On February 6, 2023, Daily Montana reported that if passed, a bill proposed by Republican state Senator Daniel Emrich would prevent science educators from teaching “subject matter that is not scientific fact.” It would also empower school boards to “review all science materials to be sure they only use “scientific fact” in a “strictly enforced and narrowly interpreted” fashion.
The inclusion of established scientific theories in science curriculum would be barred. This would inhibit not only instruction about climate change, but wide swaths of school science curricula, such as gravity and cell theory.
Montana science teachers and representatives from the Board of Public Education spoke out against this bill, many pointing out that the bill’s description of “scientific fact” as “an indisputable and repeatable observation of a natural phenomenon” is not accurate to how the scientific community distinguishes between fact and theory. AP biology teacher Kimberly Pompham pointed out that if Montana doesn't “teach [their] students what a scientific theory is, and how we got them, and how it differs from other theories, and that it’s always going to be supported by empirical evidence, [it] will be doing them a disservice.” Rob Jensen, a former teacher who won the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science in 2019 called the bill “the most extreme anti-science legislation I’ve ever seen in this country.”