Education Commissioner Henry Mack pushed back Tuesday against criticism that Florida is de-emphasizing evolution in its new plan for teaching science, insisting the state is still covering a subject he agreed was a bedrock of biological science.
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“Evolutionary biology and the theory of evolution is in the standards,” Mack said.
But several parents and teachers who attended an evening forum on the state’s proposed science standards criticized the proposal by the Florida Department of Education, which Mack runs, specifically the handling of evolutionary science.
Joshua Garrett, a teacher in Orange County Public Schools, said the state’s proposed standards “danced around” evolution.
State standards are benchmarks for what students should learn in their classes kindergarten through 12th grade, guiding what lessons are taught, what subjects are in state-approved textbooks and what concepts are tested on state exams.
Florida’s current science standards call evolution a “big idea” and the “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.”
The proposed ones barely mention evolution — a scientific theory explaining change in living species over time from natural selection that has been a cornerstone of biology for more than a century. The term “evolution,” in fact, is never defined in the new high school life sciences standards, though the concepts are sprinkled across several units.
The education department has made revisions to its proposal, officials said, but it was not immediately clear at the Tuesday forum, held at Lake Buena Vista High School in southwest Orange County, what those changes were.
Mack interjected during Garrett’s comments asking him where specifically he wanted the state to mention evolution more prominently. Then he said, “Consider it done.”
Mack also asked Garrett to join the state’s faculty committee on the standards.
The state released the new standards in September, and several experts quickly criticized them, saying they lacked depth and skirted around both evolution and climate change, important topics for Florida students to learn.
The state has since hosted a “listening tour,” including a virtual forum and two other in-person meetings in Walton and Hillsborough counties.
Mack described the state’s public forums as a chance for “myth busting” and to make clear Florida’s position.
He wants to students to learn “above ideology,” he said, and added that evolution isn’t settled science.
“I want to cultivate skeptics in the healthy sense of that term. As a result of these standards, students should not be walking away convinced of anything other than the rigor of the scientific method,” Mack said.
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The new standards would replace the current set, adopted after a months-long, statewide fight over the inclusion of evolution as a required subject of study. Those who opposed the 2008 standards argued creationism, or the biblical story that God created all living things, should be taught alongside evolution.
Thomas Simon, a Winter Park parent, compared Florida adopting the new standards to Nazi Germany ignoring the findings of Jewish scientists — which in part lost them World War II.
“If this board could explicitly name communism in the history standards last year — because words matter — you must explicitly name the foundations of modern medicine, agriculture, and energy,” Simon said.
Florida last year adopted new standards that require students learn about the “dangers and evil of communism.”
Teri O’Connor, an elementary science teacher in Orange County, urged Mack to curtail the total number of standards, as they list more than 1,000 benchmarks teachers are to cover during their classes.
“It’s only 180 days of school. That right there is an issue, especially if you want to dive in. If we need to teach the rigor of it and to critically think about each one, that’s difficult,” she said.
State education officials said they’d received about 1,800 comments on the benchmarks, and they have updated them based on that criticism.
With Tuesday the state’s final scheduled public forum, Mack said his biggest takeaway was that the standards needed to be more explicit about teaching students how to evaluate scientific studies and evidence and how to understand the scientific method.
“We might have to do a better job of helping students question more as a result of these standards,” he said.
In his original statement when the standards were announced in September, Mack wrote in a social media post that “science begins in wonder, not in ideology,” and “the classical tradition taught that nature is intelligible because it is ordered — that the book of creation can be read by reason.”
Some read that to mean he was trying to interject religion into public school education.
But soon after, Mack took to social media to insist he was not “smuggling a Sunday-school lesson into Biology,” adding in his post on X that, “I am not advocating religious influence in the standards. I am opposing the opposite error: treating nature as a prop for adult ideology, or treating wonder as something to be talked out of children by leftist zealots.”
The State Board of Education, which has final say, is set to vote on the new standards in December.
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