 "Photo: Mike Paschal/The Daily Texan")
As the Texas State Board of Education election draws near, UT mathematics professor Lorenzo Sadun announced his intention to run for the Place 10 seat against incumbent Republican Cynthia Dunbar.
In the 2006 election, there was no Democratic nominee. Dunbar ran against a Libertarian and won approximately 70 percent of the vote. The 2010 primary election is scheduled for March, and Sadun declared last week that he will seek the Democratic nomination.
The Place 10 seat-holder may become very influential. With the board almost evenly split, a negative or positive vote can greatly affect educational policy and standards.
If Sadun is elected, he will be the only scientist on the board. He said that even though he may encounter opposition from members of the board, he will find a common ground with his colleagues and will pursue agreement without sacrificing the quality of education for Texas students.
“Despite my taking a fairly hard line, I am a conciliator,” Sadun said. “I have not met a person who knew so much I couldn’t teach them something, and I’ve never met someone who knew so little that they couldn’t teach me something.”
In recent years, Dunbar has fueled much controversy with her views on the teaching of evolution and the constitutionality of public education. Sadun said Dunbar votes along with six other conservative board members and has affected the quality of public education in the state.
“The problem with the state board is simply that it’s not addressing questions of serious education,” Sadun said. “The religious conservative bloc of seven really consider their job one of fighting the cultural wars, and education is an afterthought.”
The theory of evolution has been a topic of heated debate among board members since 2003, and it has brought forth multiple testimonies and letters by professors across the state, including Sadun.
Sahotra Sarkar, UT integrative biology and philosophy professor, said the board has become too political.
“People are voting along party lines. The board is primarily Republican and they vote as a bloc,” Sarkar said. “This didn’t happen in 2003, which is why the board adopted some reasonable things back then. That’s what has been lost.”
The board has allowed politics and philosophy to influence its decisions regarding science textbooks. The theory of evolution was contested by conservative board members who insisted that the theory of intelligent design, or creationism, be taught alongside the theory of evolution.
“Intelligent design is fake science,” Sadun said. “It is a religious belief about the creation of the earth and humanity, dressed up in the language of science.”
Retired UT pharmacy senior lecturer Joanne Richards said intelligent design can be taught, but not within science, he said.
“Intelligent design is a philosophical view of how the earth was created,” Richards said “It belongs in a philosophy class, not a science class.”
As a result of votes being cast along ideological lines, standards have been manipulated according to the will of a conservative opinion, Sadun said.
Sadun said not only has the board voted against the theory of evolution, but they have adjusted statewide standards through the use of panel experts they hired. Controversy arose with a draft of the standards of English and language arts. Sadun said the board hired a team of experts that worked more than three years, but the religious conservatives disagreed with the standards and made a new draft overnight.
“The draft they put through did not have any standards for reading comprehension,” Sadun said. “This is an example of how they did things in a really sloppy way. They said, ‘Look, we don’t like the draft, we’ll just slap something together and that’s the way things should go.’ They don’t trust practitioners for what the modern state of a subject is.”
Richards proposed that board members be elected according to their positions on the issues affecting education across the state.
“[Educators] wish that board members are not elected according to a party,” Richards said. “We would like to see a non-partisan election. Platforms, not party, affiliation.”
