Miseducation: How Climate Change Is Taught in America

by Katie Worth

Overview

Why are so many American children learning so much misinformation about climate change?

Investigative reporter Katie Worth reviewed scores of textbooks, built a 50-state database, and traveled to a dozen communities to talk to children and teachers about what is being taught, and found a red-blue divide in climate education. More than one-third of young adults believe that climate change is not man-made, and science instructors are being contradicted by history teachers who tell children not to worry about it.

Who has tried to influence what children learn, and how successful have they been? Worth connects the dots on oil corporations, state legislatures, school boards, libertarian thinktanks, conservative lobbyists, and textbook publishers, all of whom have learned from the fight over evolution and tobacco, and are now sowing uncertainty, confusion, and distrust about climate science, with the result that four in five Americans today don’t think there is a scientific consensus on global warming. In the words of a top climate educator, “We are the only country in the world that has had a multi-decade, multi-billion dollar deny-delay-confuse campaign.” Miseducation is the alarming story of how climate denialism was implanted in millions of school children.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781735913643
Publisher:	Columbia Global Reports
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	494,877
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Katie Worth is an Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning investigative journalist. From 2015 to 2021, she worked for the PBS series FRONTLINE on enterprise investigations and multimedia stories about science and politics. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, National Geographic, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and was included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016.

Table of Contents

Introduction 10

Chapter 1 The Science and the Doubt 18

Chapter 2 The Teachers 33

Chapter 3 The Evolution 49

Chapter 4 The Standards 65

Chapter 5 The Textbooks 81

Chapter 6 Selling Kids on Fossil Fuels 104

Chapter 7 The Victory 121

Epilogue 143

Acknowledgments 152

Further Reading 155

Notes 156

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/20/2021

Journalist Worth debuts with a striking look at how climate change is taught in American primary and secondary schools. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is “real, it’s us, it’s bad, and there’s hope,” she writes, the country has developed a system in which “children in some places are required by law to learn about the phenomenon... while in others, students may not hear the words ‘climate change’ in class at all.” Worth traces the history of the tensions between science and religious fundamentalism back to the controversy engendered by Darwin’s theory of evolution. In the present, textbook publishers eager to avoid upsetting school boards elide or omit climate change, and state standards rarely require coverage. Meanwhile, she notes, wealthy energy companies borrow from the tobacco industry playbook by funding “educational” materials that downplay or equivocate on the scope of the threat. Worth makes powerful use of anecdotes, as with one student who lost his home to a forest fire, but doesn’t believe climate change is real. There are no easy solutions here (though she does briefly outline the bare minimum that scientists say children should learn), but the author’s illumination of the issue digs deep. Policymakers and educators alike will find much to consider. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Exceptional reporting undergirds the truly shocking facts in this book: the fossil fuel industry is doing all that it can to undermine education about climate change, which will be the most important fact in the lifetimes of kids in school today. Thank heaven for the teachers who stand up for the truth—and thank heaven that this book will spark a crucial national conversation about the hijacking of our educational system.” —Bill McKibben

“Miseducation is a cautionary tale of the wide-ranging impacts that political agendas can have when deployed in educational settings.” —Science

“A striking look at how climate change is taught in American primary and secondary schools.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A damning report on the state of science education in America, especially regarding climate change.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A must read for parents and teachers.” —Moms Clean Air Force

“Miseducation documents many cracks in American climate education while offering educators models for improving their engagement with students and communities. And in expanding the definition of ‘good climate education’ to include students’ civic development, the book transmits a heightened sense of urgency.” —The Elective

“Through a deft combination of interviews and extensive research, Worth, an award-winning investigative journalist, pillories major textbook companies for privileging markets over science and criticizes school districts for uncritically accepting tendentious booklets and videos from fossil fuel firms.” —CHOICE

“Boy, do we need this book now. As the looming climate catastrophe introduces itself by fire and flood, as the world's leaders need a sense of public urgency to make some hard choices, Katie Worth discovers widespread climate denialism in our nation's schools. Ignorance of the scientific consensus, ideological pressure, fossil-fuel industry disinformation, and a well-meaning but misguided desire to tell ‘both sides’—it is a disheartening story, richly reported, clearly told and (we can only hope) just in time.” —Bill Keller, founding editor of the Marshall Project, and author of What’s Prison For?

“In her meticulously researched and vividly written book, Katie Worth provides a detailed, comprehensive, and often enraging examination of the forces that obstruct climate change education in the United States through denial, doubt, and delay. But she also offers a glimmer of hope. Miseducation is essential reading for anybody who cares about the climate.” —Glenn Branch, deputy director, National Center for Science Education

“Climate change is an unprecedented threat to our global community, and the frontlines of our efforts to address that threat are in the nation’s classrooms where clearheaded, well-informed educators can provide the coming generation with the facts about its causes and likely consequences. But what if those classrooms have been infiltrated by bad actors? In this engagingly written and important book, Katie Worth reveals how the science education that might save us has been influenced by partisan politics and special interests putting the future of us all at risk.” —John L. Rudolph, Universityof Wisconsin-Madison, and author of How We Teach Science: What’s Changed, and Why It Matters

“Young people horrified about climate change are standing up against fossil fuel companies and governments the world over. Amid this global youth uprising, Katie Worth reveals in horrifying detail the ways in which children in American schools are being methodically—and oftentimes successfully—targeted with climate misinformation designed to keep profits and pollution from oil, coal and gas flowing. This deeply reported book names names and reveals filthy secrets and should be essential reading for anybody concerned for the future of humanity.” —John Upton, editor at Climate Central

“Katie Worth’s Miseducation explores an under-appreciated but extremely important aspect of our climate crisis: the active mis-education around climate change in American schools. She explains how conservative politicians, well-funded right-wing foundations, and frightened textbook publishers, have watered down, eliminated or confused the ways the issue is presented to tens of millions of school children. They hope to raise another generation that will fail to act on what may be the greatest threat to our future. But, as Worth shows, efforts by committed educators has led to some real progress and represents reasons for hope.” —Alexander Stille, San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia, author of The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace

From the Publisher

2021-09-10
A damning report on the state of science education in America, especially regarding climate change.

As background for her concise and rigorous analysis of climate education, Frontline investigative journalist Worth developed a nationwide, state-by-state database and reviewed dozens of textbooks. As she notes, there are roughly 50 million children enrolled in 100,000 public schools across the country, taught by 3 million teachers—and there are no national standards. The result, not surprisingly, is a sharp red-blue divide. The red side is bolstered by ample investments from fossil fuel producers and strict controls from conservative activists, and red states, notably Texas, are fitted with textbooks that cast doubt about the concept of human-caused climate change. Overall, Worth writes, “classrooms have emerged as a battleground in the American political war over climate change because what kids learn about climate change now will directly impact the speed and ambition of action taken for decades to come.” It stands to reason that in the red states, that action will be nonexistent. Worth writes of an AP science teacher in Oklahoma who refuses to teach anthropogenic climate change because her family is in the oil and gas business—were she to want to teach it in the first place, since many districts and states forbid its inclusion in the curriculum. The divide widens: As Worth notes, “we know that as lawmakers in some red states have worked to shrink what their children learn about climate change, lawmakers in some blue states have worked to expand them.” It may depress some readers to hear of this “crude two-tier system” as well as to learn of the author’s investigations into textbook publishing and reviewing, with editors rewriting commissioned science pieces to fit political formulas. “These patterns are no accident of history,” Worth concludes. “Rather, they are the product of successful disinformation campaigns, animated not by science but by ideology.”

More solid evidence of the politicization of everything, including the truth.

Kirkus Reviews