When he first heard that Texas might adopt a textbook for Mexican American studies in public schools, it pleased State Board of Education Secretary Ruben Cortez Jr, who has been instrumental in trying to get such studies included as course electives. But that smile came before he had seen the book.
Then he did and was appalled. He concluded that the proposed textbook is more polemic than academic. “It is an utter shame we must deal with racially offensive academic work,” the Brownsville Democrat said Tuesday at a news conference where he announced the results of an ad hoc committee of eight mostly university educators he brought together to review the book, which he labeled a “manifesto.” Adopting it as a text for use in Texas schools, he asserts, would be a “disaster” and cannot be “salvaged” with a few tweaks.
The review group’s 54-page report details what the authors say are 141 instances of factual errors, assertions of opinion as fact, errors of omission and misinterpretation. Cortez said the textbook is "dripping with racism and intolerance" and “offers one thing: hate. Hate toward Mexican-Americans.”
The committee concluded that the textbook fails to “meet basic standards and guiding principles in the history profession as outlined by the American Historical Association’s Guidelines for the Preparation, Evaluation, and Selection of History Textbooks (1997), and Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct (updated 2011).” It also falls short of the standards laid out in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for the Special Topic in Social Studies, the committee says.
Cortez and other Latino educators and some students are calling for the textbook to be rejected when the board meets next Tuesday.
Nicole Cobler reports:
Trinidad Gonzales, a history professor at South Texas College [who served on the ad hoc committee], said it was difficult to even mark errors because entire passages were factually inaccurate and made up of “a web of racist assertions.”
“It was very difficult to get through it because of the significant errors that kept popping up,” he said. He cited passages in the textbook he claimed to be "anti-Catholic" because it paints a picture of loyalty only to the Pope. The report compared the textbook to a book by Samuel P. Huntington, which claims that Mexican immigration, culture and religion is a threat to the country.
Texas has a long history of controversy over the political and cultural assertions found in textbooks adopted for public schools. That situation has worsened over the past couple of decades as conservatives have come to dominate the 15-member board of education. They have pushed curricula and textbooks that promote right-wing views on a range of topics, including climate change, evolution, how the United States came to be, and religion.
Tom Hart reports in The Guardian:
The publisher, Virginia-based Momentum Instruction, is run by Cynthia Dunbar, who served a four-year term on the state education board and wrote a book in 2008, One Nation Under God, subtitled How the Left is Trying to Erase What Made Us Great, which described public education as a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion”. [...]
“There’s no hidden agenda in the textbook, there’s no bias, there’s no stigma that’s trying to be put forward, we’re trying to work with as many people as possible to make sure that if there’s any language that’s confusing, or could be edited, that we do that. But for some reason these people are more concerned with doing press conferences than they are with actually submitting statements of objective factual errors to us to correct. There’s no racial bias in the textbook, I don’t know why they keep twisting it to try to put it forward.”
Seriously? It’s Dunbar doing the twisting, given the extensive list of factual and other errors in the committee’s study.
Below are examples of just a few of those. The included initials in boldface are FE for “factual error,” IE for “interpretive error” and OE for “omission error”). I have italicized the parts of the report that quote the textbook to make clear what the textbook includes and what the committee says about it:
• Speaking of the Aztecs, the book states: “No other civilization created, singlehandedly, such a reign of terror. IE This is an assertion of fact that is not based on any scholarship. For a comparison, see the Germany Nazi Holocaust that resulted in the deaths of over 6 million Jews.”
• “In 1598, Juan de Oñate established peaceful relations with the Pueblo Indians [in what is now New Mexico successfully colonized the Santa Fe area, incorporating that area into Spanish Mexico.’ FE/IE No, this was done through wars of conquest in which many Pueblo people were killed. In addition there was the massacre at Acoma in which Oñate killed 400 people and enslaved the rest, cutting one foot off of every young man. This is remembered in the Pueblos today.
• OE “Only from six pages, 87-92, was devoted to any coverage of Spanish Borderlands from 49 pages of text. The omission of the Spanish Borderland scholarship (a hundred years old with thousands of books, chapters and articles) represents one of the gravest errors within this textbook. The only coverage for the Spanish Borderlands was the California mission system. Indeed, a proposed Mexican American history textbook for Texas schools that excludes Tejano history is shocking. The equivalent of omitting Spanish Borderland scholarship would be a physics or astronomy textbook omitting Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and ignoring all the advances through the twentieth century that resulted from his theory. Such a textbook would end by only utilizing information about scientific advances that stopped by 1906. Would any reasonable person accept such a textbook for 2016?”
• “It (U.S. Constitution) also anchored the moral philosophy of the nation in ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,’ and the equality of man, acknowledging the Judeo-Christian principles espoused within British common law—the legal philosophy underlying much of the political framework of American government. FE The U.S. Constitution is not based on “Judeo-Christian principles” as noted by multiple constitutional scholars. Here the authors falsely link together Lord Bolingbroke’s anti-religious reference to a late 1930s reference, “Judeo-Christian.”
• “The failure of the Mexican government to recognize Texan independence in 1836 directly led to the Mexican American War. FE/IE Mexico’s refusal to recognize the independence of Texas was not the direct and major cause of the war between Mexico and the United States. This is as untenable as saying that the U.S. government was directly and mostly responsible for the Civil War because its leadership opposed the right of southern states to secede from the union.”
• “The overall Mexican population in America was still small, however—fewer than 100,000 in 1900—and with little border control in the Southwest, the line between ‘Mexican’ and ‘Mexican American’ was still blurry. FE Over 500,000 Hispanics lived in the United States during 1900. Of that number over 400,000 were of Mexican origin.”