A major investigation out of our sister paper the Orlando Sentinel finds that a few private Christian schools in Florida are teaching that dinosaurs and people co-existed.
For the record, dinosaurs died out about 66 million years ago, and the Homo Sapiens species is less than a million years old.
This is problematic in any case, but may be more so given that your money is partially paying for it. The state of Florida has two voucher programs — one for kids with disabilities and one for kids from low-income families — that can place children in private schools using public money.
In the case of the disabled, Florida uses direct taxpayer dollars to pay for private school vouchers. With poor children, corporations can donate to a voucher fund and then write that amount off their corporate taxes. Even though that doesn’t mean direct payment of taxpayer money, the revenue the state would have received from corporate taxes — more than half a billion dollars in the 2016-17 school year according to the state Department of Education — has to be made up for with your money.
An important caveat — schools that teach falsehoods in science classes, such as the co-existence of humans and dinosaurs or the non-existence of evolution, must be the exception, not the norm. A 2017 study by the Urban Institute found that low-income children who participate in Florida’s voucher program are more likely to enroll in and graduate from college than their low-income public school counterparts.
Should private schools in Florida be held to more rigorous academic standards in general? Should schools that accept public money be held accountable with more oversight and academic requirements
http://www.sun-sentinel.com...
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Among the materials are an alternative version of the civil rights movement in which “most black and white southerners had long lived together in harmony” until “power-hungry individuals stirred up the people.”
In science books, evolution is derided and students are told that Noah likely brought baby dinosaurs aboard his ark during the Biblical flood.
“Students who have learned science in this kind of environment are not prepared for college experiences,” a biology teacher from the University of Central Florida told the Sentinel after reviewing the books. “They would be intellectually disadvantaged.”
Also troublingly, the “teachers” at many of these schools don’t have college degrees and simply hand the children workbooks to fill out.
https://www.rawstory.com/20...
http://www.orlandosentinel....
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