After the Portland, Oregon, board of education adopted a resolution on climate change education that called (PDF) for the elimination of instructional material "that is found to express doubt about the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities," NCSE's Josh Rosenau wrote a column for the Portland Tribune (June 2, 2016) to put the resolution in context.
Relating a recent incident in which a public school teacher in Oregon unwittingly showed a climate-change-denying film in a health class, Rosenau warned of "numerous campaigns to mail slickly packaged, but scientifically misleading material about climate change to teachers across the country," explaining, "Such campaigns of denial do a disservice to teachers and students, and, ultimately, to society as a whole."
In part because of such campaigns, he suggested, teachers are often unprepared and reluctant to teach about climate change as it is understood by the scientific community. According (PDF) to the national survey of public school science teachers conducted by NCSE and researchers at Penn State University, he noted, "only four in 10 teachers know the degree of scientific agreement that climate change is caused by humans."
Earlier, Rosenau offered qualified praise for Portland's resolution on climate change education, apparently the first of its kind, to the Los Angeles Times (May 24, 2016). "I certainly think that climate education is important and should be accurate," he told the newspaper, but added, "but I tend to be a bit leery when a single subject is singled out for any reason."
Those qualms notwithstanding, Rosenau urged, in his Portland Tribune op-ed, that "[e]very parent, every citizen, and every student deserves to be confident that our public school science classes are preparing tomorrow's citizens with the most accurate, most current, most reliable information about our changing climate."