It’s always important to look for the real motivations behind witch hunts. Example: Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) Chairwoman Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, wants to use the right’s manufactured “outrage” over the CSCOPE curriculum tool to loosen restrictions on the ability of SBOE members to censor textbooks for public schools. Writing in her September […]
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)
Prof Tears Apart Official Texas Textbook Review, Pt. 2
Yet another Texas science professor has stepped forward to challenge one of the inaccurate textbook reviews prepared by an SBOE-appointed science review panel (see last week’s installment here). This one comes from Dr. Rick Hammer, a professor of botany, ecology, and environmental ethics at Hardin-Simmons University, and he zeros in on the misleading claims about climate change […]
Texas Ed Board's CSCOPE Review Could Lead to More Political Warfare over Instructional Materials
Members of the State Board of Education’s (SBOE) “ad hoc” committee appointed to oversee the review of CSCOPE — the curriculum management system used in hundreds of Texas public and private schools — say they want that review to be fair, open and based on facts. But the official form reviewers will use to evaluate the […]
About Those Texas Science Reviewers, Ms. Cargill…
“The dietician actually has a degree in food science technology, and they have to take all kinds of science courses, I know, at colleges. And then the person you’re referring to is the retired businessman specializing in finance was the gentleman with the doctorate from Princeton in chemical engineering, so he’s certainly qualified. I’m looking […]
TFN Spokesman Talks about Texas Science Textbook Battle on MSNBC
Ryan Valentine, Texas Freedom Network’s deputy director, spoke on MSNBC today about our work defending science in this year’s textbook adoption at the State Board of Education. Check it out and see how Ryan puts to lie claims by anti-evolution activists that they just want students to be able to “ask questions”: Visit NBCNews.com for […]
