"What are they teaching your kids about global warming?" asked National Journal (June 26, 2014). The answer is provided by "a patchwork of climate instruction guidelines that largely leaves teachers to their own devices, facilitating massive disparities in global-warming education from school to school and state to state."
"There's a lot of variability in how this is taught right now," NCSE's Minda Berbeco explained. "What's really troubling is a lot of students are not receiving accurate scientific information." State science standards in Georgia and West Virginia, and statutes in Louisiana and Tennessee, encourage teachers to promote climate change denial.
And opposition to the Next Generation Science Standards — so far adopted in eleven states, California, Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, plus the District of Columbia — often centers on their treatment of climate science. Such opposition derailed the adoption of the NGSS in Wyoming.
Even in the absence of explicit policies or overt pressure to promote climate change denial or downplay climate change, teachers are leery of experiencing a backlash. One teacher told National Journal, "I stay out of the process because when I first started teaching this I was labeled an evangelist. I have a kid of my own, and I have a job to keep."
The article clearly, and correctly, states that "[n]inety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is underway and human activity is the primary cause" and "[s]cientists insist that teaching the controversy — and not the consensus — is a dereliction of duty and a propagation of falsehood."