This is just nuts. The Houston Chronicle is reporting that plans by President Obama to address students across the country next week have right-wingers — including Texas State Board of Education members — foaming at the mouth about “political indoctrination” and students being “ostracized” if they don’t agree with the president. One Houston-area parent tells the […]
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)
Race and Social Studies in Texas
It has been increasingly difficult to ignore the racially charged statements that keep coming from far-right members of the State Board of Education and their appointees to panels helping revise social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools. In fact, their statements are becoming increasingly incendiary, as if they are hoping to provoke a bitter and […]
The Science Debate: A Win or a Loss?
Steven Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, reviews the recent battle over the state’s new public school science curriculum standards and asks: “Did we win or did we lose?” The results, he writes, were mixed. We think this paragraph, in particular, hits the nail on the head: The problem was this: The eight pro-science […]
Quotas for Conservatives in Social Studies?
The San Antonio Express-News has this story up online today: Texas high school students would learn about such significant individuals and milestones of conservative politics as Newt Gingrich and the rise of the Moral Majority — but nothing about liberals — under the first draft of new standards for public school history textbooks. And the […]
Playing the Victim
Texas State Board of Education Chairwoman Gail Lowe’s peculiar ideas about “citizenship” weren’t the only things that bothered us in the Associated Press article we noted yesterday. Ms. Lowe also suggested that she and fellow members of the board’s religious-right faction were somehow being victimized because of their faith: “Most members of our board are […]
