An editorial by former congressman Bob Barr in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution states that a Portland, Maine, middle school’s recent decision to offer contraceptives to middle schoolers is being done so at the expense of the students’ basic education.

What is particularly distressing about the Portland, Maine controversy is not so much that it is taking place at all, but that it is occurring even as those very same public school systems fixated on providing their young charges with birth control options, are failing miserably to provide students an adequate basic education in subjects that really do belong in schools.

As the Portland, Maine education gurus are pushing condoms, pills, skin patches and implants onto middle school kids, more than half of its eighth graders — some 57 percent to be precise — either do not meet or only partially meet state standards for reading. Those same middle schoolers fare even worse in math and science — with 71 percent of eighth graders failing to meet, or only meeting in part, math standards; a figure that rises to 85 percent for science subjects. You get the picture. Portland’s middle school students may not be able to read or do math real well, but they’ll be able to tell you all about condoms and birth control pills.

Do you agree that contraceptives and sex education are offered at the expense of basic education? Does the type of education, abstinence-only or comprehensive, make a difference in your answer? I’d be interested in whether Barr would also argue that abstinence-only education takes away from the core education.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) has abandoned federal legislation that would’ve required the government to fund only programs found to have “medically accurate” information about abstinence.

But after opponents said — wrongly, according to Lautenberg’s office — that the provision would wipe out funding for abstinence education, the Garden State lawmaker withdrew the provision, called an amendment in legislative parlance.

“We tried to make sure that any information that is passed is reliable, factual and honest. It looked like amendments were going to be offered that were deliberately punitive,” Lautenberg said. “Better judgment suggested that we shouldn’t offer it at this time.”

He said he’d offer it in the future.

Lautenberg previously introduced legislation, Responsible Education About Life Act, to change the government’s abstinence education program.

A report by a House panel found three years ago that 11 of the 13 types of federally funded abstinence initiatives contain “unproven claims and basic scientific errors,” Lautenberg said last week.

A press release issued by Lautenberg’s office stated that the legislation was in response to the Government Accountability Office’s Oct. 2006 “Abstinence Education: Efforts to Assess the Accuracy and Effectiveness of Federally Funded Programs” report. The report found that the federal government doesn’t review the content of major abstinence-only programs for scientific or medical accuracy.

According to the press release:

During the past few years, there has been an increase in the number of federally funded programs using curricula that provide medically inaccurate or misleading information. Some of these medical inaccuracies include teaching young people that HIV can be transmitted by sweat and tears, citing failure rates of condoms as high as 69 percent, as well as giving inaccurate symptoms and outcomes of sexually transmitted diseases. In addition, the federally funded programs provided erroneous information about basic scientific facts, such as stating that human cells have 24 chromosomes from each parent when in fact the number is 23.

This article raises the question of what, if anything, has been done to correct inaccuracies in abstinence education programs. Also, if there isn’t standardized review of curricula, it really seems that schools could be teaching anything they want, as long as it meets the basic criteria of abstinence-only versus comprehensive. Do you think there should be more standardization of sex education programs?