count on multinational curriculum corporations like Houghton 
Mifflin to provide educators with cutting-edge resources about issues that 
matter. School districts need to abandon the top-down, textbook-as-truth model of 
curriculum development in favor of creative grass-roots efforts like those 
piloted at Sunnyside Environmental School. As the bumper sticker says: Think 
Globally, Act Locally.
The climate activists of tomorrow are in school today. If Portland is, in 
fact, to become the green capital of the country, all of us need to pay more 
attention to what's going on in our classrooms.

Bill Bigelow began teaching high school social studies in Portland in 1978. 
He is the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and can be 
reached at bbpdx at aol.com.


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