US Congressman Henry Waxman's office has produced a disturbing report saying that federal abstinence-based sex education programs aren't merely leaving children uninformed about sex, they're lying to your kids about the facts of life. Out of the thirteen programs used by five or more Special Programs of Regional and National Significance grant recipients, Waxman's people found factual errors in eleven of them.
Left out of the report was a clear statement of which programs were more or less prone to error, excepting the clean bill of health given ETR Associates' Sex Can Wait and the Grady Health System's Managing Pressures Before Marriage programs. Amusingly, the FACTS program and the two programs produced by Project Reality fail to have all their information straight. Instead, the Waxman report simply states that an unnamed program makes a factual error and leaves it for the reader to either dig through the footnotes for the specific program name or gain the impression that all the programs are making the error.
Also missing are the numbers on how widespread the error-prone programs are compared to better programs. SPRaNS grant recipients are being singled out because SPRaNS funding is ballooning while other federal abstinence-based sex education funding has been steady over the years. We can still use the data in the report to deduce the portion of SPRaNS recipients whose programs are singled out for condemnation. In 2004, SPRaNS had "over 100 grantees and a budget of $75 million", up from $50 million in 2003 according to a provided graph. In 2003, "the eleven [erratic] curricula are used...by 69 grantees...these 69 grantees received over $32 million in funding". From this, a fair estimate is that 60% of SPRaNS-funded abstinence-based programs contain errors, though we still can't tell the bad ones from the really bad ones without digging through the footnotes, which I'm too lazy to do at the moment.
If that doesn't leave you worried about the state of biological education in the US, check out a recent Gallup poll of Americans' beliefs on evolution, where as many or more say all the scientific evidence refutes evolution as say that there's evidence to support it.
Posted by Warrior Tang at December 1, 2004 11:27 PM