#2717: Kathy Cox (?)

Nutjobs in state governments are a dime a dozen, but we’ll do our best to mention the most egregious cases, such as Georgia’s Kathy Cox. Cox is a former superintendent of public schools for Georgia and a high school teacher who also served two terms, from 1998 to 2002, in the Georgia House of Representatives, representing Peachtree City. She also had a stint from 2010 to 2018 as CEO of the non-profit U.S. Education Delivery Institute in D.C. Cox is a creationist sympathizer, and hence a complete failure in all the positions she’s occupied.

In 2004, Cox proposed striking the word “evolution” from Georgia textbooks and replacing it with the phrase “biological changes over time”, ostensibly because the “buzzword” “evolution” created problems for teachers in conservative and rural areas. For similar reasons, she also wanted to remove the expression “Big Bang”. “I think you can do without science,” said one of her aides. Not everyone was impressed. Now, Cox ultimately backed down, claiming that her sole goal was to avoid controversy. If so, her strategy was magnificently stupid, and it still leaves her with the goal of enabling creationists and hence justifies including her in the Encyclopedia.

Diagnosis: We added a question mark to the entry just in case she is merely astonishingly naïve, but we don’t put much credence in that hypothesis. What is reasonably certain, however, is that American education doesn’t need people like Kathy Cox.