The Texas SBOE Theocrats won. This is a sad day for children. The vote for the high school standards broke along party lines, with Republican supporting them and all Democrats voting no.
The standards will shape new textbooks covering history, government, geography and economics for 4.8 million Texas public school children beginning as early as the 2013-14 school year. And changes to curriculum will guide what's written in public school history books not only in Texas, but across the country. This has the potential to affect virtually every school in the country.
After months of debate and national controversy, the Texas State Board of Education Friday afternoon passed new high school textbook standards that recast U.S. history from the point of view of a movement conservative.
Texas State Board of Education is trying to turn schools into Christian Taliban training centers. They've given up on trying to prepare students for college and set the curriculum to prepare children for Republican electioneering instead.
The State Board of Education members kept up their bitter, year-long ideological tussling until the very end when they finally approved new social studies curriculum standards.
Houston Chronicle :
Controversy-wracked social studies standards won approval Friday as the State Board of Education voted 9-5 for the curriculum that will shape history books for Texas public schools.
Angry minority members of the board reacted harshly against the standards, which they claim glorify white America’s role in history while avoiding the issues of racial discrimination.
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As the arguments unfolded over how history should be presented to Texas schoolchildren, more than 42,000 people weighed in via e-mail and telephone, including 22,000 formal comments.
The five Democrats on the board continued losing battles over new changes Friday.
....
Devout Christians on the board, who believe the Founding Fathers formed a Christian nation and did not intend for the "separation of church and state" legal doctrine that has evolved over the years, approved a standard calling for high school students to examine why religious freedom is protected in the First Amendment "and contrast this to the phrase, ‘separation of church and state.’ "
Among other things, the standards state that students must "discuss alternatives regarding long term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, given the decreasing worker to retiree ratio." Another clause says students must "describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association."
TPMmuckraker has a link to a primer on how we got to this point, beginning with the initial board hearings last September, for those who have not been following this story.
Today's gem:
Here's how the board meeting opening this morning, with Republican board member Cynthia Dunbar offering an invocation. "I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England ... the same objective is present: a Christian land governed by Christian principles," she says.
From :The Top 5 ridiculous things learned from the State Board of Education textbook debates and approval:
Political and educational activists formed battle lines over what Texas children will learn about history, and as the final debates raged on in Austin, we scoured the news wires and the Texas Freedom Network live blogs. What have we learned? When it comes to designing social studies standards in Texas, facts are just the jumping-off point.
I highly recommend you read the full article.
UPDATE: MSNBC has a poll going--you can vote here:
What do you think of the new social studies standards being considered by the Texas school board?