Well Texas, it is officially go time with the Texas Board of Education and a few fundamentalist East Texans' quest to make our educational system an extension of the Southern Convention Baptist Sunday school. For the rest of the country, you better perk up and get your ears on, because this affects countless children in our nation, maybe even yours.
See, we got some grade A knuckleheads, leftovers from the Bushian Era of Texas, who somehow got allowed to write the standards fir our textbooks. Like the censuses, we do this every ten years in Texas.
Unlike 2000 though, California has basically collapsed, as has their textbook industry. So instead of other states getting their school books from a Board of Education based on fact and reason, states across the country will be using books crafted by the biggest dumbasses in Texas.
And that my friend, is saying a lot.
I'd say McLeory was dumb as a barrel of hair, but that's Perry's gig. We will all be a few monkeys short of a barrel of truth if we let these fundamentalists replace proven scientific and historical fact with Baptist theological theory.
Here is a taste of what our nations children will be learning:
Revisionaries
How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks.
By Mariah Blake, The Washington Monthly
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/...
To avoid tangling with the Gablers and other citizen activists, many publishers started self-censoring or allowing the couple to weigh in on textbooks in advance. In 1984, the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way analyzed new biology textbooks presented for adoption in Texas and found that, even before the school board weighed in, three made no mention of evolution. At least two of them were later adopted in other states. This was not unusual: while publishers occasionally produced Texas editions, in most cases changes made to accommodate the state appeared in textbooks around the country—a fact that remains true to this day.
This is what happens when good citizens do nothing, we let the knuckleheads parade.
Barton’s goal is to pack textbooks with early American documents that blend government and religion, and paint them as building blocks of our Constitution. In so doing, he aims to blur the fact that the Constitution itself cements a wall of separation between church and state. But his agenda does not stop there. He and the other conservative experts also want to scrub U.S. history of its inconvenient blemishes—if they get their way, textbooks will paint slavery as a relic of British colonialism that America struggled to cast off from day one and refer to our economic system as "ethical capitalism." They also aim to redeem Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy, a project McLeroy endorses. As he put it in a memo to one of the writing teams, "Read the latest on McCarthy—He was basically vindicated."
So not only will our nation's children be learning that there is no separation of church and state, they will be learning that dangerous anti-democratic demagogues are actually national heroes.
Gets worse.
Barton and Peter Marshall initially tried to purge the standards of key figures of the civil rights era, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall, though they were forced to back down amid a deafening public uproar. They have since resorted to a more subtle tack; while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr. deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn’t be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, "Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society." Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by whites—in his view, mostly white Republican men.
See that my fellow hispanics and other minorities? The civil rights movements, the work of King and Chávez, that was all bullshit. It was old white men who brought us to the promised land. Only old white Republicans understood our struggles and knew how we can gain more civil rights, we knew nothing and our movements were as futile as pissing upwind in an hurricane.
Thank Jesus for old white men.
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.
Once again, we have Republicans treating important policy decisions as an intramural football game between frat houses. They didn't care about the standards, all they cared about was to supplant expert opinion and facts with their version of reality. The writing teams clung to teaching our children basic English, instead these Texas Board of Education decided we needed to learn Middle English, since that is what was taught in the Dark Ages.
But the struggle did not end there. McLeroy piped up and chided his fellow board members, saying, "Somebody’s gotta stand up to [these] experts!" He and his allies then turned around and put forward a string of amendments that had much the same effect as the "strengths and weaknesses" language. Among other things, they require students to evaluate various explanations for gaps in the fossil record and weigh whether natural selection alone can account for the complexity of cells. This mirrors the core arguments of the intelligent design movement: that life is too complex to be the result of unguided evolution, and that the fossil evidence for evolution between species is flimsy. The amendments passed by a wide margin, something McLeroy counts as a coup. "Whoo-eey!" he told me. "We won the Grand Slam, and the Super Bowl, and the World Cup! Our science standards are light years ahead of any other state when it comes to challenging evolution!" Scientists are not so enthusiastic. My last night in Texas, I met David Hillis, a MacArthur Award–winning evolutionary biologist who advised the board on the science standards, at a soul-food restaurant in Austin. "Clearly, some board members just wanted something they could point to so they could reject science books that don’t give a nod to creationism," he said, stabbing his okra with a fork. "If they are able to use those standards to reject science textbooks, they have won and science has lost."
We cannot let Baptist fundamentalists from East Texas be the standard for our collective knowledge in this republic. Mind you, the books printed in Texas will be sent across the nation, possibly to a school near you.
The books have not been printed yet, we can stop this.
We must stop this.
If we are required to have standards that make plague-ridden medieval Europe looked enlightened, we will be developing an entire generation of American workers who are going to get stomped in the global marketplace.
The meetings begin this Wednesday, at 9 a.m. on Jan. 13 at:
William B. Travis Building,
Room 1-104
1701 No. Congress Ave. in Austin.
Want to get on the mike and tell them how they are about to destroy America this Wednesday?
Fill out this form:
http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/...
Want to let them know you are not happy with standards that would make the Taliban blush? Tell them here:
http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/...
Want to talk to someone about how this will set back America by decades?
Call (512) 463-9734.
Call early and call often.
This snowball is still on top of the hill, but not for much longer.
Update: From ytownohio in Comments:
A good podcast about this
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/...
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast (one of the best and most listened to educational/science podcasts on the net) has been banging on this for more than a year now. The above podcast includes an excellent interview with Texas Citizens for Science president Steven Schafersman which clearly explains what is at stake.
A very good listen.