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 […]
Textbook Censorship
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 […]
Gail Lowe’s Peculiar Ideas about ‘Citizenship’
Texas State Board of Education Chairwoman Gail Lowe has some peculiar views when it comes to teaching students about good citizenship. In her view, labor leader César Chavez and civil rights champion and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall aren’t good role models for that. Right-wing critics want to censor discussion of Chavez and […]
