At least one candidate for the Texas State Board of Education apparently agrees with former board chairman Don McLeroy’s infamous demand that “somebody’s gotta stand up to experts!”
An email — apparently from the Collin County Conservative Republicans PAC — includes a questionnaire and answers from state board candidate Gail Spurlock, R-Richardson. One of the questions:
Do you think that our current textbooks are based upon facts? Are they politically unbiased? Comment, please.
In her answer, Spurlock expresses concerns that Texas hasn’t yet adopted new social studies textbooks based on curriculum standards the state board approved in 2010:
“Most of the ‘old’ Social Studies textbooks were written by college professors, and it is well known that the largest percentage (90+) of these professors are liberal Democrats. It has been my general observation that Democrats impose politics on everything. This is one of the reasons for all of the work that was recently done by the SBOE and by the many volunteers who were involved in the public hearings to improve curricula.”
Is Spurlock suggesting that the state board reject textbooks written by college professors? Who in the world does she think should write them? Amateurs and political propagandists like David Barton? Politicians on the state board?
And Spurlock’s claim that “Democrats impose politics on everything” is laughable considering the state board’s heavily politicized rewrite of the social studies standards two years ago. The conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute has called the board’s new American history standards a “politicized distortion of history” with “misrepresentations at every turn.” In the introduction to its report about those standards, Fordham explained that the right-wing majority on the state board “displayed overt hostility and contempt for historians and scholars, whom they derided as insidious activists for a liberal academic establishment.”
Apparently, Spurlock’s contempt for expertise would help her fit right in.
Read more about the candidates and state board districts on our SBOE election watch page here.
I’ll be keeping my eye on SBOE district 10. Rebecca Osborne — best of luck to you!
As we found out about the global warming scare, scientists are always wrong or immoral one way or another about something.
The global warming fiasco as perpetrated by some of the biggest minds in science to bilk the public into thinking global warming is created by people instead of cyclical activities. Found out by released documents, these charlatans were outed to show their fraud. Then as time goes by and more discoveries are made by Anthropologists, showing truth to what the Bible says and then the discovery of DNA complexities, you would have to be an idiot to think the world was formed by a BIG Bang or hatched out of pond scum.
Both Creationism and Evolution need to be taught side by side with competent instructors from both sides giving their opinions. Let the kids decide which path to follow.
John, it is obvious you have no idea what you are talking about. You claim fraud, but you probably haven’t read any of the global warming abstracts. Also your statement that anthropologists are making discoveries proving the Bible are equally erroneous, which anthropologists?
John, you are making false accusations based on your faith, not fact. Put forth facts and I’ll change my mind.
John Cook, every time you post here, I think surely you must be attempting parody. A challenge for you: Attempt to be more ridiculous. Bet you can’t.
What appears to be the full set of questions/answers to Ms. Spurlock can be found here; she is the only SBOE candidate the North Texas Tea Party has listed as “TeaApproved”. Together, these help move her more solidly still into the “Very Silly Party” part of the spectrum. Her answer on Evolution isn’t quite as utterly cracked; ” All theories must be taught as theory, and pros and cons of every theory should be included in the study of every theory. Evolution is and should be presented as a theory and alternative theories should also be presented.” (Doesn’t Texas include the formal definition of “Theory” and the notion of distinguishing scientific from colloquial uses in its science standards like Florida does yet? Anyway….) It’s standard “teach the controversy” tripe there, but not an outright young-earth position. Her answers on Abstinence-only, Common Core Standards, and the state’s ranking in education quality aren’t exactly much more reassuring.
Google turns up an old post from November with some similar questions to Tincy Miller, apparently from “a private report that was sent by [Susan Fletcher] to the board members of Golden Corridor Republican Women […] (privately – not originally intended for public distribution)”. Apparently, Tincy Miller wasn’t purely silly enough for the GCRW. (TFN Insider may have posted about this before, but I’m not finding the entry.)
I’d also note that there was an entry on what looks to be Ms. Spurlock’s blog back in early February that I find … well, indecipherably bizarre.
Hi. This is Charles. I am bored and have decided to go over to the Dark Side of the force to express the conservative opinions that people like John Cook are so poor at expressing. I will be posting as my alter ego Charlene.
Oh, this is going to be good.
Ms. Spurlock is correct about college professors being too liberal and bringing a liberal social perspective into secondary school textbooks. I will give you an example.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the American people were indifferent to American Indians or just plain did not like them. The true historical perspective was the one that we saw on our black and white television sets. You will recall that they were a red-skinned minority that was always attacking a wagon train full of white men, white women, and white children who were doing nothing more than just minding their own business and heading west to find a little piece of land they could call their own and farm. You could turn the TV to any channel you wanted, and the redskins were gunning down some settler, scalping his wife, spearing his child, and setting their farmhouse on fire with torches. Now, admittedly, this was all Hollywood scripting per se, but the thing that you forget is that this scripting was based on the real historical legacy about the relationship between the white man and American Indian that was handed down from hard won experience between 1492 and about 1900.
Now, as a specific example, I offer up George Armstrong Custer as an example of where things have gone wrong in K-12 textbooks because of liberal influence. When I was a kid back in the 1950s, Custer was presented universally to students as a bonafide American hero who ought to be emulated by every school child in America. The emphasis was on a brave American soldier who rode with his 200 or so men out to the Little Big Horn to bust up some rumored nefarious Indian activity. Suddenly, he and his men were surrounded by 10,000 American Indian warriors. The Indians attacked from all sides. Did Custer and his men run. No siree. They did what any red-blooded American would do. They stood their ground and fought the savage onslaught just as a small band of ancient Spartans would have done—-and in so doing provided a shinihg and never to be forgotten historical example to every American school boy of what he must be prepared to do when the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian heathen hordes swoop down upon him from the ridge.
Now here is basic, old-time, conservative historical truth that we need to get back to in our social studies textbooks with regard to the American Indian. In the old time textbooks, the principle of Manifest Destiny was taught to every American school child as the gospel truth that it really was. From the moment the first white man set foot on American soil, it was the white man’s Manifest Destiny to kill as many American Indians as possible to make “safe living room” and move the white cultural juggernaut west from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. It was more than just destiny. It was God’s own personal will. As we know now, the American Indian had been nothing but a Godless, violent, heathen savage from the first moment he stepped across the Bering straight until Columbus arrived 10,000 years later. They performed horrid human sacrifices and all manner of unspeakable evil. We hold to the belief that Manifest Destiny and the killing off of the American Indian was God’s own punishment delivered with heat to these deserving heathen savages. Thank the Lord!!! We have them corraled on reservations now for our own protection, and we keep them as debased and as poor as church mice now so they will never be able to rise up and kill our people again—and most of them are still mindless savages who would do it again if we gave them half a chance. The Redman hates the white man and always will. Now, this is the historical reality we need to be teaching our children in school—just like we did in the old days.
But what did the sugary little liberals do to our textbooks? The great American hero G.A. Custer was torn down by finding every awful thing that could be said about him and bringing it into the textbooks. For example, they pointed out that he graduated last in his class at West Point. They pointed out that he was constantly loaded down with demerits for lack of discipline in his cadet years. He was also derided as a macho, foolhardy, and reckless buffoon ready to charge without thinking into impossible military situations—and his penchant for idiocy just finally caught up with him at the Little Big Horn. Now, I ask you. Is that any way to treat a bonafide American hero and all those poor soldier boys that lost their lives defending me and you against those savages? Why it was as bad as all those demonstrators against the Viet-Nam War. Why, it is just outrageous, but that is what you would expect from liberal college professors who hate America and its real history.
What about the American Indian? One day back in the 1960s, some liberal university anthropologist put forward the idea that these heathen animals might just possibly be human beings. Then they were advancing radical ideas like they might have feelings, might love their children, might have a sense of community, and a heartfelt attachment to land they thought was theirs. Tell that crap to the settler whose wife had just been scalped!!!! We need to get back to the old days in school where our textbooks tell our children what these heathen, Godless savages were really like, how much God hated them, and how he used our white ancestors to punish them for their manifold sins against Jesus and the rest of immigrant white humanity.
Whenever a wingnut throws out a “fact” you can bet it’s either wrong or totally fabricated.
90+, she said?
Nope. I checked out as many surveys of political affiliation among college faculty as I could find (3-4, I know, small sample) but “liberal” faculty fall around 46% with another 40% or so “moderate.” But, none of the studies I ran across identified political party affiliation. My guess would be that “independent” would be as large a group as either “republican” or “democratic.”
Yes, a small number called themselves “conservative” around 9% but right above that is “slightly conservative” at 10%. By inverse logic and guilt by association a wingnut could claim that anyone who labels themselves anything except “conservative” is a flaming liberal Democrat.
However, by that same logic, only 1% called themselves “extremely conservative” so why not use 99% ? Makes sense to me!
Wow! Do Charlene and Stephen Colbert drink from the same trough?? Yet I’m betting that some readers will take Charlene too literally and castigate her/him. Keep on truckin’.
On Spurlock: even in conservative Republican north Dallas, mouths will be agape as she joins the rediculist! Keep on truckin’.
Well, let’s just put it like this. Back in the 1960s, when we kids were choosing up sides to play cowboys and Indians, nobody wanted to be the Indian. Now, liberal college professors are trying to make our kids want to be the Indian—you know—feel right about it—feel secure inside that Redskin. Now that is part of what’s wrong with America today. Don’t you fine folks over at the Texas Eagle Forum feel the same way?
I think this lady is on to something. It is also a well-known fact that drunken hobos are evenly split 50-50 among Democrats and Republicans and thus would be the perfect choice for unbiased textbook revisions.