The DI reads much into this statement from the Dept. of Education:

The U.S. Department of Education has given its clear support to the right of state and local school boards to teach the scientific debate that now exists about biological evolution.


In a March 8 letter signed by Acting Deputy Secretary Gene Hickok, the department called official attention to Congressional report language in the No Child Left Behind Act that states that “where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist.” The Department further expressed its own support for the “general principles...of academic freedom and inquiry into scientific views or theories."

The article is yet another PR piece from the Discovery Institute blindly passed off as “news”, and consists mostly of the usual DI hacks gloating, declaring that “states and local school boards have the right to teach students the scientific controversy that exists about Darwinian evolution and to determine their own science curriculum content."

This ‘controversy’ is an invention. There is no scientific controversy over the general facts of evolution, as they are presented at the level of public schools and introductory level college classes. We could haggle over some of the fine details, but the basic ideas of common descent, mechanism of natural selection, and the general history of life on earth are not in contention. I’m not surprised that the Discovery Institute wants to pretend that they are...but the US Dept. of Education? Hickock may well be a creationist lurking at the highest levels for all I know, but the wording of that statement is rather ambiguous.