The State Board of Education is scheduled to take a final vote today on new social studies standards. The guidelines are the result of months of intense political debate. And the stakes are high: the standards will be used for a decade to shape how Texas children view their country and their world.
Most of the material in the new social studies guidelines is actually not very controversial. But in between the lessons on how to use maps and the importance of free speech, there is plenty to argue about, especially on a State Board of Education that has an ideological rift that is almost as big as Texas.
McLeroy: “People look at it and say, “Well as a politician, you can’t even let your faith enter politics.” I think you must have your faith enter into politics. The Founders intended that.”
That’s State Board member Don McLeroy. He says liberals have controlled public education for too long.
McLeroy: “I say we’re just putting it balanced. You know, it swings to the left, it swings to the right. I think we’ve swung it to the middle.”
For McLeroy and his socially conservative allies – that most famously means deleting Thomas Jefferson from a list of influential Enlightenment thinkers and adding Christian philosophers like John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas. Yesterday, the board struggled over whether to include labor leader Dolores Huerta in a third grade section on good citizenship. Republican board member
David Bradley objected over Huerta’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America.
Bradley: “And I’m going to go so far to say that I’m going to represent characteristics of good American citizenship, and whether you’re a socialist or a communist, it fails that definition of a role model.”
But Democratic board member Rene Nunez said Huerta is a hero for many Mexican-American farm workers.
Nunez: “She made a great contribution for the labor movement. Not a communist movement, a labor movement. Workers right.”
Ultimately, the majority conservative faction on the state board voted to leave Huerta out of that section. However, they did leave in another well known socialist: Helen Keller. But even with these guidelines in place, teachers will have a fair amount of leeway in the classroom. As long as students can pass the standardized state test. Meanwhile, some people outside of Texas are concerned the content could wind up in their state’s textbooks. That’s what brought NAACP president Benjamin Jealous to Austin on Wednesday.
Jealous: “The big states dominate what our kids are taught. The small states are essentially, through the realities of the marketplace, because it’s too expensive to order a boutique book for Arkansas, a boutique book for Oklahoma, to just take what the big states decide.”
The Association of American Publishers says that is not the case, because publishing technology is modular enough today that states can order their own editions. And if there is one effect this is having on education administrators outside of Texas, it’s that those with objections to Texas content will be more discerning than ever over which books they choose to order.
– Nathan Bernier
