Truth won out in debate on Texas textbooks

Even small victories over the right wing fundies should be savored but continued vigilance against these nuts is necessary.....

AT the Sept. 10 State Board of Education public hearing on textbook adoption, scientists, educators and students overwhelmingly supported leaving the evolution content in biology textbooks unchanged, since none contained factual errors or omissions about evolution and all contained the necessary material to comply with the Texas science curriculum. Indeed, every Texas scientist who testified not only supported the biology books, but also objected to efforts by creationists to confuse the public and State Board members about supposed "weaknesses" of evolution. In addition, the Texas Education Agency soon after reported that the biology textbooks all totally conformed to the TEKS, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, as required by law.

All the scientific evidence presented in the hearing strongly supported the scientists' evaluation of the textbooks. Speakers representing the Discovery Institute, a Seattle, Wash., organization that promotes intelligent design creationism, relied on misinformation to support their unwarranted claims that the biology books were inaccurate and incomplete. Scientist after scientist from the University of Texas at Austin spoke to the board, dissecting each creationist claim in detail and showing why each was illogical and unsupported by the evidence. Thus, the overwhelming effect of the testimony was to support the accurate scientific evolution content in biology textbooks and to leave them unchanged. Nevertheless, there is concern that some State Board members will try to change the textbooks or place them on the nonconforming list.

More.........

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/2145890

And from Texas, no less.

Now, I guess all we have to do is wait for the State Board to ignore the massive, overwhelming scientific consensus, and use creation "science" materials anyway.

I'm sure he can get the fix in on this one, just like all the other local issues in Texas that don't match his warped worldview.

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My mentee is an eight-grader. She showed me her brand-spanking new history book. I almost gagged. There's an entire chapter on the chimp's administration, complete with stories about the anthrax scare and the war on terra. Plus pages of the smirking chimp and the criminals in his cabinet. I kept flipping pages, looking for the "other side" of the story. Ha! How naive of me.

I told my mentee, "I hope when you get to college you read some history books that give the whole story."

To her credit, she voiced severe disgust with the chimp, and agreed they don't get to learn anything of substance in history class.

I can't believe I live in a state with many, many respected institutions of higher learning, and they're having to decide if our kids should learn creationsim instead of evolution. It's like I went backward in time. Good Lord.

:dem:
RV

You could do worse than suggest Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". It might be available in Austin libraries.

Once I finish, I'll try foisting it on her. But my budding activist 12-year-old may want to read it first. :-)

Just to brag on my daughter for a moment: Her school has an unusually strict (and insane) dress code, designed to punish kids who want to wear black clothes to school. You know, because that always leads to trouble. :eyes: So, my daughter and her friends circulated a petition and received 350 signatures asking for changes to the dress code. No dice. Next step? They started their own alternative school newspaper, called The True Voice. Just distributed the first edition yesterday, with articles on all kinds of topics, and an open invitation for ALL OPINIONS to be expressed. A free press. Imagine that. Damn, she makes me proud!

:dem:
RV

One push and he will fall off this world.

I actually have long suspected that we are actually in hell and the fundies and other republicans are the demons.

I've spent years in the textbook publishing industry and take keen interest in these little details.

I heard many horror stories about the Texas adoption board. They are very racist — once made us take out a picture from a literature anthology of a very highly regarded husband and wife team who write and illustrate children’s books, because they are an interracial couple. Also heard they would try to have poems by Langston Hughes and stories by Richard Wright removed from textbooks because "they were communists.”

. . . the rest of us get stuck with the same crap. Publishers won't publish a text unless it passes the CA and TX boards.

I apologize.

I would that it were different! We are unfortunately heavily populated by terrified fundies whose panties are easily put into a wad. Just mention any ordinary bodily function and they freak.

Of course, in-room porn movie sales go up for hotels during Baptist conventions. Repression at its finest.

RV

...was the attempt(s) to change millions of years (of evolution...) into "...many years ago.."!!
Ha! Sure it was. Just the other day in fact.

Ain't that a pistol!!

texas citizens for science. It is worth a look.

http://www.txscience.org/

Uncopyrighted material could be distributed over the internet. The cost would be slight. Teachers could download and print essays and educational material and pass it out to the students. In some schools, students could be assigned to read the web pages on the intranet at school or even at home.

If the internet technology is exploited, perhaps we could make textbooks obsolete, or at least secondary in the curriculum. This could dilute the influence of the Texas school book review committee.