Good news. But too late. Today, the old board is still in office, and the AP news service reports this:
A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic."
In explaining her vote against the changes, Democrat Mavis Knight said that the majority had inserted what they wanted into the standards "regardless as to whether or not it's appropriate."
There seems little hope that the Texas domination over textbook publishing will decline any time soon. As explained in an earlier post: it's too expensive for publishers to have multiple versions of a subject for different states. So the state that buys the most textbooks dominates the content. However, perhaps economic hard times will ride to the rescue.Decisions by the board – made up of lawyers, a dentist and a weekly newspaper publisher among others – can affect textbook content nationwide because Texas is one of publishers' biggest clients.
Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board's most prominent Democrats . . .By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding "American exceptionalism" and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.
Some board members themselves acknowledged this morning that the process for revising curriculum standards in Texas is seriously broken, with politics and personal agendas dominating just about every decision.
Textbooks now cost so much that more and more schools are turning to internet materials instead. The beauty of that is that no one dominates the field. Choices will be plenty, and new curricula of all sorts of persuasions can be easily produced.
So let the religious conservatives have their version of history for their schools. I'd love to see the "secular humanist" version of American history.
Ralph
In NC they decided they were no longer going to teach the Civil War in NC History. But we'll get 3 years worth of studying pirates - Aaaaargh.
ReplyDeleteThere has been some backtracking after a public outcry, but the fact anyone could even conceive of this is chilling.
richard
Where have you seen that schools are replacing textbooks with internet materials? I haven't seen that happening yet, primarily because the text book industry is big and incestuous.
ReplyDeleteOne of the scary things about Apple's new ipad is that they have cut deals with all major textbook publishers to do electronic downloads of their books. What this effectively does is destroy the used textbook market, because with electronic publishing you can make students buy a 'new' version every year. You only have to make minimal changes, easily done on ebooks, to make the old book obsolete. And there is no way to pass along an electronic textbook, unless you pass along the reading device.
So these Texas textbooks will soon be distributed via the internet and , because of download ease, become the accepted standard.
What's amazing to me is how little concerned people seem to be about this decision. Yeah, there's some initial outrage. But it fades and people go on to other issues.They don't recognize how dangerous it is, the rewriting of history.
richard