The Texas Textbook Wars

by Madeleine Kando

In Texas, a series of new textbooks will hit classrooms this fall, which more than five million public school students will be using for nearly a generation to come. These new textbooks are filled with errors, omissions and revisions that promote a Christian Fundamentalist world view, courtesy of the Texas State Board of Education.

So what, you might say? What else would you expect from one of the most backward, conservative states in the Union, a hotbed of Creationism? Why bother write about it at all? The problem is that Texas is one of the biggest customers of publishing giants like McGraw-Hill Education. Together with Florida and California, they have roughly 13 million students in K-12 public schools and although California has more students, Texas spends more of its budget on textbooks. It literally rules the textbook market in the US. This fact and the Texas State Board of Education's relentless efforts to politicize textbooks in order to advance its religious agenda, has given the state enormous influence over what gets included in school textbooks in many states throughout the country.
Public education has become the latest battleground in the culture wars. The documentary 'The Revisionaries' shows how SBOE members, and in particular its chairman, Don McLeroy, a dentist, Sunday school teacher and a fervent young earth creationist, use their position to advance their personal religious convictions and distort what many American children are learning in their history and science classes.

McLeroy himself is quoted to have said that 'Education is too important not to be politicised'. If he had his way, children would learn that the earth was created 10,000 years ago and that man walked the earth with dinosaurs, that learning about evolution leads to atheism and that Moses was one of our founding fathers.

McLeroy is not alone in believing that humanity appeared 10,000 years ago. Over 40% of Americans hold a Creationist belief, which is the highest percentage of most advanced countries. Add that to the 20% that are 'not sure', that leave only 40% that believes in Evolution. Since the Supreme Court ruled that teaching creationism in schools violates the separation of church and state, Texas science curriculum standards make no mention of Creationism, but they say that “students should analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations so as to encourage critical thinking." As if a highschool student has enough knowledge of the theory of evolution to 'critique' it.

Slate Magazine has published a Map, showing that thousands of schools in states across the country can use taxpayer money to promote creationism. The Responsible Education Solutions charter schools system, which operates over 65 campuses in the states of Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana and serves over 17,000 students, is teaching Creationism with the help of tax dollars. It uses the ACE Accelerated Christian Education program, a fundamentalist curriculum that teaches amongst others, that the Loch Ness monster is real and is proof that evolution is wrong and that kids can avoid AIDS by following the Bible.

In order to remain internationally competitive and to prevent states from dumbing down their standards, the Government created the Common Core State Standard, which was adopted by forty-four of the fifty states. Texas is not one of them. Texas uses its own standard called the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills), which is heavily influenced by the largely right-wing state board members. What TEKS dictates, goes into the textbooks.

Aside from making textbooks inaccurate, Texas has also managed to make them unreadable. Textbooks are composed of a general text with lots of little 'boxes', highlighting important issues, or historical events. It’s the ideal place to stash whatever the Board felt needed to be included, to contradict, distort or tone down facts that they didn't agree with.

The notorious Texas couple, Mel and Norma Gabler, the pioneers of textbook censorship, no longer attend meetings since they are dead, thank God, but they trained a whole generation of conservative Christian activists who fight for their ideas: sexual abstinence, free enterprise, creationism, and the primacy of Judeo-Christian values.

Science textbooks are not the only casualties of the SBOE's aggressive censorship. Here are a few examples of what is now included in the Texas Social Studies textbooks:

• The U.S. government is described as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic".
• The separation of church and state is not a key principle in the Constitution.
• One source listed on the subject of Climate change is the Heartland Institute, specifically an article by Joseph Bast and James M. Taylor entitled: “Global Warming: Not a Crisis", insinuating that climate change is a 'natural phenomenon'.

This is what one of the few Democratic members of the board had to say, after the textbook revisions were adopted: 'I am ashamed of what we have done to the teachers and the students of this state'.

400 years ago, Galileo was put under house arrest (where he died)  by the Roman Catholic  Church for advocating Heliocentrism, namely the true fact that the earth is not the center of the universe, and that it evolves around the sun, rather than the other way around. The  Church found Galileo’s views  heretical  and “satanical.” Does Texas want to return to Medieval times? leave comment here