Texas Board Approves Textbook Review Rule Changes

[demmiblue]

Source: AP

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The Texas Board of Education imposed tighter rules Friday on the citizen review panels that scrutinize proposed textbooks, potentially softening fights over evolution, religion's role in U.S. history and other ideological matters that have long seeped into what students learn in school.

Tension over the issue has been building for years in the country's second most populous state, where the textbook market is so large that changes can affect the industry nationwide. Critics complain that a few activists with religious or political objections have too much power to shape what the state's more than 5 million public school students are taught.

The 15-member education board approves textbooks for school districts to use, but objections raised by reviewers can influence its decisions. The volunteer review panels are often dominated by social conservatives who want more skepticism about evolution included in science textbooks, arguing that a higher power helped create the universe.

The board also had long been controlled by social conservatives before election defeats weakened their voting bloc in recent years — but not before its culture war clashes drew national headlines. Those members pushed for deemphasizing climate change in science classes, and requiring social studies students to learn about the Christian values of America's founding fathers and evaluate whether the United Nations undermined U.S. sovereignty.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/texas-board-voting-textbook-review-rule-changes

[Paladin]

1. This is only overdue by 50 years or so.

Glad to see a little forward motion, but jeez.......

[Igel]

2. The process is partially overburdened by social conservatives.

But the boards are appointed by geographic region. More socially conservative areas in Texas than liberal areas. ("D'uh" is the appropriate response. If Texas goes bright blue, the problem would be flipped.)

If you look at the review board composition in places like Austin, you don't get problems with loons pushing Creationism. You get anti-corporate loons who nitpick over every ambiguity in textbooks by publishers like Pearson because of its involvement in standardized tests but give other publishers a break. (Although, seriously: If you had the choice between a textbook written by the test writers and one written by others, which would you probably say is the better choice--assuming you can swallow your revulsion at rewarding bias and showing favoritism?)

There was this nifty graphic put out based on long lists of "errors" presented to the TEA board back in November. Many thousands of errors by Houghton-Mifflin and Pearson, some fewer by McGraw-Hill, and when you looked at the hip and trendy all-digital sources there were few errors presented. The social conservatives were too backwards to evaluate them, the hipsters like hip and trendy, and too many people didn't stop to remember that the all-digital "instructional material" sites were mostly unfinished, were intended to be barebones and easily updated as science facts were updated, and so didn't have all that much for people to argue about.

Texas education ...