Bad Astronomy

NSTA is, apparently, still in trouble

Note: The tally of the votes for the Weblog awards is not yet final. When it is made final, I’ll post about it then. Until that time, something that might make you wonder what’s going on as much as it has me:

The plot thickens.

A very brief synopsis: Laurie David, a producer of “An Inconvenient Truth” told the National Science Teachers Association she wanted to give away a copy of the DVD to each of the NSTA’s 55,000 members. The NSTA declined, citing several reasons. I posted about this first here, and then followed up with this, and then again here.

At that point I didn’t think the evidence either way was enough to sway me. But that’s changing.

New revelations have put the NSTA in a bad light. Ms. David posted a rebuttal to the NSTA comments on the Huffington Post.

U Dream of Janie is a blog I read (with some NSFW content), and Janie is a little (OK, a lot) ticked about this situation. She makes a lot of cognizant points, and they are not in favor of the NSTA.

Go ahead and read it, then come back. It helps if you read what she says first.

In her blog, Janie noticed something that I saw as well: the initial NSTA response to the Washington Post OpEd was edited shortly after it was posted – and by “edited” I mean parts were removed. I noticed immediately, because a quotation I cut and pasted from their response is no longer there. Here it is, from my original blog post about it:

Gerry Wheeler, Executive Director of the NSTA, responds to the controversy on the NSTA website:

NSTA policy states that the association cannot endorse any outside organization’s products and/or messages to its members. Therefore, we do not send any such products and/or messages directly to our members, regardless of the source.

This entire passage was later removed from the NSTA website. Why? I have to admit this is really odd and even suspicious, given what I said about this passage again from my original post:

If the Washington Post OpEd had mentioned that in the first place, there wouldn’t have been such a stir (in fact, the entire OpEd would have been unnecessary). Was this policy made clear to Laurie David, the author of that OpEd? I wonder. If so, why didn’t she mention it in her article? And if not, why not?

Janie feels the same way; this passage, if true, alleviates a lot of suspicion. Having it removed, however, makes things more suspicious than they were in the first place.

Janie is convinced the NSTa is up to no good, and I will say with these new revelations that I am leaning that way myself.