Disappearing Documents

NSTA claims that their 'Science of Energy' project with the American Petroleum Institute ended in 2001. But that's not what it looks like online. In fact it appears to have been very much alive right up until the controversy about it erupted.

In the days since the Washington Post published the op-ed questioning NSTA's lucrative oil company partnerships, material created under these partnerships has been disappearing quickly.

But we did manage to capture some of the evidence before it was gone:

You can catch a glimpse of what the NSTA 'Science of Energy' homepage looked like on this API Classroom Energy page, here. Go there now and this is all you'll find this.

As of November 18, the NSTA 'Science of Energy' sitemap still looked like this: this. That's gone, too.

The 'Running on Oil' page of the 'Science of Energy' site looked like this [pdf]. It's a dead end now, too.

API revised their main website on education resources the day after my article appeared, too. Days before, the article it looked like this. But today the NSTA name is nowhere to be found.

Evidence that NSTA was promoting the API-funded 'Science of Energy' well after Dr. Wheeler says they stopped is still out there. The group cited the program in its July/August 2005 e-newsletters [pdf]. (As of this writing, that page is still live.)

NSTA also spotlighted it in their High School Science Classroom section in the late summer of 2005.

NSTA is scrubbing some of the oil off of other pages, too. Here [pdf] is what their 'Building a Presence for Science' donor list looked like then.

And now: (ExxonMobil is still listed but other benefactors have disappeared).

Click here to return to Crooked Curriculum: Oil Company Money Scandal at Nat'l Science Teachers Association Deepens