Barbara Reger says she believes that God created the Earth, animals, plants and, of course, woman and man, and she tells children that some scientists insist nature shows the mark of a higher power's design.
This might not be worth noting but for the fact that Reger teaches biology in a public school. She is also head of the science department in a middle school in Indianapolis, one of the quiet proponents of intelligent design and creationism -- whose numbers science education experts call "troubling" and surprising -- among the ranks of public school teachers.
These challengers of evolution don't have to push the state legislature to revise education standards or run for the school board. They're inside, right there in the classroom.
"There's a consistent, a significant number of biology teachers in public schools who are creationists," says Randy Moore, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota who has written extensively on what might be called the "closet creationism" in public schools. "Despite decades of science education reform, these numbers have remained pretty consistent."
The great majority of science teachers accept and teach evolutionary theory, but in a national survey this year, one-third of teachers said that they have faced pressure to marginalize the subject, chiefly from parents and students, and that they often do so to avoid conflicts.
At least 10 statewide studies into these issues have been published since 1999. In six of them, public school biology teachers endorsed teaching creationism in some form alongside evolutionary theory in numbers ranging from nearly 20 percent in Minnesota to nearly half in some Kansas schools and more than two-thirds in Kentucky.
In two states, 40 percent of biology teachers say they allow little or no class time for evolutionary theory, a fundamental part of modern biology. In five states, nearly one in five teachers do not accept the scientific validity of evolutionary theory. In Texas, Louisiana and Minnesota, more than one in five teachers say they accept the scientific validity of creationism -- rejecting common ancestry of living things and accepting the involvement of a supernatural force in the development of life on Earth.
A Maryland education official said she knew of no such teacher surveys here.
