How much do you know about the far-right bloc on the Texas State Board of Education? Take the TFN Quiz and find out! Then share the link with your friends and help spread the word about radicalism on the state board. […]
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)
‘Worst Person in the World’ – Texas Edition
Popular MSNBC host Keith Olbermann turned his withering gaze to Texas last Friday, excoriating Governor Rick Perry for even considering public school-hater Cynthia Dunbar for chair of the state’s Board of Education. Dunbar’s outlandish comments landed the governor the top spot on Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” list. You won’t want to miss this […]
McLeroy Defends Unqualified ‘Experts’
Don McLeroy — the College Station Republican whose nomination as chairman of the State Board of Education the Texas Senate rejected in May — is defending unqualified, board-appointed “experts” who want important historical figures like César Chavez and Thurgood Marshall removed from social studies curriculum standards for public schools. McLeroy is quoted in a Dallas Morning News […]
The Right Pushes for Dunbar Appointment
One of the Ten Commandments forbids lying, but far-right pressure groups seem to think it doesn’t apply to them. Mistruths are plentiful in their campaign to get Cynthia Dunbar named chair of the Texas State Board of Education. The biggest lie is that opponents of her appointment are discriminating against Dunbar because of her religious […]
Blacklisting César Chavez
It didn’t take long for the absurdly unqualified ideologues appointed to a social studies curriculum panel by the Texas State Board of Education to start playing politics with our kids’ education. Two far-right members of the so-called “expert” panel guiding the curriculum revision are demanding that César Chavez — the renowned community and labor organizer and civil […]
