Media questions

Question 1

Title? (Why is the book called Miseducation?)

Answer 1

I wanted to know what kids were learning in American schools about climate change, so I started talking to teachers, students, parents, administrators; I read dozens of textbooks, I built a fifty-state database. And all of that reporting led to the conclusion that lots of American kids are learning climate denial in class, even though in many cases their lives are already being shaped by the climate crisis. Miseducation is about how that happened and why it matters.

I wanted to know what kids were learning
Talked to teachers, students, parents administrators. Textbooks. Database.
Turns out lots of kids learning climate denial
Even though already harmed by cc
Miseducation is about how it happened and why it matters.

Question 2

What’s your book about? 15 second answer

Answer 2

Miseducation is about how lots of kids are learning climate denial in class, even though in many cases their lives are already being touched by the climate crisis. The book is about how that happened, and why it matters.

Question 3

What’s your book about? 30 second answer

Answer 3

I wanted to know what kids were learning in American schools about climate change, so I started talking to teachers, students, parents, administrators. I read dozens of textbooks and built a fifty-state database. And all of reporting that led to the conclusion that lots of American kids are learning climate denial in class, even though in many cases their lives are already being shaped by the climate crisis. Miseducation is about how that happened, and why it matters.

Question 4

What’s your book about? 45-60 second answer

Answer 4

wanted to know what kids were learning in school about climate change, because it’s the issue that will define the century they were born into. So I read dozens of textbooks, built a fifty-state database, and talked to teachers, students, parents, administrators all over the country.

What I found was first of all, there’s a lot of tension over this issue. Teachers are disagreeing with administrators, parents are mad that their kids are either learning it or not learning it. Students are pushing back. This is a big issue in science classrooms.

And second, I found a real divide in what’s taught. In some places, kids are getting a really robust education about it. In other places, kids are getting either no education about it – they never hear the words climate change on school grounds – or they actually learn climate denial in class.

So Miseducation is about how that happened, and why it matters.

Question 5

Why now?

Answer 5

The climate crisis is already here. And these kids have the most at stake out of all of us. It’s an issue that will be extremely relevant to their lives, and it’s important to know what they’re learning about it.

Question 6

why you?

Answer 6

When I was a reporter at FRONTLINE I was assigned to a climate change story out of the Marshall Islands. And when we were there, we were just amazed by how knowledgeable the kids there were about climate change. So that led me to wonder, what are American kids learning about this issue?

Question 7

why write?

Answer 7

This story was initially going to be a magazine article, but the more reporting I did, the more fascinating it got. It seemed so important that it was worthy of a book.

Question 8

Main Messages

Answer 8

There’s a lot of tension in schools over this issue.
I found a substantial red-blue divide on the issue.
Adult politics have inserted themselves into public schools.
This didn’t happen by accident.
Kids have most at stake

It might surprise people to know
What I found was

Question 9

Facts/numbers - kids, time, teachers, scientists

Answer 9

A quarter of American kids ages 14-17 rejected the idea that climate change is a crisis. Which is of course a smaller proportion than their elders. But it’s still significant.

Science teachers spend an average of just 1-2 hours on climate change in the entire school year.

A third of teachers say they tell their students that “many scientists believe” that climate change is natural.

A recent count found 100 percent agreement among scientists who were publishing peer-reviewed studies that humans are warming the earth.

Question 10

Textbooks – What’s in them?

And why?

Answer 10

What’s in them?

Often have good information
But also often undermined by doubtful language
e.g. one textbook I looked at, in a quarter of all classrooms.
Many scientists believe that humans, SOME believed.
Textbooks are supposed to be the authority, so of course kids trust them. T

Why?

Because it’s a business. They’re contending with market forces.
They’re trying to be vague not because they think it’s the truth but because they’re worried about their textbooks being rejected in states like Texas and Florida.
What’s happening NOW is there are two tiers of textbooks. One that is sold in places like California, and one that’s sold in places like Texas.

Question 11

Who’s the bad guy? Who’s to blame?

Answer 11

It’s a mix of things.
Local politics. Right wing message machine. Investments by fossil fuel companies. The cautiousness of textbook companies.
There are some organizations that are out there intentionally pushing doubt.
One thinktank in Chicago sent a book pushing climate denialism to something like 200,000 science teachers.

Question 12

What do ff have to do with it.

Answer 12

This has been going on for a long time.
In 1998, there was a meeting hosted byt he American Petroleum Institute, attended by Exxon, Chevron and some coal companies. A leaked memo out fo that meeting said that “Victory will be achieved when the public ‘understands’ the uncertainties in climate science.’
One of the tactics they specifically discuss is reaching out to kids. THey wrote that this was necessary to “erect a barrier” against regulation of their industry.
And they did that.
They worked with the NSTA
Created ab unch of curriculum that had skeptical messaging.

Question 13

Who’s funding

Answer 13

Like a lot of money trails, this one is murky. Deliberately secretive about it.
But it’s been well reported that the fossil fuel industry long supported climate denial campaign, even though their own scientists were telling them that it was real.

Question 14

Arkansas oil rep

Answer 14

I was sitting in a seventh grade classroom in Arkansas when an representative of the Arkansas oil and gas industry association
Arkansas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners
walked in.
She was there to talk to the 7th graders
Her presentation was about fossi fuels and how important they were.
But she also told students that they didn’t need to worry about climate change.
She ran a program called “Arkansas Energy Rocks!” Pencils. Curricular materials.

Question 15

Paradise

Answer 15

I talked to a seventh grade kid whose house had burned down in a megafire in Northern California, from what we know are the ,
so he was arguably a climate refugee himself. But when he learned about climate crisis in science class, he said, “My parents said it’s not real, so I dont’ believe in it.”

Question 16

Alma mater

Answer 16

I went to my own alma mater, Chico Junior High School, and talked to a science teacher who said that one year, she realized her students were leaving her class, where they were learning climate science, and walking into history class, where the teacher was showing them YouTube videos that alleged global warming was natural and the crisis was a hoax. She confronted the history teacher. “They’re eleven,” she remembers telling him. “We need to be really mindful of when one adult they trust says one thing and another adult they trust says, ‘Don’t worry about it.’” His response: “Well, I just want them to know both sides.”

Question 17

Oklahoma teens

Answer 17

In a high school in Oklahoma, I talked to five teens whose families had immigrated from the Marshall Islands, a nation famously endangered by sea level rise. Four of the five said I was the first adult they’d ever heard say the words ‘climate change’ on school grounds.

Question 18

Nokes

Answer 18

In Arkansas, I met an environmental science teacher who tells his students it’s too soon to say whether pollutants are warming the earth—it could be sun cycles, coronal mass ejections, or magnetic force fields. He has five classes a day, so he’s given that skeptical message to hundreds of kids a year in that town.

Question 19

analogy with flat earth

Answer 19

It’s like if some kids in America were being taught that the earth were flat.

Question 20

What was most surprising?

Answer 20

Even if they are teaching, can be undermined by other teachers.
Happening even in blue states.
Some kids are never even hearing the words.
Politicians are deciding in many places and cases in what’s happening int he curriculum. Not in control of educators and scientists.
Textbooks.

Question 21

Why does it matter?

Answer 21

These kids have more at stake than anyone. Lots of them are already. They deserve to know the truth. Also, we need their help in solving it. Ready to roll up their sleeves.

We owe kids information about this. It’s is arguably THE definitional issue of the century they were born into. They deserve to understand that, and moreover, we also need them to be able to participate in the civic deliberations and finding solutions.

Question 22

Prediction answer (what’s going to happen to this generation of students?)

Answer 22

There’s only so long that climate denialism will work – it’s becoming more and more obvious. These kids will learn at some point in their life that they weren’t told the truth. But the question is, will society accept it’s happening in time to forestall the worst outcomes of climate crisis.

Question 23

Recommendation answer (what should we do? what should we teach?)

Answer 23

First of all, people need to know this is happening in their community’s classrooms.
Second, we need to decide if we want to get these messages out of schools.

SOme groups are working to get climate change in academic standards.
When I visited Oklahoma, there was no mention of climate change in any required class.
At the same time, kids in hawaii were learning about the crisis in third grade social studies, middle school science, high school biology, US history and government, world history and culture, Pacific Island studies, Earth science, environmental science, and at least one math class.
Those kids were leaving school at least somewhat climate literate.

Teachers tell me they want more More professional development on how to teach it, because they didn’t learn it themselves.
Washington State has this program spending millions of dollars a year to teach science teachers how to teach climate. And in their first two years they reached one in five teachers in the state. THey’re going beyond science teachers now and teaching english and math. That is real investment.

A good education the kids should be learning four things:
It’s real. It’s us. It’s bad. There’s hope.
And it shouldn’t be all doom and gloom. Students need to learn that there are solutions to this problem, and that they can be part of that solution. In fact, we need them to be part of the solution. They should leave a climate education ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

Question 24

What’s next for you?/your next project?

Answer 24

I grew up near Paradise, which you might remember is the town that burned to the ground in a giant fire in 2018. So I’m going to spend some time in my hometown and report on what happens in the aftermath of a climate catastrophe.

Question 25

Red/blue divide

Answer 25

The steady advance of blue and red states in opposite directions has created a two-tier system—so much so, that you can roughly predict what a child might learn about climate change simply by knowing whether they happen to live in a state where the science is broadly accepted, like Hawaii, or one where it is a source of friction, like Oklahoma.

Question 26

Debate in the classroom

Answer 26

Many teachers, unwittingly or not, are teaching climate change as an open empirical question. While debate in class is typically good pedagogy, there are no ‘sides’ to consider when teaching climate change. And ‘both-sides-ism’ can be nearly as damaging as outright denial.

Question 27

OIl Industry

Answer 27

The fossil fuel industry has long used Big Tobacco’s disinformation playbook (detailed in Merchants of Doubt), to discredit, undermine, and cast doubt on climate science. My reporting shows this tactic is used not only in Washington, DC, but in elementary and middle school classrooms.

THere’s a leaked memo that shows that in 1998, members of the fossil fuel industry got together – exxon, chevron, the American Petroleum Institute – and specifically made a plan to place climate denial into classrooms. To this day, they sponsor seminars for teachers and free fieldtrips for kids to oil derricks. They have created tons of free classroom materials and put it up online. An organization called the Climate LIteracy and Energy Awareness network surveyed over 30,000 resources available online about climate change, and found that only 700 were acceptable for use in science classrooms.

Question 28

Heartland

Answer 28

A libertarian thinktank based in Chicago was behind a booklet titled “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming” which they mailed to over 200,000 teachers in the U.S.

For a period, the American Enterprise Institute offered scientists $10K + expenses for any article that undermined the IPCC’s conclusions. Between 1998 and 2005, Exxon alone contributed over $16M to 43 organizations that produced denialist content (one Greenpeace estimate doubles that dollar figure).

The constellation of think tanks, advocacy groups, and trade associations that comprise the climate denialist universe is an almost $1B industry.

Question 29

How this fits into the cultural war?

Answer 29

Just like there’s a conservative narrative that talking to kids about this nation’s racial history will somehow brainwash them, there’s a narrative that teaching kids about climate change is an inherently political or biased act. It’s not.

Climate change is happening and we owe kids a basic literacy about why it’s happening and what its impact on their lives may be.

And truly if we want kids to be informed citizens who can make wise decisions about their future and the future of their communities, we need to equip them with accurate information.