Mailings to Teachers Highlight a Political Fight Over Climate Change in the Classroom

by Katie Worth (Frontline/The Groundtruth Project) Last spring, science teachers across the nation began receiving unsolicited packages containing classroom materials from a libertarian group that rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.

This spring, some of the same teachers are opening packages containing very different materials: A book written by a Cornell University affiliate called “The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change,” which embraces the prevailing science, explains the phenomenon in detail and includes recommendations for how to teach the subject to children.

Last year’s mailings were sent out by the Heartland Institute, an Illinois-based think tank that holds an annual conference that has become a pilgrimage for those who reject the overwhelming findings of the scientific community that humans are causing the earth’s climate to change. The packages contained pamphlets, a DVD and a book titled “Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming.” A spokesman for the group said it sent more than 350,000 packages to K-12 and college-level science teachers last year.

Those direct mailings, first reported on by FRONTLINE in collaboration with The GroundTruth Project, led three ranking House members tocondemn the campaign as propaganda and Democratic senators to question Education Secretary Betsy DeVos about the effort.

News of the Heartland campaign also reached the staff of the Paleontological Research Institution, based in Ithaca, New York that has received grants from the National Science Foundation to publish a series of “Teacher-Friendly Guides” for teaching earth science. At the time, the group was about a month away from publishing a guide to teaching climate change, said Alexandra Moore, PRI’s senior education associate and co-author of the book.

“We were all sitting there looking at each other saying, ‘Oh my gosh, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could send out copies of this book to every teacher who got the Heartland book?’,” she said.

In contrast to Heartland, which says it aimed to send its book to every middle school teacher, high school teacher and college instructor who covers the subject, Moore and her team have been sending out a single hardcopy of the book to one science teacher or administrator in each public high school, plus CDs containing digital copies of the book for their colleagues. So far, the group has raised $70,000 on its crowdsourcing page, and another $30,000 in additional donations – enough to send the materials to about 50,000 teachers, Moore said. She estimates it will cost $400,000 to send the book to every public high school in the country.

A 2016 national survey of 1,500 science teachers found that 31 percent told their students that global warming is still up for debate. One in 10 told students that climate change is a natural phenomenon. Five percent simply didn’t mention the subject. And a 2015 Pew survey found that while young adults aged 18 to 29 agree that humans are causing climate change more than their parents and grandparents do, 37 percent believe there is either no solid evidence for it, or that it is natural.

Heartland’s science director, Jay Lehr, said he read PRI’s book twice, and described it as propaganda.

Across the country, there is no set curriculum for science education; decisions about what to teach are typically made at state or district levels. In 2013, a national effort to create more uniformity resulted in the Next Generation Science Standards, which includes education about human-caused climate change in middle and high school. So far, 19 states and the District of Columbia have adopted those standards; but in others, the standards have caused controversy. In recent months, attempts to dilute or remove climate education from teaching standards were narrowly defeated in New Mexico and Idaho. READ MORE