Fears about kids learning evolution aren’t limited to the Bible Belt. The WestonForum.com, a website for the community of Weston, Connecticut, reports that a local intermediate-school teacher, Mark Tangarone, has prematurely retired after a flap about evolution:
Mr. Tangarone, a 17-year veteran of the Weston school system, claims that a program he wanted to teach about Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln was rejected by the school administration because it involved teaching evolution — the scientific theory that all life is related and has descended from a common ancestor.
“I find it hard to believe that in this day and age that a teacher such as myself can be ordered to eliminate the teaching of Darwin’s work and the theory of evolution,” he said.
The school superintendent denies that Tangarone’s resignation is about evolution, maintains that it’s a “personal matter,” and characterizes Tangarone as a “disgruntled employee.” Tangarone, however, has emails from the school principal that suggest a different story:
In 2008, Mr. Tangarone created a TAG program called “AustralAsia” to celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, who were born on the same day in the same year.
Part of the program involved Darwin’s journey to Australia and Asia, where he discovered natural anomalies such as seashells on mountaintops. Mr. Tangarone said he also planned for a discussion with the students about Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Before implementing the program, Mr. Tangarone submitted an outline to Mark Ribbens, then principal of the intermediate school, for review and approval. (Dr. Ribbens left the school district in 2009.)
In an e-mail to Mr. Tangarone dated Sept. 8, 2008, Dr. Ribbens rejected the basic program, citing for the most part, the teaching of evolution:
“While evolution is a robust scientific theory, it is a philosophically unsatisfactory explanation for the diversity of life. I could anticipate that a number of our parents might object to this topic as part of a TAG project, and further, parents who would object if evolution was part of a presentation by a student to students who do not participate in the TAG program.”
He further stated, “Evolution touches on a core belief — Do we share common ancestry with other living organisms? What does it mean to be a human being? I don’t believe that this core belief is one in which you want to debate with children or their parents, and I know personally that I would be challenged in leading a 10-year-old through this sort of discussion while maintaining the appropriate sensitivity to a family’s religious beliefs or traditions.”
In conclusion, Dr. Ribbens said, “In short, evolution is a topic that is not age appropriate, is not part of our existing curriculum, is not part of the state frameworks at this point in a student’s education, nor a topic in which you have particular expertise. For all of these reasons, the TAG topics need to be altered this year to eliminate the teaching of Darwin’s work and the theory of evolution.”
The students at issue are from the third, fourth, and fifth grade. And Tangerone “is certified to teach science and social studies for grades K-6. He also has a six-year degree in gifted education.” The website also reports that “Mr. Tangarone has taught for 33 years, 29 in gifted programs. He has won awards and fellowships for his TAG programs.”
What a loss to the kids and to the school!
Over at Newsweek’s “The Human Condition”, Mary Carmichael dissects the situation (see also her earlier piece on the value of teaching evolution to younger kids), taking issue with the notion of Tangerone as a disgruntled employee:
You know what? I’d be disgruntled, too, if my supervisor told me he was scared to offend people by suggesting that we “share common ancestry with other living organisms”—or that I wasn’t allowed to do my job because he found scientific facts to be “philosophically unsatisfactory.” Surely the most philosophically unsatisfactory action one could take is to deny the truth.
Weston, CT is just down the street from New Canaan, the hometown of Prof Coyne’s favorite stork — Ann Coulter (her mother is on the town Board of Selectmen). New Canaan (immortalized as the blue-blooded setting of Ang Lee’s “The Ice Storm,” which was filmed there) is notorious for the virulent anti-Semitism of many of its prominent citizens. Given Weston’s geographic proximity, some similarity in attitudes is to be anticipated.
New Canaan, Ct is also the home of Glenn Beck, but I really don’t blame the Weston school administration on either of them. Nor do I think they reflect the community. Ribbens undoubtedly is an idiot who shouldn’t be administering anything related to education (unfortunately, however, he is now principal of the state run high school for performing arts in Bridgeport). The current administration does what public school administrators do — they support themselves and “policy” at the expense of the children and education. Frankly, Weston, Ct is now one of those areas where students would probably get a better education in evolution if they were home schooled. (The parents would simply ship them off to one of the tonier private schools in the area, all of which teach evolution and all the sciences with real rigor.)
I gather that there are some places where science teacher can do no right. If you say that scientific findings disprove this or that religious belief, someone will accuse you of doing something unconstitutional. If you stick to just science facts, someone will take you to task for not being sensitive enough to people with religious beliefs!
Connecticut has their science standards posted online. Seems like this administrator may actually have ordered the teacher to teach less than the science standards the state requires for public schools. While the standards for 3rd grade don’t specifically mention evolution they do require discussion of animal and plant adaptation to the environment.
By the way the 8th grade standards to explicitly require the teaching of evolution.
Here’s a link to the pdf http://www.sde.ct.gov/sde/lib/sde/pdf/curriculum/science/PK8_sciencecurriculumstandards2009.pdf
We need Mr Tangerone here in Texas where he can teach…hee,hee… gifted students…har, har…sputter, sputter…all about evolution…ha,ha,ha,ohh, my…I can’t go on…hee, hee…
I am so glad my children and I were taught evolution in NY State before the religious right put a death grip on reality.
Our country deserves to lose its prominence in the world if we keep this up.
That happened long ago. As Oscar Wilde said, the US is the only country which went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in-between.
It’s school failings like this that ultimately make the US more and more dependent on imported workers and researchers who haven’t been educationally poisoned by this system.
Sexual and racial identity could certainly be considered core beliefs too, from which some derive sexist or racist attitudes, some of which are buttressed by religion. So if someone were to teach that men and women should share equal civil, political and economic rights and that all races are equal, this would be disallowed because it might “go against” someone’s core beliefs?
Wow.
You betcha – see Amnesty International’s firing of Gita Sahgal for just one example.
The assertion that evolution is “philosophically unsatisfactory” is itself philosophically unsatisfactory.
Mark Ribbens is too ignorant to be involved in education; oh wait, I take it back he needs to be educated.
Philosophically unsatisfactory.
TRANSLATION: I am a chicken shit school principal and I don’t want to deal with a few religious whacko parents who may be offended.
That’s really all this comes down to. The principal just doesn’t want to have to deal with a few parents’ complaints. Sure, he could defend the teacher’s curriculum, stand up to the naysayers and laboriously explain why evolution is both scientifically valid and the best explanation we have the diversity of life. But that sounds too much like work. Why go to so much trouble when the children will move on in a few years? Let’s pass the buck and let the high schools wrestle with this issue.
“…it is a philosophically unsatisfactory explanation for the diversity of life.” = I never read a single book about evolution, so I’ll go ahead and speak out of my ass.
Sounds like the head of the school board there is on Tangarone’s side, at least.
Wow, Ribbens is such a dipshit. “Don’t teach the kids – their parents may not approve!” Someone remind me again why all governments in the USA decided all those years ago that affordable public schooling was a good thing?
So 3rd to 5th graders aren’t old enough? What nonsense. My daughter started learning about evolution when she was 5 and is completely fascinated by it still. And no, she’s not ‘gifted’, just bright and curious. Now at age 10, she’s more knowledgable about the subject than I was when I graduated high school back in the ’80s. Elementary age is the perfect time to begin teaching it, while they still retain their wonder and fascination with science.
It doesn’t surprise me, though, that the principle was concerned about parental objection. I live in a semi-conservative area and I’ve heard complaints about evolution being taught in the schools here. It’s one of the reasons we homeschool.
My son is now 12 and he started homeschooling when his third grade teacher “taught him” about Noah’s ark and how it was carrying dinosaurs. Big surprise for me, his atheist mom, when the came home and asked “Who is Noah? What’s an ark?”
I used to hear that homeschoolers were a bunch of religious fanatics that didn’t want their kids to learn science. Looks like the tables have turned. I keep meeting atheist and secular homeschoolers like myself who are pulling their kids out of school in order for them to learn science.
Yes and Mark Ribbens is now coordinating another State supported educational institution in Trumbull, CT a magnate school RCA. This “Open Choice” program was created by legislation that was designed to increase racial, ethnic, and economic diversity. Did they know before hiring Ribbens that he espouses his own brand of ignorance and bias.
Worse yet, other administrators Jerry Belair and Skerice didn’t reign in this ignorance nor apparently share this curious educational direction with the school board. They should all be fired… or is Weston just another backwater town posing as upscale education so the wealthy parents can justify their inflated salaries.
Does “Ribbens” mean “coward” in some other language? And what about the parents who wouldn’t object? Why is it the whiners who always rule the day?
Looking back on my public K-12 yrs (so ’55-67), I don’t remember anyone recoiling at the notion of evolution, or attempting to stifle mention of it. This was in Virginia, too, albeit Northern VA. There was one kid in high school* who walked around with a bible, but he was generally regarded as strange and nobody talked to him much. In family life I got dragged off to church, too, but there were no objections to evolution at home or at the church either (altho I do distinctly recall a Sunday school teacher arguing that Jews were a separate race – none of us bought it). There were plenty of Baptist kids in HS, too, and I don’t recall any of them expressing any anxiety over the notion of evolution either. It wasn’t until I got to college that I got a whiff that there were actually still considerable numbers of these fundamentalists, but that was only in the academic sense. I started grad school at the U of Richmond, which was started by Baptists, but there was not a whiff of any of the Cedarville types there. It wasn’t till later, as a grad student in NJ, that an actual fundamentalist type encroached on my personal space – a guy confronted me out of nowhere in a grocery store (I was surveying the packaged deli meats at the time) and wanted to know if I’d accepted JC as my personal savior.
The point of all this in re. the above & other familiar statistics is that while rational thought may seem not to be gaining ground statistically, from my personal experience it seems that we’re backsliding.
*Said HS was not without its nitwits in the administration, either. I was in a school play that contained this shocking line for the lead actor: “I love you.” Love was deemed too emotionally charged and had to be changed.
What happened to professional autonomy?
Why would you have to discuss class content with a principal?
Teachers are professionals, holding at minimum a Bachelor degree, and often multiple degrees in both a speciality area and education. The state sets the standards, and how an individual teacher chooses to help students master these would be guided by the pedagogical needs of the students.
What can we do to assist this teacher and condemn this unprincipled principal ?
Weston is an upscale town, filled with people who view themselves as enlightened, if not intellectually-oriented. It would be very disturbing to the electorate if they found themselves at the center of a science controversy. (Not that the town is filled with scientists; they are mostly financial services types.) So the best thing to do is to register on the Westport Forum (the only local paper) and give your comments. I guaranty the town, the school administration and the school board will notice. If you want to have a wider audience you can write to the Norwalk Hour, Westport.now, and the Hartford Courant. (I wouldn’t bother with the Connecticut Post; it’s a right wing rag.) Unlike, say a town in Texas, the community will be disturbed by the negative attention and the administration will be cowed from trying something stupid again. Ribbens thought he was avoiding controversy by his moronic email. He and the school should be disabused of that notion.
The original article is in the Weston Forum. Send letters and comments to the paper for publication. Let the locals see how small they appear in the eyes of the world thanks to Ribbens, Belair and Scerice.
Good catch. I meant Weston Forum (it’s an Acorn freebie that has local news individualized for a number of towns in Western Fairfield County.) I musta had Westport on the mind because I have books due today at the Westport Library.
Why not draw attention to this nationally and send a copy to your local papers (as well as Weston’s Board of Education) and get the news to this sleepy section of the world to wake it up to the fact that public education should be free from the personal beliefs and restrictions of the likes of Dr. Ribbens.
I wonder how Francisco Ayala and Eugenie Scott react to this ?
When I was teaching outdoor education for a large public school system, my supervisor asked me if I could “tone it down” with teaching evolution.
He got a one word answer…No.
And, yes, he was a coward who had gotten I don’t know how many complaints.
“At the other end of the spectrum are the opponents of reductionism who are appalled by what they feel to be the bleakness of modern science. To whatever extent they and their world can be reduced to a matter of particles or fields and their interactions, they feel diminished by that knowledge… I would not try to answer these critics with a pep talk about the beauties of modern science. The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.”
– Steven Weinberg
I think Weinberg is wrong about “The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal”.
Send people to read Dawkins’ “The Blind Watchmaker” and they can read about Hierarchical Reductionism and how it can be used to showcase complexity and the many layers of life or human designed objects. One can concern oneself with only a few layers of reduction to explain life and/or the universe’s myriad components.
Evolution is “not age approriate”??? I have heard a lot of stupid thing about evolution, but this beats them all by far. So – will we rate Darwin R or X in the future?
Regarding the Trackback/Pingback below, the Verbose Stoic is also Misinformed.
Weston Forum (same paper as original article letter to editor) April 8 Steven Newton Public Information Project Director National Center for Science Education is quoted “Because Connecticut science standards clearly direct that evolution be part of the curriculum starting at grade three…”
Sounds like the teacher was correct and the principal disregarded state standards.
After researching the state standards the Stoic might reconsider the posting for accuracy.
Get your facts straight! The school involved here is an Intermediate School (Grades 3 to 5). The student age range is 8 to 10. If you feel this has no bearing on the issue, you don’t know anything about cognitive development.
Principal Apologizes
http://www.acorn-online.com/joomla15/thewestonforum/news/local/56145-evolution-flap-ribbens-apologizes-weston-parents-have-questions.html
This was strictly then about dominant male and admin. backed the principal (who now apologizes) and instead chose to attack the teacher as “disgruntled”.
Pretty low on the evolutionary scale if you ask me.
I live in the town and had the teacher.
This is a shame. This is a major loss for our community, and the world at large.
As “pro-evolution” as the school district claims, saying they teach it in grade 3, they want to keep him from doing so. The principal mentioned is indeed gone now, but he’s still been prevented from running his AustralAsia program.
By the way, this wasn’t to teach evolution. It was about how Abraham Lincoln was born on the same day as Darwin, and both of their lives. The intention was mostly to discuss Darwin’s travels. Granted, evolution is unavoidable in such a study, but it wasn’t the primary aspect.
In addition to the bits of ignorance, we have a sizable population of intelligent parents here. http://parentsforpubliceducation.com/
So please, don’t judge Weston by this.