What a Politicized Texas History Textbook Looks Like

On Tuesday a number of university scholars spoke out at a State Board of Education (SBOE) public hearing on proposed social studies textbooks for Texas public schools. Among those scholars was Dr. Jacqueline Jones, chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History this year for […]

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Live-Blogging the Texas Social Studies Textbooks Public Hearing

You can watch today’s public hearing at the State Board of Education live online here. 3:50 – The board hearing just ended. Board members will discuss the textbooks tomorrow (Wednesday). We’ll be here. 3:47 – Cargill and other board members keep arguing that nothing can be done about the flawed curriculum standards adopted in 2010. So in their […]

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Proposed Texas Textbooks Get the Facts Wrong on Climate Change, Promote Denialism

When it comes to Texas textbook adoptions, attacks on science seem to be almost an annual affair now. So with the State Board of Education considering new social studies textbooks for Texas public schools this fall, we asked the National Center for Science Education to check what those texts say about climate change. The news is […]

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No Surprise: Right-wing Activists Respond to Davis News with Sneering Contempt

The long-running war the religious right has waged on women and their freedom to decide for themselves whether and when to have children found a new target this weekend: the acknowledgement by state Sen. Wendy Davis, the Democratic nominee for Texas governor, that she had two abortions in the 1990s because of truly heartbreaking medical reasons. The first was […]

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Ted Cruz's Dad Pushes Offensive Racial History Lesson

Rafael Cruz, a right-wing evangelical Texas minister and the father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, has some peculiar, offensive and absurdly inaccurate things to say on race and American political history. Speaking at a Western Williamson County Republican Club meeting near Austin on Aug. 21, Rafael Cruz argued that black people “need to be educated” about Democrats and […]

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