Evolution is a fucking fact. Trying to put it on the same level as unsubstantiated nonsense is deliberately crippling the next generation, intellectually.

As an educator, I can tell you that the pressure brought to bear on the district and principals, and then passed down to teachers, by the parents and communities with an evangelical fire hotter than their mythical hell DOES result in schools backing down and placating...over and over.

I can say that I know science teachers who reassure parents and their students that evolution is "just a theory." In the realm of science, a theory is an idea that is so strongly supported by data and prediction that it might as well be called a fact. But in common conversation among non-scientists, “theory” means almost the opposite. To the non-scientist, calling something a theory means you don’t have enough data to confirm it. This contradiction opens the door to repeated rejection of the science, and is often not clarified by science teachers under pressure from battle-weary principals and districts to cover their asses.

In my own classes, our state standards require that the history of Judaism and "the rise of Islam" be taught. Parents don't mind me teaching the history of Judaism as presented in adopted text books, although they do expect it to align with the old testament. When it comes to the "rise of Islam?" They rise up in a typhoon of outrage, sending wave after wave after wave of attacks at me, the principal, and the school district, despite our ability to point out the actual content standards required by the state.

Of course, the further down the corporate deform path we've gone with high stakes testing, the more the pressure to teach no Social Studies at all, since it's not tested. So, when I'm furtively trying to sneak in some history and government under the cover of "reading instruction," while wildly hoping one of those random, unscheduled walk in observations doesn't happen that day, we can't get to very much anyway.