Dunbar to Head SBOE?

Could it get any worse? Could someone who despises public education soon be heading up the board tasked with managing the Texas public school system? Well, the buzz suggesting that Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, may be the next chair of the Texas State Board of Education is growing louder, writes Hearst Capitol bureau reporter Gary Scharrer for the Houston […]

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Defeating Ignorance, AIDS and Teen Pregnancy

A Texas Freedom Network Education Fund report released in February revealed that more than nine in 10 Texas school districts teach students nothing about responsible pregnancy and disease prevention when it comes to sex except for abstinence-only-until-marriage. One of the most common strategies in abstinence-only curricula, the study’s authors found, was wildly exaggerating the failure […]

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Taking on David Barton

The July/August issue of Church and State magazine from Americans United for Separation of Church and State has an excellent cover story about David Barton. Barton, you will recall, is the head of the Christian-right group WallBuilders, which argues that separation of church and state is a “myth” and that our laws and society overall should […]

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Whose Values?

We wonder whether many of the foot soldiers in the religious-right movement will ever wake up to how they have been used. Over the years we’ve all seen how religious-right pressure groups wade into areas that would seem to have nothing to do with promoting “traditional family values” (whatever that means to them) and other […]

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TFN Monitors Special Legislative Session

What most observers expect to be a short special session of the Texas Legislature begins today in Austin. Gov. Rick Perry called the session to deal with lawmakers’ failure this spring to reauthorize the Texas Department of Transportation and four other state agencies scheduled to end operations under the state’s system of periodic Sunset review. […]

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