The usually voluble Gov. Rick Perry has made essentially no public comment about how the far-right wing of the Texas State Board Education engineered a now nationally infamous rewrite of social studies curriculum standards in May. We believe the governor’s silence represents a fundamental failure of accountability to Texas parents. […]
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)
The Whole Truth about the Confederacy
One of the more interesting — if not enlightening — debates about social studies curriculum standards at the May State Board of Education meeting in Austin focused on the avowed importance of including a study of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address alongside the first and second inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address of Abraham […]
Barton Plays Historian Again (Poorly)
OneNewNow (“the day’s stories from a biblical perspective”) once again features David Barton, the prominent right-wing political activist who pretends to be an accomplished historian, in a story about social studies curriculum standards in Texas public schools. You can read the whole thing for yourself, but a few passages stuck out for us. First, Barton […]
Church, State and Cynthia Dunbar
In an article on the website of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, Texas State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar is pretending to give history and constitutional lessons about the principle of church-state separation. The article explains that Dunbar’s critics — it focuses largely on the Texas Freedom Network — have been critical about her tasteless […]
Embracing Extremism in the Texas GOP
UPDATE: Now we find out that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is coming to the Texas GOP convention in June. See more at the end of this post. Don McLeroy lost his chairmanship of the State Board of Education last year because he was more interested in promoting his own narrow ideological views than facts and […]
