Even before the Texas State Board of Education took up its expected debate today over what students will learn about separation about church and state in their social studies classrooms, board member Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, made her position clear. She offered the board’s opening prayer this morning and removed any doubt about what she and […]
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)
America vs. the World?
Yesterday’s debate over social studies curriculum standards at the Texas State Board of Education mostly illuminated political biases of board members more than it did good education policies. Many conservative board members opposed, for example, restoring civil rights and labor leader Dolores Huerta to third-grade standards because they say she’s a socialist and isn’t an […]
Texas SBOE vs. Dolores Huerta
Dolores Huerta doesn’t have a lot of fans at the Texas State Board of Education. In January the co-founder of United Farm Workers of America was stripped from a Grade 3 list of “historical and contemporary figures who have exemplified good citizenship.” Earlier today, the board again clashed over the inclusion of Huerta, with social […]
Keeping Communism Out of First Grade?
A Wall Street Journal piece today on the Texas State Board of Education’s politicization of proposed social studies curriculum standards notes one particularly outrageous change the board’s far-right faction made (which we have already reported about) back in January. Check out the quote from board member Don McLeroy: Debate about certain provisions has been intense. […]
Why Does the Far Right Hate Democracy?
Texas State Board of Education member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, has written a new essay defending absurd, politicized changes the board is making to the social studies curriculum for public schools. We have discussed in the past many of the points she touches on in the essay. But we haven’t said much about one in […]
