The Texas State Board of Education, meeting in Austin today, rejected a common-sense proposal to keep errors out of public school textbooks.
TFN issued the following press release:
Board Votes 8-7 to Reject Establishing Scholar Panels for Reviewing Proposed Textbooks for Factual Errors
Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller had the following statement today following a vote by the State Board of Education against a proposal for setting up panels of college and university scholars whose sole responsibility would be to review proposed new textbooks for factual errors.
Miller said:
“With all the controversies that have made textbook adoptions in Texas look like a clown show, it’s mindboggling and downright embarrassing that the board voted this down. Instead of appointing qualified historians, scientists and mathematicians to review proposed textbooks for accuracy, board members are leaving it up to schoolchildren to do the fact checking.”
Miller noted that the SBOE’s current review process is designed to check only whether textbooks conform to state curriculum standards. Review panels report factual errors they might find, but they do not perform a systematic, cover-to-cover review of the textbooks for factual accuracy.
This fall the state was embarrassed when a Houston student found that a geography textbook adopted by the state board in 2014 describes slaves as African migrants brought to America as workers. The publisher is scrambling to correct the passage in its textbooks, which is already in classrooms.
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The Texas Freedom Network is a nonpartisan, grassroots education and religious liberties watchdog based in Austin.
6 Comments
I think the commenters below said everything I would have said.
I don’t know why they would object to having books reviewed for factual errors. The fact they don’t makes it brainwashing and not education.
I predicted Thomas Ratliff’s proposal would be defeated. If it had passed, the Board bigots would have much greater difficulty censoring and editing instructional materials to suit their corrupt extremist agenda to keep Texas students confused and ignorant about reality.
The SBOE is filled with SOBs who are dedicated to whitewashing history. The Repugnants, not just the people who are in Texas, do not want our children learning anything other than they want them to know.
At one time the Repugnants wanted to make teaching CRITICAL THINKING a criminal act.
We need to recall ALL of the members of the SBOE as they are not at all interested in educating our children.
The longer I live in this state the more I grow to hate it. These repub morons want every child in this state to be fed a pack of lies. This state is a f-king embarrassment.
Rhonda, I’m with you. How supposedly intelligent people can vote for what used to be the Republican Party and now is just the Repugnant Party is beyond my ability to understand. Some people vote for them simply because that is the party their parents voted for without bother to open their eyes and find out that they’re an entirely different bunch of fools.
Either that or they don’t give a damn about this country and THAT is the problem.
Faux keeps attacking our president, I wonder what they will do when President Sanders is inaugurated.
I KNOW what they’re going to say, it is whatever the Repugnants want then to say.