Let’s revisit the success of Texas State Board of Education member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, in requiring social studies students to analyze Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address. The Texas Education Agency has posted the revised American history curriculum standards (as of the January changes) here. The relevant standard for eighth-grade American history reads: “(A)nalyze […]
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)
Exposing the Discovery Institute
Among the most maddening things about the assault on science education — especially resistance to teaching public school students about evolution without watering it down with arguments rooted in junk science — is the rank dishonesty and religious bigotry that motivate anti-evolution extremists. In yet another excellent Huffington Post essay, Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy […]
Does the SBOE Think Treason Is Patriotic?
The Texas State Board of Education‘s approval in January of a requirement that students study the ideas in the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis hasn’t received a lot of attention. Far-right board member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, proposed that addition to the eighth-grade American history curriculum standards. In states that once made up the […]
Brian Russell: Public Schools Hater
When Cynthia “Public Schools Are Tools of Perversion” Dunbar recruited Austin attorney Brian Russell to run for the seat she is vacating on the Texas State Board of Education, the obvious question was whether Russell shares her contempt for public education. We got a partial answer when it was revealed that Russell home-schools his kids. […]
Faith and Evolution: Redefining the Divide
Is the primary divide in the debate over teaching about evolution one between scientists and people of faith? No, writes the founder of the Clergy Letter Project, an organization that demonstrates that faith and science are not inherently at odds with each other. In his piece for Huffington Post, Michael Zimmerman writes that the real divide […]
