The audio above is almost as amusing as the clip from “The Revisionaries” in which former Texas State Board of Education Chair Don McLeroy uses a cardboard model to describe how all the animals were able to fit on Noah’s Ark. You know, this one, where at the end all the children pretty much say […]
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)
Creationist Chair of Texas Ed Board Refuses to Explain Her Interference in Science Textbook Review
Was Texas State Board of Education Chair Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, trying to influence the work of the panels reviewing proposed new high school biology textbooks last week? Cargill, a creationist who has insisted that textbooks should teach “another side” when discussing evolution, met with the panels last Wednesday (July 31). We now know that those […]
Texas Ed Board Member Asks: What Was SBOE Chair Cargill Up To?
Our report that Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) Chair Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, appeared to be interfering on Wednesday with the independent teams reviewing proposed new biology textbooks became a topic of discussion at a state board workshop session today. As the session was about to end, SBOE member Marisa Perez, D-San Antonio, expressed her concerns […]
Why Was Creationist Texas Ed Board Chair Barbara Cargill Interfering with the Science Textbook Reviews on Wednesday?
According to at least one observer inside the Austin hotel ballroom where reviewers are going over proposed new science textbooks for Texas public schools, State Board of Education (SBOE) Chairwoman Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, spent much of Wednesday working with those supposedly independent panels. Cargill is one of the state board’s leading evolution critics. During […]
Creationist Demands That Houston Museum Ban Atheists and Science Supporters
OK, so who is being intolerant here? Houston-area creationist David Shormann, author of The Exchange of Truth: Liberating the World from the Lie of Evolution, says members of several Houston organizations who support sound science education are intolerant, anti-Christian bigots. And he wants a Houston museum to bar those groups from using its facilities to educate the […]