Science scores dropping--is anyone surprised?

The NYTimes is running a story on a "distressing" drop in science scores by 12th graders nationwide.  The article offers a couple of explanations.

Assistant Secretary of Education Tom Luce said they reflected a
national shortage of fully qualified science teachers, especially in
regions of poverty, where physics and chemistry classes are often
taught by teachers untrained in those subjects.

"We lack
enough teachers with content knowledge in math and science," Mr. Luce
said. "We have too few teachers with majors or minors in math and
science. That clearly is a problem."

Some teachers cited the decreasing amount of time devoted to science in
schools, which they attributed in part to the annual tests in reading
and math required by the No Child Left Behind law.

Honestly though, regardless of the above explanations, did anyone really think students in America today were getting anywhere near an adequate grounding in science?  We're living under a presidential administration that is actively hostile towards science in favor of religion, and that takes its advice on matters like global warming from its favorite fiction writer.  Stem cell research has all but ground to a halt in this country, and school boards all over the country are being overrun by evangelical Christians making strong legislative and PR efforts to have creationism treated with parity alongside evolution as an adequate explanation for natural phenomena.

The Christianist movement loves to pretend they're Jewish and have been hated and oppressed ever since Christians were fed to the lions in the Colosseum.  Newsflash: the real attack in this country is directed at rational thought.