The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) has faced national scrutiny and ridicule in recent months for its right-wing revisions to the state’s social studies and history curriculum. Changes have included requiring students to learn the difference between legal and illegal immigration, examine “documents that supported Cold War-era Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” and study prominent right-wing political figures.
This massacre to the state’s educational system is engineered by the SBOE’s bloc of far-right conservatives, who have little to no background in education policy. Members include Cynthia Dunbar, a Republican who has called public education a “tool of perversion.” There’s also Chairman Don McLeroy, a dentist who has stated, “The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel.”
There’s beginning to be a backlash against these far-right members, however. McLeroy lost his primary to a more moderate Republican candidate, and Dunbar is not running for re-election. Yesterday, ThinkProgress spoke to Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau, two Democrats who are running for SBOE in Districts 10 (Dunbar’s area) and 5, respectively. Both of them stated that the SBOE has lost focus and abandoned other areas of its mission in the quest to politicize the Texas’ curriculum, said that constituents are frustrated with the negative attention, and promised to try to repeal the textbook revisions:
Plans to review the far-right changes:
– JENNINGS: The worst case scenario — if they choose to make the changes that they’re proposing this week, at the absolute least, the science textbooks are up for adoption in 2011, the social studies are up for adoption in 2012, and so the Texas education code requires that textbooks be accurate and they contain all the essential knowledge and skills that are in the curriculum, but there’s nothing that says they can’t contain more. So at the very least, I would work to be sure that the textbooks we approve are inclusive. But, before that, one thing that I will be pursuing in January is to rescind the changes that they make this week, if they choose to push their ideology instead of listening to the teachers and the subject area experts who have worked so hard to provide them with information.
remainder:
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/20/texas-education-election/