With just a month go before the March 4 primary elections, challenger Rita Ashley is outspending — by far — incumbent David Bradley in the Republican primary race for the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) District 7 seat in Southeast Texas. Ashley lost to Bradley in the 2012 GOP primary. She is a former […]
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)
TFN's Cameo in Tuesday Night's Bill Nye-Ken Ham 'Debate'
We were pleased to hear the Texas Freedom Network come up in Tuesday night’s “debate” between science advocate Bill Nye and creationist Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis. Ham brings TFN into the discussion in the clip above, but the full debate video is here. Here’s what Ham had to say about TFN: “Kathy Miller […]
Texas Creationists Are Still Trying to Censor the State's New Biology Textbooks
The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) adopted new biology textbooks for public high schools last fall, but anti-evolution activists are still trying to censor those textbooks. And they seem to be targeting one in particular: Pearson Education’s high school textbook by authors Ken Miller and Joe Levine. Through a request under the Texas Public Information […]
Some Good News: Texas Ed Board Revises Textbook Adoption Rules
This week we got a hopeful sign — at least a little one — that politics might not entirely govern the State Board of Education’s upcoming adoption of new social studies textbooks. Partly in reaction to how anti-evolution activists nearly hijacked the adoption of science textbooks last year, state board members adopted new rules that […]
Texas Textbook Activist Insists Civil Rights Successes Led to 'Burning and Looting,' Slavery Was a Minor Cause of Civil War
Another sign that the social studies textbook adoption in Texas this year is going to be messy: A political activist who helped write new curriculum standards for the state’s public schools in 2009 is insisting that new textbooks under consideration this year should promote his revisionist views on issues such as slavery and the Civil […]
