Oh, Curriculum!

Sunday the New York Times reported on the textbook curriculum changes that were made to appease the State of Texas special interests. As usual, the changes are both dogmatic and intended to imprint students with ceratin myths that make open-minded learning and thinking difficult.

Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made.

The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board’s makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others — one Democrat and one conservative Republican — announced they were not seeking re-election.

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

No sooner had the article been published than a twitter feed dedicated a parody of these changes was established. Twitterers from all over the country have added their own changes using a tag of #texastextbookfact to identify their entries.

Here are a few:

• Texas was the first state to recognize the value of the Negro race to high school athletic programs

•  Mountain top removal mining puts everyone on the same economic playing field.

•  Slavery was an ambassador program meant to bring people to America to save them from poverty and socialism.

•  Women should have the right to choose between paper and plastic. 

•   Adam & Eve waited til they were married before the consummated their love.

• You are only required to be able to count as high as your largest ammo clip.

• Every time you shoot something, an angel gets its wings.

•  Racial disparities in sentencing are the fault of activist judges.  

•  native americans welcomed americans as liberators

 If you enjoy snarky humor just type #texastextbookfact into the twitter search app and it will begin listing the latest Texas revisions to American History, Science and Math.
 

Sanitizing Our Children's Minds, More GIGO

I maintain the slim and slippery hope that this research is doing some good. The motto of American public k through 12 education could well be, "Ignorance is bliss".

American public education is run by a circle jerk of politicians who are a byproduct of the system they so despise. I am less upset with the lack of funding for mandates as for the lack of quality, if any, that the mandates represent. The legislation of education is a colossal and expensive failure that rewards publishers, test corporations, and a compliant education industry that is happy to go along to get along.

Tonight is especially trying. Ashford is a small town full of diverse, wonderful people who are always at the short end of the political stick. Our candidates stand no chance of competing with the larger towns to evrer get elected to state office regardless of the quality of candidates. We are held hostage to Tolland in the 53rd District and Mansfield in Region 19. The bigger towns roll in state money while the small towns try to make Lincolns scream. It seems nobody in the provincial politics outside of Ashford could see fit to vote for our candidate. I'm totally bummed - more braindead politics.

The same phenomenon exists in the world of textbook publishing, information is scrubbed so hard to please the big markets that nothing worth memorizing is left to memorize for testing purposes. The byproduct of textbook learning is equivalent to an exercise in anti-learning - our kids are dumber for the effort.

Here's a sample of A textbook case of failure, Politically driven adoption system yields shallow, misleading materials by Alex Johnson, Reporter, MSNBC, Updated: 10:05 a.m. ET May 16, 2006. Click the title bar to read the entire piece.

“This is where people miss the boat. They don’t realize how important the textbooks are,” Wang said. “We talk about vouchers and more teachers, but education is about the books. That’s where the content is.”

If America’s textbooks were systematically graded, Wang and other scholars say, they would fail abysmally.

American textbooks are both grotesquely bloated (so much so that some state legislatures are considering mandating lighter books to save students from back injuries) and light as a feather intellectually, flitting briefly over too many topics without examining any of them in detail. Worse, too many of them are pedagogically dishonest, so thoroughly massaged to mollify competing political and identity-group interests as to paint a startlingly misleading picture of America and its history.

Textbooks have become so bland and watered-down that they are “a scandal and an outrage,” the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank in Washington, charged in a scathing report issued a year and a half ago.

“They are sanitized to avoid offending anyone who might complain at textbook adoption hearings in big states, they are poorly written, they are burdened with irrelevant and unedifying content, and they reach for the lowest common denominator,” Diane Ravitch, a senior official in the Education Department during the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, wrote in the report’s introduction.

“As a result of all this, they undermine learning instead of building and encouraging it,” she added.

A closed market
The culprit is the system by which many states choose what books their students will read. Because the market is a small one, textbook publishers must cater to the whims of elected school board leaders in the biggest states that buy the most books: Texas and California, which control a third of the national market, the Association of American Publishers estimates.