Just when you think you’ve seen it all… “Take bones,” he says, offering a brief description of the collagen and amino acids in bones as an example of biological complexity. “Intuitively people have a tough time thinking nothing guided this. Are we supposed to believe that all of a sudden, say on April 1, five […]
Textbook Censorship
The Texas State Board of Education decides what every student in Texas public schools will learn from kindergarten through high school. The board does so by adopting curriculum standards and textbooks for public schools in the state.
For decades, far-right politicians on the State Board of Education and their extremist allies have taken advantage of this flawed system to dismiss the advice of experts and scholars. They have instead worked to inject their personal views into textbooks on everything from evolution and climate change to the history of slavery, civil rights, and separation of church and state.
Resources
- Report Reveals Serious Flaws in Social Studies Textbooks
- The State Board of Education: Dragging Texas Schools into the Culture Wars (2008 report)
- Evolution, Creationism & Public Schools: Surveying Texas Scientists (2008 report)
- Culture Wars and the Classroom (2010 report)
- Senate Bill 6: Changes in the Textbook Adoption Process (2011 report)
- Texas Science Curriculum Standards: Challenges (2012 report)
- Science Textbook Review (2013 report)
- Social Studies Textbook Review (2014 report)
A Board Divided by Faith or Contempt?
We have heard the Texas State Board of Education‘s far-right members claim over and over again that they are unfairly attacked for their fundamentalist religious views. They do so even as they seek to inject those narrow views into curriculum standards for our state’s public schools, whether it’s by promoting creationist arguments against evolution or objecting […]
Getting in Touch with ‘Their Inner Children’
The political jousting between Bill White and Rick Perry over the Texas State Board of Education‘s controversial revision of social studies curriculum standards is legitimate in the electoral arena. It’s certainly preferable to dragging political agendas into our children’s classrooms, which the state board has been doing during the curriculum revision. But what the Republican Party of Texas did […]
Dunbar Takes New Trip on Extremism Train
Good grief. Cynthia Dunbar has demonstrated once again the kind of religious and political extremism that currently dominates the Texas State Board of Education — and the reason academic experts and classroom teachers should be guiding the process of revising curriculum standards for public schools, not politicians with personal agendas. Speaking last week on a far-right […]
Pants on Fire, Ken Mercer
Maybe Texas State Board of Education member Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, should work on controlling his temper. When you’re mad, as most of us probably heard from our mamas growing up, you often say things that, well, aren’t always completely accurate. In an e-mail from his re-election campaign today, Mercer charges that the “major print […]
