Protecting their recruits? LOL! The percentage of high school students who will go on to research oriented careers in any natural science field (let alone those directly related to evolution) is infinitesimal. Even if there was this grand conspiracy you seem to imagine, it wouldn't focus there. It would focus on upper level and postgraduate college work. Yet in grad school no one much cares what you think, so long as you're not a clymer about it.
There was a controversy involving a college instructor out in California in the 90's. Maybe the name will come to me in a minute. Oh, yeah, it was Dean Kenyon. Anyway, Kenyon's department objected that he was teaching ID in his intro-level biology courses. At one point in the negotiations his department noted that their main objection was that intro courses should restrict themselves to established theory, but if Kenyon agreed to forgo teaching ID there the department would give him senior (or post-grad, I don't remember) seminars especially devoted to the topic.
Kenyon turned this down. So here Kenyon had the choice, on the one hand, of discussing ID, superficially and for a few days, with general students, virtually none of whom would chance to take up research oriented science careers, and none of whom would be equipped to debate, refine, apply, or otherwise help advance Intelligent Design. On the other hand he had the opportunity to engage students with ID in detail and for a full semester, and furthermore these would be advanced students who were already on a track toward research careers, or who had already begun them. These would also be students would be equipped, at least to some degree, to help develop a scientific theory. In any case it would be an opportunity to recruit students who might then devote a portion of their subsequent careers to the subject.
Now I understand that maybe Kenyon had a point to make, and so he didn't want to give ground. But this was simply too good an opportunity to pass up. No scientist advocating a fringe idea, who genuinely believed in it's scientific potential, would turn down such an opportunity. Recruitment is KEY in getting a new idea off the ground, and young scientists just starting their careers are a fertile ground.
But the fact is that virtually ALL creationists focus almost exclusively on secondary level education, or undergrad level college at best. They don't even seem to care about real science: that is the working profession. Oh, they pretend to, but they don't really. They have all sorts of excuses for focusing on high schools instead. Notice your own sour grapes attitude, that it (evolutionary science) is a uncrackable conspiracy of cowed functionaries who fear to challenge the official "dogma". No uncommitted person believes that nonsense for a minute. (I don't even believe you really believe it, not deep down. It's a rationalization you reiterate, accept and don't question.)
Like most antievolutionists you've just written off actual science (science as practiced by working scientists doing original research) because you don't really care about it. Your interest is in indoctrinating non-scientists, particularly children.
And yet you seem to believe that this will have some effect on science down the line somewhere. Get a clue. It won't. It doesn't work that way. Again it's like thinking the Red Sox can actually win the World Series if only the sports pages pretend they did. But it's what really happens on the baseball diamond that counts. Just so with science. It's was happens in the lab that counts. You can't effect that by rewriting textbooks. You can only effect it by DOING science.
Perhaps, but MOST of these will VOTE someday!!!