Barbara Cargill, who chairs the Texas State Board of Education and is running for re-election to her District 8 seat this year, still thinks she is one of a minority of “conservatives” on a state board in which 11 of 15 members are Republicans. And she also wants voters to know that she’s working to […]
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)
Handful of Contests See the Most Money in Texas State Board of Education Races
In the 1990s, San Antonio businessman James Leininger — the religious right’s sugar daddy in Texas — poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into State Board of Education (SBOE) races. That money helped hard-right social conservatives build a multi-year campaign to take control of the board — and turned subsequent board debates over textbooks and […]
Dolores Huerta Cheats Death, Earns Medal of Freedom
Civil rights activist Dolores Huerta has earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom despite being alive, the White House announced last week. Huerta will receive the nation’s highest civilian honor at a ceremony later this year along with the still-living astronaut John Glenn, still-breathing former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, still-has-a-pulse musician Bob Dylan, still-walking-the-earth former […]
TFN’s Kathy Miller Talks about New Documentary on the Texas SBOE
Austin’s KVUE-TV has a story this evening about “The Revisionaries,” the new documentary focusing on the Texas State Board of Education that premiered this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller talked to KVUE about how the state board has put politics and personal agendas ahead of […]
‘Reality by majority vote’
Key moment from last night’s Colbert Report interview with Don “Somebody’s gotta stand up to experts” McLeroy? That probably came when host Stephen Colbert asked the former Texas State Board of Education chairman who decides what information gets into textbooks: Colbert: “I imagined that experts wrote textbooks, but in fact it gets voted on at […]
