Texas School Board Set to Vote Textbook Revisions

Texas School Board Set to Vote Textbook Revisions
By MICHAEL BRICK
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: May 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/education/21textbooks.html?hpw


AUSTIN, Tex. — After facing months of protest, conservative members of the Texas Board of Education were expected Thursday night to vote to teach schoolchildren a version of American history that emphasizes the roles of capitalist enterprise, the military, Christianity and modern Republican political figures.

The decision, expected to fall largely along the party lines — the board has 10 Republicans and 5 Democrats — followed tens of thousands of public comments, a protest rally and a daylong hearing where about 200 speakers addressed the board.

By sheer force of its population size, Texas has long held outsize influence on national textbook publishers, some of whom sent curriculum writers to take notes in the boardroom.

That influence has waned somewhat in recent years, with the digital age allowing editors to tailor versions of their textbooks to individual states.

But Texas has only increased in stature as a symbolic battleground over the politicization of education, largely because of the emergence of a conservative voting bloc on the board.

Once a decade, the board members rewrite hundreds of pages of guidelines known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the blueprint for standardized tests used to judge teachers, principals and entire schools.

Last year, conservatives on the board changed the state science curriculum to undermine the teaching of evolution, cell formation and the Big Bang.

While many of the changes to the science curriculum used coded language to advance conservative principles, some additions to the history standards were more overtly political. Board members planned to add language requiring high school students of the civil rights movement to “describe the role of individuals such as governors George Wallace, Orval Faubus, and Lester Maddox and groups, including the Congressional bloc of southern Democrats, that sought to maintain the status quo.”

In another passage, the board would require students to explain the roles of “Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.”

By the time of the vote on Thursday, conservatives on the board had already outlined their intentions in broad strokes.

In a hearing on Wednesday, dozens of speakers, including several professional educators hired to write the original standards, urged more time for review of the full curriculum.

Instead, the board moved on to consider last-minute amendments.

In a sign of the partisan rancor, color-coded books documenting the changes of recent months showed that many of the same words and phrases have been repeatedly inserted and removed. Some of those came up again on Thursday.

The board’s chairwoman, Gail Lowe, a Republican, tried to keep the panel’s debate focused on the narrow scope of the new amendments.

At one point, for example, Ms. Lowe silenced a question about the word “justice,” ruling it irrelevant to the matter at hand, which at the moment was whether first graders should learn the importance of “respectfully” holding public officials to account or just holding public officials to account.

In last-minute amendments, some board members demonstrated the extent of their ambition to influence the classroom, proposing amendments that resembled lesson plans.

Barbara Cargill, a Republican from suburban Houston, successfully campaigned for a reference in the curriculum to the singer Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe, arguing, “How could any of us forget his rendition of ‘Old Man River’ in Showboat?”

And in a recurring debate concerning the use of the phrase “such as” when listing historical figures for inclusion in textbooks, conservative members of the board underscored their influence on textbook publishers.

“There’s not a ‘such as’ out there that doesn’t appear in the book,” said Patricia Hardy, a Republican career educator who votes independently of the conservative bloc. Teachers look for books specifically emphasizing material that will be covered on standardized tests, Ms. Hardy added, saying, “They weren’t born yesterday.”

A member of the board’s Christian conservative voting bloc, Ken Mercer, responded: “Thank you. I’m very happy.”

As positions hardened on both sides, opponents of the changes sought to blunt their impact on children in the rest of the country. Legislators in California have drafted a bill requiring that state’s board to scrutinize new textbooks for evidence of the Texas influence.

One opponent of the changes, Benjamin T. Jealous, president of the N.A.A.C.P., vowed to take the fight to other states.

“The biggest danger is we’ll end up with children who don’t understand history,” Mr. Jealous said in a telephone interview. “The school board members are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.”