Textbooks and politics

I am a Yankee through and through it makes it a little weird at times living in West Texas, to be honest I feel really out of place a lot of times. But if many of those living here in Texas had it their way they would control everything. The main people doing this are very much the religious right. What may come as a supprise to many is how much control Texas has over the textbooks that students around the country use. This is because when their standards are written the state itself chooses the books. Texas is the 2nd most populated state in U.S. and with all of the schools using the same books this is a huge number of books. This means that many publishers write their books to the Texas state standards and don't rewrite them for another state or school district. With this background information I figured I would pass along this article I came upon a couple of days ago showing the history of the far right's take over of textbook standards here in Texas that have been causing a stir amongst educators from over the entire U.S. This is an interesting read and shows why so many of those in higher education here in Texas are so vocal about going against what the board says. Things like this in particular:

There has already been plenty of screaming and wall pounding in the battles over standards for other subjects. In late 2007, the English language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree, who often acts as the faction’s enforcer. At the bloc’s urging, the board threw out the teams’ work and hired an outside consultant to craft new standards from scratch, but the faction still wasn’t satisfied; when the new drafts came in, one adherent dismissed them as “unreadable” and “mangled.” In the end, they took matters into their own hands. The night before the final vote in May 2008, two members of the bloc, Gail Lowe and Barbara Cargill, met secretly and cobbled together yet another version. The documents were then slipped under their allies’ hotel-room doors, and the bloc forced through a vote the following morning before the other board members even had a chance to read them. Bradley argued that the whole ordeal was necessary because the writing teams had clung to their own ideas rather than deferring to the board. “I don’t think this will happen again, because they got spanked,” he added.

It is things like this along with the state standards for science and the potential ones for history that only show the US as being right in all of their decisions and founded as a christian country. Both of these are wrong ideas. The U.S. has made mistakes in foreign policy along with domestic policy. Showing these wrongs and teaching why they are wrong is what makes us a better country and better people in general. And there have been enough people that have pointed out why we are not a Christian country that I don't feel I even need to address the idea of seperation of church and state.

Anyway I def suggest that you check out the article it is important that we all know what we are up against both here in Texas and throughout the rest of the country.