The Week in Quotes (Feb. 25 – March 3)

Here are some of the week’s most notable quotes.

Edward Countryman and Emile Lester, two of the contributors to a new TFN Education Fund report on Texas’ flawed social studies standards.

“It’s important that our public schools prepare students to be informed citizens with a fact-based understanding of our nation’s history and government. We can’t heal divisions and tackle other challenges that persist in our country otherwise. That common understanding is harder to reach when politicians hijack our children’s public schools to promote their own ideological agendas. The result is indoctrination, not education.”

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Texas House Speaker Joe Straus

“Does a culture of voting sound evil to you?”

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Austin Independent School District trustee Yasmin Wagner, on voting to rename five district buildings named for men who served in either the Confederate military or government.

“What was finally the clarifying moment for me was to realize that at the end of the day, this really isn’t about those individual men. It really is about the spirit with which those names were placed on that building, what was happening during the time that those names were appointed to those buildings.”

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Brett Shipp, a former journalist and one of several Democratic candidates vying to unseat powerful Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions.

“I loved my job, but then Donald Trump got elected.”

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Dr. Ed Countryman, one of the contributors to a new TFN Education Fund report that outlines the distortions in the social studies curriculum for Texas’ public schools.

“[Board members] threw out what teachers and scholars suggested not to be in there and threw in a garbage bag of this, that and something else. I am not going to say that somebody is deliberately lying [to public school students.] I am going to say that the standards that have been produced are terrible and that Texas has a chance to fix them.”