WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court Monday declined to wade into the turbulent debate over teaching evolution versus creationism in public schools.
Without comment, the nine justices refused to hear the case of Rodney LeVake, a high school biology teacher from Minnesota. LeVake claimed he was unfairly reassigned after school administrators learned of his belief in creationism, which holds that God made the Earth in six days.
LeVake, who has a master's degree in biology education, was teaching his first year of 10th-grade biology when the case began. Discussing the curriculum with one of his colleagues, LeVake confided that he had scientific doubts about evolution, Charles Darwin's theory that life on Earth evolved from single-celled organisms more than 3.5 billion years ago.
When school officials confronted him about his comments in 1998, LeVake proposed giving students "an honest look at the difficulties and inconsistencies of the theory without turning my class into a religious one," according to court documents.
School administrators responded by reassigning LeVake to teach a ninth-grade introductory science course in the southern Minnesota town of Faribault. That course did not include lessons on evolution.
LeVake sued to get his old job back, saying he was being discriminated against, not because of anything he had said in class, but because of his religious beliefs. He also contended that school administrators were trampling on his First Amendment free speech rights by denying him the academic freedom to tell his students that some scientists disagree with Darwin's theories.
A Minnesota trial court sided with the school district, saying school administrators had the right to determine the school's curriculum. An appeals court affirmed that ruling, and the Minnesota Supreme Court declined to hear LeVake's appeal.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court did the same.
"It's not unexpected," said Frank Manion, a New Hope, Ky., lawyer for the American Center for Law and Justice who represented LeVake.
Manion compared asking the Supreme Court to take one case among thousands with playing the lottery. "If they take it and you win, great. If you lose, well, we're not shocked. But you've got to play to win," he said.
Manion, whose group often represents people advocating school prayer and public religious displays, said he gets many calls from teachers who want to teach creationism, and he routinely declines to take their cases.
But LeVake's case was different, he said, because LeVake wanted only to include in his curriculum a "legitimate, non-religious, scientific criticism of Darwin's theory."
"He was talking to a fellow teacher and said, `I can't teach evolution the way they want us to teach it -- as 100 percent true fact. I can't tell students that, not because of my religious beliefs, but because of my scientific beliefs,' " Manion said. "This teacher went and told on him, and then school administrators started asking Rod, `What are your views on evolution?' "
Manion contends that school officials made an assumption that because his client held creationist religious beliefs, that he wanted to teach them in the classroom.
"They saw him as a conservative fundamentalist, and many people are prejudiced against folks like that," he said. "They assumed that anybody of that ilk must really be wanting to teach creationism."
But by the time the case reached the Supreme Court, LeVake had abandoned the religious discrimination claim, focusing instead on the First Amendment issue and academic freedom.
"We never contended he should be allowed to teach creationism," Manion said. "We just said there was a place, within the science curriculum, to say what he wanted to say, and preventing him from saying it was a First Amendment violation."
But Kay Nord Hunt, a Minneapolis attorney who represented the school district, argued that LeVake's real intent was to control the school's curriculum.
"The problem here was, fundamentally, he refused to teach the curriculum as the school board said it was to be taught," she said Monday.
Nord Hunt said the school's science department chairman and other school officials met at length with LeVake to try to resolve the disagreement. In the end, she said, they decided "he really was not willing to teach evolution without his own views overshadowing it."
She pointed out that the reassignment to the general sciences class was not considered a demotion and that LeVake lost no income or seniority at the school.
She characterized the case as an employment dispute.
"The school district is the employer. They have a process of curriculum planning, with input from teachers, parents and administrators," she said. "He could have gone to them to give his input, but he didn't go to them. He just decided he couldn't teach the curriculum, so he was reassigned."
The Supreme Court last decided a case over public school education on the origin of man in 1987. In that case, it struck down a Louisiana law that had prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools without giving equal time to creationism.
More recently, the Kansas Board of Education caused a stir in 1999, when it voted to delete the teaching of evolution from that state's science curriculum. After three board members were ousted in the November 2000 elections, the board restored evolution to the curriculum and voted to allow alternate theories to be taught as well.
Nationwide, most school districts, including those in Texas, teach the theory of evolution.