The Texas Freedom Network’s defense of sound science education was featured this weekend in a New York Times piece about the State Board of Education’s adoption of new biology textbooks — and, no surprise, anti-science pressure groups are hopping mad about it. Check out this rant from the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based organization that promotes the […]
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)
Anti-Evolution Fanatics Fail at the Ballot Box, Turn to the Courts
The evolution wars aren’t just a Texas phenomenon. On Thursday a group called Citizens for Objective Public Education filed a federal lawsuit to block Kansas from using multistate curriculum standards that treat evolution as established, mainstream science. From an Associated Press article: The lawsuit argues that the new standards will cause Kansas public schools to […]
Don McLeroy Responds
Don McLeroy, the arch-creationist former chairman of the State Board of Education, is displeased over how some folks have interpreted his public hearing testimony last week about proposed new biology textbooks for Texas high schools. Here’s how the San Antonio Current describes his testimony in a story published online today: While McLeroy described some of the evolution […]
SMU Prof Tears Apart Official Texas Review of Leading Biology Textbook
Anti-evolution activists have been alarmingly influential in the state’s official review process for proposed high school biology textbooks in Texas, but truly qualified reviewers have also been part of the process. One of the best examples of the latter is Ron Wetherington, an evolutionary anthropologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Wetherington is not just a […]
TFN in the News … A LOT
TFN has been in the news in bunches during the past few weeks due to our #StandUp4Science campaign and related efforts. Below you’ll find those press hits. Excuse us if we’ve missed a few, we’ll be adding more as we come across them. Plus, we expect some new ones will be published soon. And don’t […]