Dover Teachers Want No Part of Intelligent-Design Statement
Jeffrey Mervis

A Pennsylvania school board has added "intelligent design" to its curriculum while simultaneously barring discussion of the origin of life
DOVER, PENNSYLVANIA--Jennifer Miller always wanted to be a teacher. And after "loving molecular biology" during a high school class, she decided to teach the subject at that level. For 12 years she's shared her passion with students at Dover High School, part of the 3600-student Dover area school district here in southeastern Pennsylvania. But last week she did the unthinkable: She walked out on her three ninth-grade biology classes.
Miller wasn't abandoning her students. Rather, she was standing up for her professional principles. The local school board had ordered her and seven colleagues to read to their biology classes a statement that attacks the theory of evolution and promotes intelligent design--the idea that the complexity of life requires action by an intelligent agent--as an alternative explanation for the origin of life. The statement also bars scientific discussion in the classroom of the origin of life, consigning that topic "to individual students and their families."

The board's statement (www.dover.k12.pa.us/doversd/site/default.asp) officially puts intelligent design into a U.S. public school curriculum for the first time. And that step has united the science faculty at Dover High School. "Intelligent design is not science. It is not biology. It is not an accepted scientific theory," the teachers wrote in a 6 January letter to Dover School Superintendent Richard Nilsen, requesting that they be excused from delivering the missive. Reading the four-paragraph statement, they argued, would force them to "knowingly and intentionally misrepresent subject matter or curriculum."

Nilsen acquiesced. So last week he and Assistant Superintendent Michael Baksa visited all nine ninth-grade biology classes to read the statement--without taking any questions afterward. Their arrival was the signal for Miller and a few of her students to leave.

Opposition to the teaching of evolution has roiled U.S. public schools for more than a century. But after the Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that teaching creationism constitutes an illegal dose of religion in the classroom, opponents began looking for a scientific anchor for their beliefs. Dover represents the latest wrinkle: The attempt to denigrate Darwin's insight--and the overwhelming evidence for it--posits it as simply one in an array of equally valid hypotheses about how life evolved on the planet. Last week a Georgia school district appealed a federal judge's ruling banning textbook stickers labeling evolution as "a theory rather than a fact." The judge said the stickers reflected the school board's affinity for "religiously motivated individuals" (Science, 21 January, p. 334). And on 14 December, a group of Dover-area parents asked a U.S. District Court to declare the school board's statement unconstitutional. A trial is scheduled for September.

By design. Ninth graders at Dover High School heard Superintendent Richard Nilsen (right) read a statement on intelligent design in their biology classes.
CREDITS: PAUL KUEHNEL/YORK DAILY RECORD/SUNDAY NEWS

In the meantime, the issue hangs over the staff at Dover High like a cloud. "It's gotten to the point where I don't even want to go shopping because I might be accosted," says Bertha Spahr, a chemistry teacher who came to the school in 1965 and who chairs the science department. Miller and Robert Eshbach, a third-year environmental sciences teacher, have become media minicelebrities, appearing on ABC's World News Tonight and the BBC as well as in the pages of The New York Times. "We could do three or four [interviews] a day, if we wanted," says Miller.
The Dover controversy began more than a year ago, when the district's current high school biology textbook came up for a routine, 7-year review by the school board. School board members quizzed the teachers and later publicly expressed their displeasure with the way the textbook handled evolution. Although the board eventually adopted the latest edition, it also accepted an anonymous donation to the school library of 50-plus copies of the 1987 book Of Pandas and People, which makes the case for intelligent design. On 19 November the board approved the statement that triggered the suit and led to Miller's walkout.

Ironically, evolution occupies only a tiny part of ninth-grade biology at Dover High. Miller and the other two introductory biology teachers will spend at most three 90-minute classes on the topic--the last unit of the year before final exams--even though state curriculum guides say the unit should run for 19 days. "I'll teach competition," says Miller. "We'll talk about how more things are produced than survive. I'll teach the evidence for Darwin's theory [on the origin of species] and talk about his trip to the Galápagos. I'll cover natural and artificial selection. And we'll do reproductive evolution." But that's it. "We don't mention evolution anywhere else in the course." Miller says she prefers to concentrate on the present, "and how things that are here are still evolving."

Contrary to the claims of intelligent-design advocates, the board's directive will narrow rather than broaden the scope of the course. "In the past, we could talk about the origins of life," says Miller. "At least I could ask them what they might have heard [as criticism of Darwin], and we could discuss it. But now the school board has ruled that out."

As they begin the new semester, Dover teachers are hoping for at least a respite from the hoopla. The May primary features seven (of nine) school board seats, but they won't be filled until the general election in November. That means the controversy is likely to reignite in early June, when the next batch of students begins their brief study of evolution.