Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer's book makes a fine contribution to the study of the factors that shape public school curricula. It also provides an invaluable source of information about the current status of high school biology education in the United States. It will thus be essential reading for a far broader audience than would normally be interested in education policy as such. Fortunately, the writing is clear and accessible, so that even those not deeply immersed in the education policy literature will have no trouble with the material presented.

The book makes two key contributions. First, it offers a more sophisticated examination of the connection between public opinion about evolution and state content standards for biology than has heretofore been available, showing how local standards vary along with beliefs about evolution, within the constraints set by the courts. Second, it contains an in-depth analysis of a singularly rich data set gathered in a survey of more than 900 high school biology teachers, investigating their own beliefs as well as their teaching practices, and connecting these to their personal backgrounds and to the nature of the districts where they teach.

The survey was inspired by a key empirical puzzle: Why is the teaching of evolution so controversial in American high schools? As the authors note in their introduction, “a disagreement about ideas is not sufficient to account for the amazing durability of this conflict on the American scene. A more complete explanation … must account for politics.” (p. 3). Moreover, the book makes clear that much of the relevant politics takes place not at the state policymaking level, nor in the courts, but at the level of individual school districts and of the individual teachers within them. While media attention focuses on courts and state standards, this book convincingly suggests that those are not likely to be the source of real change in what high school students learn in their biology classes.

One minor quibble with the organization of the book concerns the way in which the authors frame their introduction as well as the opening chapter in terms of “a key normative question: Who should govern the nation's public schools and determine what students should learn?” (p. 3). While this is, indeed, a key normative question, it is not one the authors set out to answer; instead, they show us the political actors who shape what students will learn, and how they do so. Still, since the authors chose to frame the issue normatively, they perhaps ought to have offered their own answer to the normative question, having studied the issue so thoroughly.

The first half of the book focuses on the democratic responsiveness of state-level education standards. The authors begin with a brief overview of the history of arguments about who should decide what gets taught in public schools: the public, judges (protecting civil liberties), experts, or teachers. A discussion of key court cases, including the famous Scopes trial, highlights the historical influence of courts in eliminating creationism/intelligent design (ID) from the classroom. Court decisions have been framed almost entirely in terms of religious freedom, which suggests a promising direction for further research: How has this issue been treated in countries where religious liberty is not constitutionally protected in the same way it is in the United States?

An in-depth analysis of a quarter century of public opinion polls about evolution and the teaching thereof in public high schools shows that most Americans favor teaching “a biblical perspective on the origins of life on earth” (p. 33), either alongside evolution or supplanting it. The authors are consistently careful and thorough in considering possible alternative interpretations of the patterns they identify. Perhaps most interestingly, the data show that those with a college education or beyond are dramatically more likely to believe in evolution. Combined with what the book tells us about the high school biology education in the United States, this raises an intriguing question: In countries where evolution is more systematically taught at the high school level, does this finding disappear? In other words, is this an association between belief in evolution and educational attainment, or simply between the former and exposure to real biology? Somewhat relatedly, in a later chapter, Berkman and Plutzer find that having completed a college course in evolution increases the predicted time spent by teachers on evolution by 25% (p. 178).

Turning to state-level patterns, the data suggest that there is no state in which support for exclusively teaching evolution exceeds 50% of the population. This means that “there is not a single state in which the official state policy … fully reflects the wishes of the majority of citizens” (p. 27), since no state standards officially sanction teaching creationism, even alongside evolution. On the other hand, the authors do find that public opinion on evolution is a strong predictor of the quality of a state's biology curriculum, meaning that state standards are at least somewhat responsive (p. 113).

The second half of the book focuses on the survey of high school biology teachers, which was conducted in the spring of 2007. On average, the survey showed, evolution is discussed for about 14 class hours (pp. 122–3). Moreover, three-quarters of the respondents never covered creationism or intelligent design. On the other hand, the authors “estimate that 21% of all science teachers endorse creationism or ID in their classrooms” (p. 138), and “only about three quarters of teachers report a personal belief in the evolution of human beings” (p. 183). From the standpoint of teaching high school students scientifically accurate information, then, the situation leaves much to be desired.

The authors conduct a thorough analysis—well worth reading carefully and in detail—of the teacher-level determinants of teaching evolution (or creationism). Among others, they find that state standards matter less than one might think, nor is everyone fully aware of their contents. Quotations from individual respondents nicely illustrate the impact of standards, personal beliefs, pressures from parents or superiors, and so on.

The survey also showed that teacher preferences line up fairly well with the expected preferences of school districts. The authors explain this congruence in terms of “assortative hiring”: Districts are more likely to hire those they expect to share their beliefs about evolution, while teachers prefer to teach in a district where beliefs are in line with their own. One striking result of such hiring patterns is that students in the most traditional districts have an almost 40% chance of receiving biology instruction from a young-earth creationist (p. 199).

At an August 2011 campaign event, Texas Governor Rick Perry stated that “in Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools.” Many observers countered that, in fact, creationism is not present in Texas's curriculum standards, nor does the Supreme Court sanction the teaching of creationism. As this excellent book shows us, however, Perry was quite correct: Creationism is taught in many classrooms, not only in Texas but across the country. Those who would like to see that change must look beyond the courts and state policy boards to individual districts and teachers, where the key decisions about what is to be taught are really made.