Here’s a familiar headline: “Fight brews over social studies textbooks.” It’s that time again, when our fractious State Board of Education reviews and adopts textbooks for our 4.7 million public schoolchildren. It’s a high-stakes undertaking, since Texas, with the second-largest public-school population in the country, wields considerable influence over other states’ textbook selections.
The last time the board adopted new social studies materials was in 2002, and it was messy, with conservative members demanding multiple changes, resisting the portrayal of slavery as the major cause of the Civil War and demanding that creationism be taught along with evolution.
And it got worse: By May 2009, with the conservative wing of the 15-member board firmly in the driver’s seat, the Chronicle reported that a livid Leticia Van de Putte, Democratic state senator from San Antonio, told the U.S. Senate that the board, whose chair, a dentist, believed the Earth to be about 6,000 years old, had become “the laughingstock of the nation.”
In March, 2010, after raucous debate, the board approved (in a strictly partisan vote, 10 Republicans over five Democrats) a social studies curriculum that led The New York Times to comment, “ … rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.”
In an essay on the Chronicle op-ed page, Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Foundation, a nonpartisan education and religious freedoms watchdog organization, wrote that those 2010 standards presented a “fundamental problem this time around” because the new textbooks to be adopted this year must be based on those same “deeply flawed” standards.
We agree with Miller that this is indeed a fundamental problem: But the greater problem is that we elect these board members with no guarantees of knowledge or experience in the education field. Consequently, many see it as a stepping-stone to a higher office, or a platform for their ideological or political preferences.
But, as Miller pointed out, there are a few bright spots: Some of the most radical board members have been replaced in the past few years; more educators are on the review panels, and new rules were adopted in January to improve transparency and boost the input of scholars and educators. And an independent review by respected scholars is in the works.
You, too, can be part of this vitally important process: Until November, when the final vote will be taken, the public is invited to offer its comments by email at review.adoption@tea.state.tx.us.
These are all modest gestures, but they’re the best we can do until we finally decide that our children, our investment in the future, should not be left in the hands of elected officials with their own agendas.
— Houston Chronicle
