The National Journal article The Next Plan to Get Climate Denial Into Textbooks reads like a Texas-bashing manifesto from progressive education interests. Their target was a Lone Star watchdog group Truth in Texas Textbooks, a coalition of volunteer researchers, scholars, a curriculum accuracy expert and citizens-at-large who took on the politically correct Fed Led education agenda during the 2014 Texas Social Studies textbook adoption process.
Breitbart Texas reported on how the independent voluntary review team found factual errors, historical omissions and progressive bias in the same Social Studies materials that Texas Freedom Network paid liberal professors to uncover conservative bias, which included the amusing allegation that Texas public education was teaching that Moses, the Hebrew lawgiver, was an American Founding Father.
A resulting 89 new Social Studies state standard aligned textbooks were adopted this November and they will enter classrooms in the 2015-16 school year. However, the National Journal isolated the miniscule role climate change played in the Social Studies adoption process.
Not a surprise. National Journal, a Gates Foundation supported shill, was impelled to call out the Texas Social Studies textbook adoption process weeks after its conclusion, zeroing in on Truth in Texas Textbooks as the source of their ideological angst.
National Journal decried Truth in Texas Textbooks as an “organization of more than 100 activists that wants global warming to be taught as an opinion rather than fact.”
Breitbart Texas spoke to Truth in Texas Textbooks founder Lt. Col. Roy White (Ret.) who said, “(We) supported the idea that all sides of climate change and global warming be addressed. “Presenting a single side of an argument disallows any opportunity in a classroom for debate.”
Apparently, in the Gates’ funded climate change journalistic embrace there is no room for debate, only a brave new world of foundation funded education journalism where truth is elusive.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds the Common Core State/College and Career Readiness (C4) Standards and bequeaths grants to those educational institutions that support the climate-change agenda through Next Generation Science Standards.
They are not alone. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Gates and other progressives like the Lumina Foundation fund journalism outlets to further their education agendas.
Case in point: NBC, which ends its education reporting with the disclosure “Education coverage for NBCNews.com is supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”
“Financing journalism is among the many strategies that both the Gates and Lumina foundations use to keep their goals on the national agenda,” the Chronicle of Higher Education article highlighted. They admitted Gates funded two of their own websites.
They also reported that from 2006 through 2011 “Gates gave $5.4-million in media-related grants to support coverage that included higher education (in addition to grants specifically for elementary- and secondary-education reporting). Among those grants: Some $1.1-million to NBC Universal for a national meeting of “thought leaders” as part of the network’s Education Nation programming, and more than $1.4-million to the Education Writers Association to offer training and resources for journalists.”
The Gates Foundation underwrote National Journal’s July 10, 2013 “summit” on the New Knowledge Economy, also according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The pro-College-and-Career-Ready Lumina Foundation casts an even wider carbon footprint over influencing public opinion largely through liberal mainstream journalism. The higher education chronicle highlighted that Lumina has doled out $3.1-million, in grants to media organizations including $1-million to American Public Media Group to cover “the kind of education Americans will need for the 21st century,” $600,000 to the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, and $1.39-million to Washington Monthly Corporation.
National Journal claimed that Truth in Texas Textbooks was planning to target climate change sciences and issue textbook ratings for the sole purposes of teaching the “climate-change ‘controversy'”.
Actually, Truth in Texas Textbooks formed “for the single purpose of improving factual accuracy of social studies textbooks for the 5 million children of Texas who will use these (Social Studies) textbooks beginning in the 2015-16 school year, according to their website.”
Climate change was a relevant topic during the 2013 science textbook adoption process. Despite Texas Freedom Network president Kathy Miller’s accusations that the oil and gas industry was attempting to hijack the science books, even the Huffington Post reported that the Texas State Board of Education adopted the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt environmental science book.
Also, Texas public schools use the popular online learning tool BrainPOP “which isn’t just pro-climate change, it’s pro-man-made climate change,” a Texas teacher, who asked to remain anonymous, told Breitbart Texas.
Still, climate change ideologues like the National Journal spew that teaching a “controversy” in climate science is equivalent to “public opinion” and they claim that climate scientists nearly “universally believe” that there is a connection between human activity and an assumptive change in global climate.
It has been almost a decade since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth promoted the notion of global warming later rebranded as climate change. Yet, for all the environmental climate literacy foisted onto K-12 classrooms, it continues to be shrouded in factual controversy.
In 2012, the Wall Street Journal printed an open letter from 16 respected scientists who disputed global warming.
The letter stated: “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 ‘Climategate’ email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, who wrote that ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.'”
According to the letter, the earth’s warming was only happening if “one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.”
Not only did the Wall Street Journal letter call out how “those promoting alarm” shifted from planetary warming to climate changing “weather extremes to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2,” they punctuated the unfounded hysteria with the fact that “CO2 is not a pollutant.”
Still, climate change mania in the United States has influenced public school science standards.
Breitbart London reported that the United Nations polled the world and it didn’t hold a high priority on climate change. In fact, it came in dead last as an international concern.
Furthermore, Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman called climate change “a lie.” Breitbart News reported that he called the man-made climate change theories no longer credible. No rising temperatures. The ice caps are not melting away.
“Polar Bears are increasing in number,” Coleman said noting there has been no evidence of this manufactured warming in over 18 years.
Last year, China translated the Heartland Institute’s 2009 Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data concerning the “veracity of anthropogenic climate change” Breitbart News also reported.
The 2009 documentary Not Evil Just Wrong roasted global warming alarmists and profiteers.
Even Wikipedia hosts a laundry list of respected scientists who doubt climate change but in Big Education, it boils down to a political agenda filled with fuzzy science taught as fact in the classroom.
Breitbart Texas spoke with MerryLynn Gerstenschlager, Vice President and Education Liaison for Texas Eagle Forum, who currently is in Peru speaking at the United Nations Lima Climate Change Conference.
During the last week of the Texas Social Studies adoption process, Gerstenschlager implored the State Board of Education to “teach our children both sides of the debate and not just one side of the debate as fact.”
Gerstenschlager told Breitbart Texas from Lima, “When we were rewriting the science (standards) TEKS several years ago, conservatives wanted to continue to teach both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories as we had done in Texas for several years. However, the liberals would have none of it, and, as a result, we discontinued teaching the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories in Texas.”
Gerstenschlager’s argument in her 2013 science textbook public comments was that, sometimes, scientists are wrong.
She said, “Copernicus, who is considered to be the founder of modern astronomy, discovered that sun is at the center of the universe. He basically took astronomy from a system, where we wanted to believe certain things, to a system where we could prove that certain things were true. Today, the global warming alarmists are using computer models to prove what they believe, rather than, like Copernicus, can prove that certain things are true.”
She added, “In Texas, our school children should either be taught only those things that can be proved to be true or taught both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories.”
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