The political antics of the far-right faction that now controls the Texas State Board of Education has been attracting a lot of attention in the press. The faction has managed to make work on everything from adopting mathematics textooks to revising language arts and science curriculum standards strained and controversial. Unnecessary fights over those and other issues […]
Recent Blogs
Empty Standards Mean Trouble for Public School Bible Classes
Last year the Texas Legislature told the State Board of Education to create new, specific curriculum standards for high school elective courses about the Bible’s influence in history and literature. That was one of a number of safeguards for religious freedom that lawmakers put into the bill. In March, however, the state board decided it […]
Posner on Sharlet
Sarah Posner, who compiles The American Prospect’s always-informative “The FundamentaList,” a round-up of religious-right stories each week, interviews Jeff Sharlet, an expert on the media’s coverage of religion, about his new book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. As Posner writes: The Family exposes the inner workings of an elite […]
Were the Founding Fathers Creationists?
Many times we stumble across op-ed pieces that argue in favor of including “intelligent design”/creationism in public school science classes. We usually don’t include them in our Daily News Clips because there are far too many of them and we don’t want to add fuel to their fire. But today is a good day to […]
Sec. Spellings, Meet the Facts
A Republican Congress instituted the first federally funded private school voucher program, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, in the District of Columbia in 2004. The program was a political victory for far-right groups and individuals such as voucher sugardaddy James Leininger of Texas. But it looked likely to fade out of existence due to the efforts […]
