Since the murder of nine people at an African-American church in Charleston last month and the renewed controversy over the Confederate flag that followed, we’ve seen a slew of stories about what public school textbooks teach about the Civil War. Very early on, we got a call from the Washington Post on this question. While that reporter […]
Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller, speaking Sunday on MSNBC’s The Melissa Harris-Perry Show, discussed how textbooks in Texas distort the history of the Civil War. Check out the interview in the short clip below.
Former Texas State Board of Education chair Don McLeroy isn’t done distorting history. While McLeroy was on the board in 2010, he and his colleagues gave Texas schools new social studies curriculum standards that downplay the primary role slavery played in the Civil War. Now, as a former SBOE member, he’s rewriting the role he and other […]
The Texas State Board of Education will vote in November on new social studies textbooks that will be in Texas classrooms for the next decade. Earlier this month, official state review panels met in Austin to vet those books. As we did during the science textbook adoption process last year, the Texas Freedom Network researched who got appointed to the […]
This week we got a hopeful sign — at least a little one — that politics might not entirely govern the State Board of Education’s upcoming adoption of new social studies textbooks. Partly in reaction to how anti-evolution activists nearly hijacked the adoption of science textbooks last year, state board members adopted new rules that […]
We have now had our first look at changes publishers have submitted in response to objections — many of them attacks on evolution and climate change science — raised by official state review teams evaluating new science textbooks for Texas. And we have very encouraging news: All 14 publishers are refusing to water down or compromise instruction […]
Austin public radio station KUT is airing and streaming online a new documentary about the right’s long-running culture war over public education in Texas. “The Long Game: Texas’ Ongoing Battle for the Direction of the Classroom,” by award-winning producer Trey Kay, looks at the ongoing political witch hunt over CSCOPE as well as the divisive […]
The audio above is almost as amusing as the clip from “The Revisionaries” in which former Texas State Board of Education Chair Don McLeroy uses a cardboard model to describe how all the animals were able to fit on Noah’s Ark. You know, this one, where at the end all the children pretty much say […]
New York Times columnist Gail Collins has a new book coming, As Texas Goes…, which looks at how right-wing politics and other shenanigans in Texas have hijacked public policy across the country. You can read two extended excerpts from Collins book (due out this month): one on the textbook wars here and another on sex […]
After several years of especially divisive “culture war” battles over what Texas public school students should learn about evolution, history and other subjects, the State Board of Education last week decided that it will adopt new science textbooks for all schools in 2013. The new adoption schedule also has the board approving textbooks for history […]
