General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTexas: Whitewashing Civil War history, Screwing students
New textbooks are about to screw Texas students beyond repair. And it could spread to other states.
The Texas board of education adopted a revised social studies curriculum in 2010 after a fierce battle. When it came to social studies standards, conservatives championing causes from a focus on the biblical underpinnings of our legal system to a whitewashed picture of race in the United States won out. The guidelines for teaching Civil War history were particularly concerning: They teach that sectionalism, states rights and slavery carefully ordered to stress the first two and shrug off the last caused the conflict. Come August, the first textbooks catering to the changed curriculum will make their way to Texas classrooms.
snip
Texas is in good company when it comes to weak history standards. Many other state guidelines are vague or confusing, and allow for uneven teaching. Yet Texas is rare for the brazenly political way board members devised its curriculum.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whitewashing-civil-war-history-for-young-minds/2015/07/06/1168226c-2415-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html?hpid=z3
napkinz
(17,199 posts)Cyrano
(15,057 posts)will help them get a higher education.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)Which Texas colleges would that be?
jwirr
(39,215 posts)the place. But I went to a private college in Nebraska were profs taught what they wanted to teach.
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)Which colleges will be whitewashing the antebellum south and post-war era?
jwirr
(39,215 posts)teaching anything they wanted to teach.
Orrex
(63,224 posts)But they're 100% fine with the nation's schoolbooks being almost exclusively written by a single, agenda-driven group of companies.
It's something that once believed is hard to unbelieve. It was briefly mostly true, but that was maybe 7, 8 years ago. Before that Calif. and TX vied for influence, just because of their size. In 2008/09, California decided not to buy books, and so TX was left. But the other states still had some influence. Since then there are three players: TX, Calif., and Common Core.
And you'd be surprised at how many companies offer samples of textbooks. Just for physics I reviewed perhaps a dozen sets of "instructional materials." Some are on dead tree. Some are online. Many are hybrid. (Which in Texas is stupid, because the rules are such that the text of the printed textbook cannot change until the next textbook adoption. No such requirement for online textbooks. If the online materials include the textbook, then they're frozen in lockstep with the textbook.)
Take TX science textbooks. They were rewritten lightly to satisfy some particular points of the Texas standards. The primary re-write was to remove all reference to common core, since that's a no-no in Texas. If you compare the TX and non-TX versions, you find one big difference: The TX textbooks have Texas standards cited, the rest have Common Core. Otherwise, pretty much word for word. In a few places there's something TX adds. I couldn't find any place where Pearson, Houghton-Mifflin, or any other publisher took pains to delete information.
Thiongs like "here are three things, written to stress the first two" are just inane. Where that emphasis comes from is unknown--it's not in the text, it's in the minds of the Texas Freedom Network writers. Moreover, any textbook that simply includes those three pass the requirements. As an aside, I'd point out that in some circumstances, the last of the sequences is the most important: In the standard trope "faith, hope, and love" the crucial one is "love," the one that TFN argues must inevitably be de-emphasized. Oops.
Been on the district review committee for science. I know how it works in Texas. The TFN is the same organization that managed to spread info about the science textbooks that was just outrageously (1) obsolete, (2) biased, (3) inaccurate, (4) entirely in keeping with their opinions. There are four traits--timely, unbiased, accurate, and impartial--carefully put in that order to de-emphasize all of them.
That's some excellent information, and encouraging!
Of course, textbooks still suck (the ones I've seen look like dumbed-down PowerPoint presentations) but I'm glad to hear that Texas isn't running the show, at least.
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)(Pun intended)
Cyrano
(15,057 posts)every kid that gets a "Texas education." It could screw them for life.
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)An accurate example of why I believe the whole "the confederate flag is my heritage" thing is empty rhetoric used to cover up deeper issues no one would admit to. And now we have the state systemically doing the same... again.
Archae
(46,345 posts)The Charlton Heston "Ten Commandments" one.
Not this one:
Numbers
31:15 And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?
31:16 Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD.
31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
Cyrano
(15,057 posts)any publicly/government funded school. The First Amendment to the Constitution makes that pretty clear:
Cali_Democrat
(30,439 posts)is not about slavery?
These folks are brainwashed from an early age.
Ignorance.