The religious right’s war to undermine teaching about evolutionary science has spilled over the state line from Texas into Louisiana. Today a Louisiana panel is considering proposed biology textbooks that religious-right groups criticize as pro-evolution. Barbara Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and a co-founder of the Louisiana Coalition for Science, is very concerned: […]
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)
Check TFN’s Voter Guide — Then VOTE!
On Tuesday voters head to the polls in important elections for state and national offices. Races for the Texas State Board of Education are especially important this year. For the past four years, a powerful faction of political and religious extremists on the state board has turned nearly every critical debate on curriculum standards and […]
Don McLeroy’s Swan Song
Donna Garner, the serial e-mailer ideologically aligned with the Texas State Board of Education‘s faction of religious extremists, is distributing to her e-mail list an extended excerpt from what she reports is a speech by state board member Don McLeroy. McLeroy apparently made the speech on October 23 at a Bastrop County Tea Party event. […]
An Appeal for Hope
The research compiled by the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University in San Marcos is heartbreaking: since 2004, at least six Texas teens have been so tormented by bullying and abuse at school that they have taken their own lives. Another attempted suicide by jumping from a two-and-a-half-story balcony. Some of the students […]
More Bad History from Don McLeroy
Right-wing websites are still hailing the Texas State Board of Education‘s passage of a resolution that attacks Islam and falsely claims that social studies textbooks are anti-Christian and pro-Muslim. And state board member Don McLeroy, the dentist from Bryan/College Station, is still pretending to be an expert in history (in addition to science, economics, political […]
