It's been a busy week for the teaching of science in US schools. Most of the attention has focused on the leaked plans of the libertarian Heartland Institute to promote doubt in classrooms about whether human activity is causing global warming.
Earlier this week, the education committee of the Oklahoma House of Representatives also got in on the act by approving a bill on the teaching of controversial scientific subjects such as evolution and climate change.
The Scientific Education and Academic Freedom bill says that "the teaching of some scientific subjects, such as biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy".
"Teachers," it goes on, "shall be permitted to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories." That sounds innocuous enough, but the bill has alarmed science-education advocates.
"If the goal is simply to permit teachers to help students understand, why do you need to pass a law?" asks Joshua Rosenau, a programmes and policy director at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in Oakland, California. Instead, he warns, the law would provide protection for teachers who wish to teach creationism or global-warming denial.
The bill also mandates that students "may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student [?] shall be penalized in any way because the student may subscribe to a particular position on scientific theories".
The bill now goes to the full US House of Representatives for approval.
In other news, it was revealed this week that Peter Gleick - a US climatologist and climate activist who impersonated a Heartland employee to obtain internal documents, including details of their climate education programme - was to have joined NCSE's board of directors later this year. In light of recent developments, though, Gleick offered to withdraw from this position, and NCSE has accepted his offer.
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