The Texas State Board of Education has recently approved a new social studies curriculum that has raised more than a few eyebrows.
The New York Times reported on some of the updates which include "stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light."
In particular, students will learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” Phyllis Schlafly - the woman who made a career out of telling women they shouldn't have careers.
Additionally, they will be changing the way students learn about the Civil Rights movement, making sure that students study the philosophies of the Black Panthers in addition to those of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and ensuring that text books mention that republicans supported civil rights legislation (the article doesn't say if the Jim Crow laws will also be mentioned in history books).
More troubling though is the specific plan to question "the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation.
The Great Society legislation was under Lyndon B Johnson, and his goals were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. It was during this time that the Civil Rights legislation that forbade job discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations was passed. The Medicare and Medicaid programs were also created during this time.
Title IX refers to the law that says there needs to be equal funding and opportunities in educational activities for women and girls in any school or college that receives federal funding. It is largely credited with increasing the participation of girls in sports.
Here we are in March celebrating Women's History Month, just wrapped up Black History Month, and our Texas State School Board doesn't seem to want to acknowledge why we need to celebrate that. America has not always been perfect. The experiences of women and minorities are already under represented in history books, but instead of adding these experiences, the conservative school board is choosing to ignore them.
The New York Times article stated that "efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, 'They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.'"
To make matters worse, "there were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics." The board will finalize the vote on the curriculum changes in May. Maybe they can find a historian or two before then?
Comments
This article appears to be a subjective summary of a subjective NYT article. Have either you are the NYT bothered to actually read the standards and the revisions made to them? They are available (except for the March revisions) on the Texas Education Agency website. Have you bothered to research the content of current social studies textbooks?
TexanJane, can you give your assessment of the revisions. It seems like the revisions have a conservative bent to them. Lessening Hispanics, boosting country music while excluding rap, etc. I am just interested in another point of view.
Fortunately we have 10 members on the Texas State Board of Education who care to keep the truth of our history in the textbooks for our vunerable children to learn. Thank you, Phyllis Schlafly!
I agree heartily with TexanJane. As someone who attended the SBOE hearings in November, January, and March, I can affirm that the author of this article (and of course the slanted reporting by the NYTimes) are DEAD WRONG.
In the new TEKS curriculum standards passed on March 12, minorities--including women, Hispanics, blacks, and Sikhs--are represented in greater numbers and specificity than ever before.
Similarly, idiotic rumors such as "Oh, my gosh--Thomas Jefferson has been removed!!" are just that: completely baseless rumors that have been spread by journalists too lazy to check the actual TEKS document.
High school journalists often do a better job than the sneering, hugely generalizing-from-personal-bias reporters such as this Ms. Kim Howard, the Dallas Morning News, the San Antonio Express-News, and the Far Left Times. Please do some fact-checking before calling yourselves journalists!!
P.S.
A couple of other instances of ignorance and/or misrepresentation in this article:
Phyllis Schlafly did not "tell women they should not have careers." Such a simplistic statement is beyond appalling.
Mrs. Schlafly earned a law degree late in life and invested extraordinary efforts to work against some of the complex, potentially disastrous repercussions of the far-left women's movement and so-called Equal Rights Amendment.
Thinking people DO actually examine long-term and unintended consequences of bureaucratic mandates (including Lyndon Johnson's massive welfare entitlement programs).
Please read Dr. Thomas Sowell's book, "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" to see just how often and how tragically, social programs backfire and create more poverty than they solve. Naivete' and Utopian rhetoric are cute, but often deadly to society.
Because the revisionists have been working overtime to change history, the majority of our Texas State Board of Education has worked together to give balance to the far-left leanings of our Social Studies standards. When the S. S. standards are published in their entirety in mid-April for thirty days of public comments, then the biased reporters such as Kim Howard and others will have "egg on their faces." The parents who send their children to our Texas public schools will be thrilled that their children will learn fact-based history that presents our country as an exceptional nation.
In response to the Texas Board of Education action to amend its curriculum to include information on the World War II detention of Germans and Italians by the United States, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) believes it is vitally important to clarify the record about the significant differences between the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the treatment of German and Italian Americans.
The significant differences between the Japanese American incarceration and the treatment of German and Italian Americans is fully documented in the Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) titled Personal Justice Denied. The CWRIC was established in 1980, pursuant to legislation enacted by the Congress of the United States to investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding the issuance of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. The CWRIC Report is based on the testimo
No need to bother with facts, when you can just cut and paste from the ill-named Texas "Freedom" Network's talking points, is there?
I've followed public education at the state level for most of the last 15 years Kim, and what the prior commenter noted is extremely true: the social engineers have been trying to take over Texas education, and were it not for the conservative bloc on the state board our kids would be in even worse shape than they are already. It wasn't the Texas Education Agency which recognized that Whole Language didn't work -- it was the conservative bloc on the state board. It wasn't the TEA which figured out that "fuzzy math" was a crock -- it was that conservative bloc. Time and time again the TEA has tried to introduce some new educational fad, only to be thwarted by unpaid SBOE members who on their own time and own dime actually LOOK at what those fads are and recognize how they would negatively impact Texas students.
Corey:
The revised standards are by no means perfect, but in many instances the SBOE faced an "either-or" choice on what to include or not to include. For some reason or another, our educators seem to think there is a limit what kids can learn.
I would prefer there be no emphasis on the study of popular music, for example -- but since they didn't have a choice and had to include one genre over another, then yeah, let's have them study country rather than music created by criminals which glorifies criminals. Many of the other exclusions fall into the same vein; why can't local teachers, for example, enrich their curriculum by including the story of the brave Tejanos who fell at the Alamo alongside Travis, Crockett and Bowie? What makes Cesar Chavez, whose only contribution to Texas culture was his campaign against illegal immigration, more important than Juan Seguin, Lorenzo de Zavala, Juan Antonio Navarro and Selena?
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