How many public schools teach creationism in America?

It's a question Slate decided to document via a map.

Whether it's a public school, or just a tax-funded charter institution, schools in Texas, Utah, Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia, Indiana and countless others receive some sort of taxpayer money, yet also are allowed to blur the line between church and state.

All public schools in Louisiana and Tennessee--those great bedrocks of forward scientific thought--are allowed to teach creationism (whether or not they choose to do so is unknown), whereas the state's largest charter program in Texas, Responsive Ed, takes it a step further. As Slate describes:

The state’s largest charter program, Responsive Ed, receives $82 million in taxpayer money each year, but that hasn’t stopped its schools from adopting a creationist curriculum that seriously misrepresents the science of evolution. These materials wrongly portray the fossil record and the age of Earth as scientifically controversial, assert that there is a lack of “transitional fossils,” and claim evolution is untestable.

Damn right! Earth might be 4.540 billion years old, it might be 4.54001 billion years old--we can't handle this kind of controversy!




Map: Portion of Slate map, found here.