Last year, we wrote a report  on the Texas Board of Education’s controversial overhaul of the state’s history curriculum standards, in which the board conveniently reshaped the United States history schools taught to better reflect right-wing political talking points. Now, as the Texas Freedom Network has been tracking, the state’s school board seems to be gearing up for a right-wing overhaul of the science curriculum. Texas Board of Education Chairwoman Gail Lowe is busy lining up a panel of anti-evolution activists to review the state’s science curriculum this spring…and her track record on these issues doesn’t bode well for the scientific education of Texas children:

For example, when the state board was considering new science curriculum standards in 2008-09, Lowe appointed one of three anti-evolution activists to a special advisory panel. Her appointee, Baylor University chemistry professor Charles Garner, had signed on to an anti-evolution petition from the creationist Discovery Institute. Garner and the other two anti-evolution advisers urged the state board to adopt standards that would open the door to creationist/”intelligent design” arguments in public school science classrooms. The board ultimately did just that, essentially ignoring hundreds of respected scientists and scholars — including Nobel laureates — from Texas institutions of higher education, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science who practically begged board members not to dumb down science education in Texas.

Lowe has also said on voter guides that she “strongly favors” teaching “intelligent design” (creationism) alongside evolution and creationist-claimed “weaknesses” of evolution in science classrooms. In 2003 she and three other State Board of Education members opposed the adoption of proposed new biology textbooks because the textbooks didn’t include those so-called “weaknesses” of evolution.

Lowe’s hostility to evidence-based information extends also into sex education. Texas has one of the highest teen birthrates in the nation even though more than 90 percent of Texas school districts teach abstinence-only in health classes. Yet Lowe voted for new health textbooks that don’t include a shred of medically accurate information on condoms and other forms of contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted infections. (One textbook Lowe voted to approve instead suggested that a strategy for avoiding STDs is to “get plenty of rest” so that you make better decisions. Seriously.)

Texas’s school board is infamous for micromanaging right-wing curriculum standards that in turn shape textbooks that are marketed to schools across the country…but this year, it’s not the only state in the game. Mother Jones last week counted seven states with some sort of creationism law in the works, either requiring or allowing teachers to question the science of evolution and bring creationism into the classroom.