A recent survey of 926 public high school biology teachers revealed that:

1. Only 28% consistently follow National Research Council recommendations to teach evolution as the unifying theme of biology.
2. 13% explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design.
3. Most teachers, called "the cautious 60%," said they are "neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives."

Randy Moore, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, wasn't surprised by the survey findings. "These kinds of data have been reported regionally, and in some cases nationally, for decades. Creationists are in the classroom, and it's not just the South," he said. "At least 25% of high school teachers in Minnesota explicitly teach creationism."

Study authors Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer wrote, somewhat dramatically, that "Considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America's classrooms." It is notable that both men are professors of political science at Penn State, not biologists or chemists or physicists. In other words they are social scientists. They do not dispassionately employ the scientific method in their own work; rather they interpret data based upon their own worldview, much like the teachers they criticize.

Plutzer said he thinks that the "cautious 60%" represents a group of teachers who, if they were better trained in science and evolution, would gain the confidence to teach evolution to students and defend it to parents and school board members.

But Moore doesn't believe more education would change things much. "These courses aren't reaching the creationists," he said. "They already know what evolution is. They were biology majors, or former biology students. They just reject what we told them."

Frustrated by this failure of teachers to toe the atheistic line, some scientists and educators are pressing to make evolution the lynchpin of biology lesson plans from kindergarten through high school. The official rationale is that starting early will build a foundation for more difficult concepts in later grades. Presumably at least one unspoken motivation is the assumption that promoting evolution to children early and often makes it less likely that they will reject it later in favor of creationism. (New York Times, 2-7-11; HechingerReport.org, 2-7-11; ScienceDaily.com, 1-28-11)