A Failure to Communicate

Several pages of amendments showed up. Several SBOE members asked for the TEA to prepare a summary of suggestions from the public comments that were made on the TEKS. McLeroy and some of the others are outraged.

"We obviously have a failure to communicate" - quote by Pat Hardy

Hardy says the SBOE should take responsibility for how the process of the science TEKS review is broken, and is also calling out the scientists.

She is half right: the process is broken. The SBOE is a mess. But the scientists, the expert writing groups and professional societies made excellent recommendations for clear, concise language for science TEKS. The SBOE members screwed it all up!

This is not exclusively the fault of the 7 Young-Earth Creationists on the SBOE; the other 8 members refused to pay attention to any advice given them by the science community. They failed to understand the implications of voting for the amendments proposed by the creationists. This idea that you have to "go along to get along" may work for politicians, but it has no place whatsoever in science.

Pat Hardy, like many of the others who voted for this last amendment, utterly failed to communicate. We spoke directly to them face-to-face and laid out in plain English what the boundary between good science and crap is. They didn't listen.

The scientists were consistent from the beginning. We only asked for them to pay attention when il-informed amendments were made to an excellent set of science standards.

As to these 8 pages of amendments: these are mostly small changes in wording and clarifications, but this work should have been done months ago. These comments should have been given to the working groups when the TEKS were being written.