"Evolution Education in the U.S. is Getting Better"

Defense witnesses for the 1925 Scopes trial.

A group of scientists prepares to testify for the defense in the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial."

NCSE's Glenn Branch and Ann Reid described the recent NCSE/Penn State national survey of public high school biology teachers in a September 12, 2020, blog post for Scientific American, explaining the results in the context of "the long and contentious history of evolution education in the United States" from the Scopes trial of 1925 to the Kitzmiller trial of 2005 — which, as they observe, inspired the 2007 survey that the NCSE/Penn State survey replicated.

The results of the NCSE/Penn State survey are explained in detail in Eric Plutzer, Glenn Branch, and Ann Reid's "Teaching evolution in U.S. public schools: A continuing challenge," published in Evolution: Education and Outreach; expounded further by Branch on the BMC On Society blog and the National Science Teaching Association blog and in Skeptical Inquirer, and discussed by Reid on the ASCB blog and in a Nature commentary.

Glenn Branch
Short Bio

Glenn Branch is Deputy Director of NCSE.

branch@ncse.ngo