9:50 a.m. – Board member Ken Mercer: “Will learning ‘weaknesses’ of evolution make someone a lesser doctor?” 9:53 – Board member David Bradley says teachers have also been intimidated when they want to teach about “weaknesses” of evolution. He says he wanted to bring Ben Stein (from the movie “Expelled”) to speak about that at […]
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)
Live Blogging the SBOE Hearing on Science
8:30 a.m. – The Texas State Board of Education board room near the Capitol in Austin is packed this morning, with folks from around the state waiting to testify on proposed new public school science curriculum standards — and the pressure groups pushing creationism are out in force. The Discovery Institute in Seattle and Texans for […]
Sweeping Away the SBOE’s Authority
State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, has just filed legislation that would strip the Texas State Board of Education of all authority assigned to it by statute. Among the board’s powers that would go away: setting curriculum standards and adopting textbooks. That authority would be transferred to the Texas Education Agency. The only authority the board would […]
The SBOE’s ‘Hall of Shame’
In the Texas Freedom Network’s nearly 14 years of existence, we have seen plenty of nonsense come out of the Texas State Board of Education. Board members have attacked health textbooks for including even basic information on contraception and photographs of women in professional careers (rather than sufficiently promoting stay-at-home moms as the ideal). They […]
Will the SBOE Get Called into the Principal’s Office?
It appears that Texas lawmakers are beginning to look at ways to rein in an out-of-control State Board of Education. Today state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, pre-filed a bill for the coming legislative session that would make state board elections nonpartisan. Recent controversies make clear the need to take ideology and partisanship out of races for […]
