The evolution wars in Texas are still simmering, but creationists in Kansas have suffered a series of routs in recent years. Chalk up another on Tuesday, when the Kansas State Board of Education adopted new curriculum standards that require students in all grades to learn about evolution and climate change as key scientific concepts. Creationists […]
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)
Texas SBOE Vice Chair Ratliff Rips Sen. Patrick Again Over CSCOPE Witch Hunt: Bullying and Burning Books
Texas State Board of Education Vice Chairman Thomas Ratliff, R-Mount Pleasant, has already made clear his disgust over the political witch hunt that forced the state’s Education Service Centers to stop writing lesson plans in their CSCOPE curriculum management system. In May, for example, he tore into Senate Education Committee Chairman Dan Patrick, R-Houston, for […]
Political Activist: 'CSCOPE Must Die'
#CSCOPE MUST DIE…..SAVETEXASEDUCATION FROM THE PROGRESSIVES That’s a tweet this morning from one of the political activists who has helped organize the right-wing witch hunt against the CSCOPE curriculum management system. She absurdly claims that CSCOPE’s lessons (written by current and retired Texas teachers) are anti-American and are being used to indoctrinate kids into communism […]
Local Writer Pleads: Stop the Political War on CSCOPE, Deal with the Real Problems Facing Public Schools
A writer for the Wise County Messenger near Fort Worth makes some good points in a column on the CSCOPE “controversy” that tea party activists and other right-wing activists have been pushing across the state. It’s worth a read. After attending a community meeting where activists promised to provide the “truth” about CSCOPE, writer Brian […]
Dan Patrick Shades the Truth about His CSCOPE Witch Hunt
The right-wing witch hunt over the CSCOPE curriculum tool used in hundreds of Texas public and private schools has been filled with bizarre distortions from the beginning. But weeks after the state’s Education Service Centers bowed to political pressure and announced that they would stop writing lesson plans for school districts, state Sen. Dan Patrick […]
