Originally Posted: Feb. 22, 2018
As Texas again begins revising what its 5.3-plus million students are taught, a group of academics has produced a report highlighting problems with the 2010 standards _ and ways to fix them.
When the Texas Board of Education last produced history curriculum guidelines for public schools, experts decried its members for attempting to promote religious and conservative ideology over facts.
Now the state is considering revisions to the 2010 standards, which a group of academics slammed in a report Thursday. Among their complaints: lessons downplaying slavery as the Civil War’s cause, exaggerating the influence of Moses on U.S. democracy and applauding the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America.
The report suggests some heavy editing, but it remains to be seen whether the board’s 10 Republicans and five Democrats will comply when they begin voting on rewrites in November. For years, the panel has generated attention for such things as trying to limit lessons on evolution and climate change in science textbooks.
“The best we can hope for right now is the more egregious mistakes are rectified,” one of the report’s authors, Edward Countryman, a history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said Thursday in a conference call. “I think it’s possible.”
The report was commissioned by frequent education board critic the Texas Freedom Network, but its authors say their objections are about facts, not politics.
Their report notes how one board member in 2010 described slavery as an “after issue” and how Texas’ resulting curriculum standards suggested it was the Civil War’s third cause behind sectionalism and states’ rights. The board also asked the state’s nearly 5.4 million public school students to compare ideas from Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address with those of the one by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, which didn’t mention slavery while championing small-government values. READ MORE