Texas Influence On Schoolbooks In The News Again

[Formaldehyde]

Texas Mother Outraged Her Son’s Textbook Called Slaves ‘Workers’ And ‘Immigrants’

A Texas mother spoke out against part of McGraw-Hill’s textbook, “World Geography,” when she noticed that the language erased slavery by calling slaves “workers” and including them in the section “Patterns of Immigration.” One example of the text:

The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.

Roni Dean-Burren, who taught English for more than a decade and is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston, pointed out that the language of “worker” suggests compensation and “immigration” suggests that people weren’t kidnapped and brought to North America against their will. She first learned about the textbook section when her son sent her a photo of the text.

Dean-Burren’s criticism of the textbook was widely shared across Facebook and a video made after the original post garnered 1.4 million views by Sunday, according to CNN. McGraw-Hill responded to the post on its Facebook page and announced that it will edit the section. It stated, “We believe we can do better … To communicate these facts more clearly, we will update this caption to describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor.”

The online version will be changed as soon as edits are determined and the new and improved language will be present in the next printing of the textbook. Dean-Burren’s Facebook post points to wider criticism of the textbook industry, however, which is mostly based in Texas. Texas first began its grip over textbook content when it decided to pay 100 percent of the cost of public textbooks. The catch was that the Texas State Board of Education had to approve the textbooks first.

Because the books that received approval were more likely to be produced on a larger scale, the Texas textbook market affected the national textbook market, Gail Collins explained in her analysis of the Texas textbook market for The New York Review of Books. The board tends to be more conservative in its outlook and sometimes embraces narratives that favor a Euro-centric and Christian-centric revisionist history.

When it came to the Middle Ages, the board appeared to be down on any mention of the Crusades, an enterprise that tends to reflect badly on the Christian side of Christian–Islamic conflict. And when they got to the cold war era, the board wanted to be sure students would be able to “explain how Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict.” Later, they were supposed to study “Islamic fundamentalism and the subsequent use of terrorism by some of its adherents.”

Parents and educators have been taking to social media to raise awareness of how schools approach teaching about slavery in general. Teachers, journalists, and education advocates tweeted about a game about slavery that allowed players to stack slaves on top of each other, like Tetris. Soon the European game manufacturer took the slave Tetris section out of the game and made a statement on the outcry, which largely chalked up the disagreement to cultural differences. However, the greater concern was that anyone made a game about slavery to begin with.

I hadn't realized that Texas is now essentially in complete control of US textbooks. This is distinctly different than in the past where they demanded their own special revisionist authoritarian conservative history to be propagandized in the textbooks the students used, and which were then picked up by a few similarly backward states.

But now they have a pervasive influence on the entire school textbook industry in the US:

NY Review of Books: How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us

“What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks”

No matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to blame.

When it comes to meddling with school textbooks, Texas is both similar to other states and totally different. It’s hardly the only one that likes to fiddle around with the material its kids study in class. The difference is due to size—4.8 million textbook-reading schoolchildren as of 2011—and the peculiarities of its system of government, in which the State Board of Education is selected in elections that are practically devoid of voters, and wealthy donors can chip in unlimited amounts of money to help their favorites win.

Those favorites are not shrinking violets. In 2009, the nation watched in awe as the state board worked on approving a new science curriculum under the leadership of a chair who believed that “evolution is hooey.” In 2010, the subject was social studies and the teachers tasked with drawing up course guidelines were supposed to work in consultation with “experts” added on by the board, one of whom believed that the income tax was contrary to the word of God in the scriptures.

Ever since the 1960s, the selection of schoolbooks in Texas has been a target for the religious right, which worried that schoolchildren were being indoctrinated in godless secularism, and political conservatives who felt that their kids were being given way too much propaganda about the positive aspects of the federal government. Mel Gabler, an oil company clerk, and his wife, Norma, who began their textbook crusade at their kitchen table, were the leaders of the first wave. They brought their supporters to State Board of Education meetings, unrolling their “scroll of shame,” which listed objections they had to the content of the current reading material. At times, the scroll was fifty-four feet long. Products of the Texas school system have the Gablers to thank for the fact that at one point the New Deal was axed from the timeline of significant events in American history.

The Texas State Board of Education, which approves textbooks, curriculum standards, and supplemental materials for the public schools, has fifteen members from fifteen districts whose boundaries don’t conform to congressional districts, or really anything whatsoever. They run in staggered elections that are frequently held in off years, when always-low Texas turnout is particularly abysmal. The advantage tends to go to candidates with passionate, if narrow, bands of supporters, particularly if those bands have rich backers. All of which—plus a natural supply of political eccentrics—helps explain how Texas once had a board member who believed that public schools are the tool of the devil.

Texas originally acquired its power over the nation’s textbook supply because it paid 100 percent of the cost of all public school textbooks, as long as the books in question came from a very short list of board-approved options. The selection process “was grueling and tension-filled,” said Julie McGee, who worked at high levels in several publishing houses before her retirement. “If you didn’t get listed by the state, you got nothing.” On the other side of the coin, David Anderson, who once sold textbooks in the state, said that if a book made the list, even a fairly mediocre salesperson could count on doing pretty well. The books on the Texas list were likely to be mass-produced by the publisher in anticipation of those sales, so other states liked to buy them and take advantage of the economies of scale.

“What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks,” said Dan Quinn, who worked as an editor of social studies textbooks before joining the Texas Freedom Network, which was founded by Governor Ann Richards’s daughter, Cecile, to counter the religious right.

As a market, the state was so big and influential that national publishers tended to gear their books toward whatever it wanted. Back in 1994, the board requested four hundred revisions in five health textbooks it was considering. The publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston was the target for the most changes, including the deletion of toll-free numbers for gay and lesbian groups and teenage suicide prevention groups. Holt announced that it would pull its book out of the Texas market rather than comply. (A decade later Holt was back with a new book that eliminated the gay people.)

Given the high cost of developing a single book, the risk of messing with Texas was high. “One of the most expensive is science,” McGee said. “You have to hire medical illustrators to do all the art.” When she was in the business, the cost of producing a new biology book could run to $5 million. “The investments are really great and it’s all on risk.”

Imagine the feelings of the textbook companies—not to mention the science teachers—when, in response to a big push from the Gablers, the state board adopted a rule in 1974 that textbooks mentioning the theory of evolution “should identify it as only one of several explanations of the origins of humankind” and that those treating the subject extensively “shall be edited, if necessary, to clarify that the treatment is theoretical rather than factually verifiable.” The state attorney general eventually issued an opinion that the board’s directive wouldn’t stand up in court, and the rule was repealed. But the beat went on.

In 2009, when the science curriculum was once again up for review, conservatives wanted to require that it cover the “strengths and weaknesses” of the theory of evolution. In the end, they settled for a face-saving requirement that students consider gaps in fossil records and whether natural selection is enough to explain the complexity of human cells. Don McLeroy, the board chairman who had opined that “evolution is hooey,” told Washington Monthly that he felt the changes put Texas “light years ahead of any other state when it comes to challenging evolution!”

The process by which the board came to its interesting decisions sometimes seemed confused to the point of incoherence. Things would begin tidily, with panels of teachers and expert consultants. Then the expert consultants multiplied, frequently becoming less and less expert, until the whole process ended in a rash of craziness. The science curriculum was “this document that had been worked on for months,” Nathan Bernier, a reporter for KUT in Austin, told National Public Radio.

Members of the [teachers’ association] had been involved…. People with Ph.D.s had been involved in developing these standards. And then at the last second, there was this mysterious document that was shoved underneath the hotel doors of some of the board members, and this document, at the very last minute, wound up—large portions of it wound up making its way into the guidelines.

In 2010, the board launched itself into the equally contentious sea of the social studies curriculum, and the teacher-dominated team tasked with writing the standards was advised by a panel of “experts,” one of whom was a member of the Minutemen militia. Another had argued that only white people were responsible for advancing civil rights for minorities in America, since “only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.”

“The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel,” McLeroy told Washington Monthly. “Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

In their first year of work on social studies, the board agreed that students should be required to study the abandonment of the gold standard as a factor in the decline in the value of the dollar. If the students were going to study the McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunt of the 1950s, they were also going to contemplate “how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in US government.”

The changes often seemed to be thrown out haphazardly, and to pass or fail on the basis of frequently opaque conclusions on the part of the swing members. In 2010, the board tossed out books by the late Bill Martin Jr., the author of Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?, from a list of authors third-graders might want to study because someone mixed him up with Bill Martin, the author of Ethical Marxism.

The social studies curriculum was perhaps the last hurrah for the extreme agenda that Don McLeroy, the anti-evolution dentist, had championed. When the discussions began, he could frequently rally a majority on the fifteen-member panel, with the consistent support of people like Cynthia Dunbar, who once wrote that sending children to public schools was like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” (She also once called Barack Obama a terrorist sympathizer.) In 2011, Dunbar announced her retirement; she had been commuting between Texas and Virginia, where she taught at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University School of Law. After McLeroy himself lost a Republican primary to a candidate who believes in evolution, Barbara Cargill, his successor as board chair, expressed concern that she was left with only “six true conservative Christians on the board.”

“Readable? I’ve never heard a discussion of that”

These days the Texas board is far less powerful than in its heyday. But in a way, it’s more influential than ever.

The state legislature has diluted the board’s ability to control what books local districts pick. And the expanding Web-based curricula make it easier for publishers to work around the preferences of any one state, no matter how big. But students all around the country will be feeling the effect of Texas on their textbooks for years, if not generations. That’s because the school board’s most important contribution has not been to make textbooks inaccurate. It’s been to help make them unreadable.

“Readable? I’ve never heard a discussion of that,” said Julie McGee.

The typical school textbook is composed of a general narrative sprinkled liberally with “boxes”—sidebars presenting the biographies of prominent individuals, and highlighting particular trends, social issues, or historical events. As the textbook wars mounted, those boxes multiplied like gerbils. It’s the ideal place to stash the guy who broke the motorcycle speed record, or the cattle boom, or, perhaps, the gold standard. (It’s also where, in bows to gender and racial equality, mini-biographies of prominent women and minorities can be floated.) In an era of computerized publishing, changing the boxes is easy. The problem comes when the publisher has to change the narrative, something many committees of experts may have labored over at the cost of millions of dollars.

All the bickering and pressuring over the years has caused publishers to shy away from using the kind of clear, lively language that might raise hackles in one corner or another. The more writers were constrained by confusing demands and conflicting requests, the more they produced unreadable mush. Texas, you may not be surprised to hear, has been particularly good at making things mushy. In 2011, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, issued an evaluation of US history standards for public schools. The institute was a longtime critic of curricula that insisted that representatives of women and minorities be included in all parts of American history. But the authors, Sheldon Stern and Jeremy Stern, really hated what the Texas board had done. Besides incorporating “all the familiar politically correct group categories,” the authors said,

the document distorts or suppresses less triumphal or more nuanced aspects of our past that the Board found politically unacceptable (slavery and segregation are all but ignored, while religious influences are grossly exaggerated). The resulting fusion is a confusing, unteachable hodgepodge.

All around the country, teachers and students are left to make their way through murky generalities as they struggle through the swamps of boxes and lists. “Maybe the most striking thing about current history textbooks is that they have lost a controlling narrative,” wrote historian Russell Shorto.

And that’s the legacy. Texas certainly didn’t single-handedly mess up American textbooks, but its size, its purchasing heft, and the pickiness of the school board’s endless demands—not to mention the board’s overall craziness—certainly made it the trend leader. Texas has never managed to get evolution out of American science textbooks. It’s been far more successful in helping to make evolution—and history, and everything else—seem boring.

Discuss.

 

[Leonel]

Well I guess TECHNICALLY they were workers but of course it glosses over the whole issue.

 

[Zkribbler]

...Discuss.

That's a rather presumptuous verb, don't you think?

What if I told you to hop backwards on one foot and cluck like a chicken? Would you do it?

 

[Paul in Saudi]

Well, the importation of slaves to the US was outlawed in 1807, effective in 1808. So that part is wrong. About 400,000 slaves were taken to the US, not millions. So that part is wrong. They were slaves, not workers. That part is wrong.

But to recast Chinatown; "It's Texas, Jake."

 

[warpus]

lol at this stage the only thing I can get myself to do is laugh at the state of education in America.

 

[BvBPL]

Texan educational standards do heavily influence textbooks used by other communities because of economies of scale.

However, people upset by this can easily affect the textbooks used by their own communities by involving themselves in their local school boards.


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[Joecoolyo]

lol at this stage the only thing I can get myself to do is laugh at the state of education in America.

That's not very nice

 

[Tigranes]

Well, they do say Slave Trade brought... So at least there is an acknowledgement of slavery.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Texan educational standards do heavily influence textbooks used by other communities because of economies of scale.

However, people upset by this can easily affect the textbooks used by their own communities by involving themselves in their local school boards.

Yes, of course they can "easily" do so. As every single community in the US would have to do to try to undo the massive damage caused by Texas that directly influences every single school child in the US, and which would take millions of man-hours to accomplish on that basis.

Well, they do say Slave Trade brought... So at least there is an acknowledgement of slavery.

And they were "workers" who "immigrated", right?

It is amazing what some authoritarian conservatives are willing to rationalize and defend, even when presented with the facts.

 

[BvBPL]

Yup.

Just get the local school board to enact text book regs that are actually sensible.

Sensible text books are out there. It's just that the cheapest ones are going to be these ones produced en masse. Without alternative direction from the school board, local schools will gravitate, appropriately, towards the least costly option to fill a need.


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[Valka D'Ur]

lol at this stage the only thing I can get myself to do is laugh at the state of education in America.

There are some areas of Canada that would be only too happy to follow suit. I'm not sure if it's been rescinded yet, but for awhile, during the Stelmach premiership here in Alberta, parents were allowed to pull their kids out of health and science classes the moment the teacher said anything at all about evolution or sex education.

And later, there were musings about letting the oil companies have input on developing the school curricula (for both public and separate systems), because of course it makes sense to indoctrinate educate kids about oil and gas and make them good little anti-environmentalists.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Sensible text books are out there.

I'm sure you can provide ample evidence of this.

 

[warpus]

That's not very nice

I would be nicer about it, but it's so ridiculous and backwards that I just..

 

[Formaldehyde]

There is only one sane way to solve this problem, so it will obviously never occur in the US as long as the Republican Party still exists.

The federal government should dictate standards for textbooks by using the advice and consent of noted educational experts, just as they do in every other modern country on the planet. They are the only group which should have any impact at all in what information is taught to our children at any level.

 

[BvBPL]

The consequence f that would be a decline in local educational goals. Children in New York would learn less about the Iroquois compact, those in the northwest, less about First Nation traditions in that area, and those in the southwest, fewer lessons about how it was the first area with European settlements.


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[Formaldehyde]

How terrible that they would have to possibly receive additional lessons from their teachers regarding what they think is such incredibly important local history. Not to mention an entire year is typically spent teaching state history at the middle school level so everybody can learn what the state bird and flower are.

There is no good excuse for intentionally propagandizing the youth at the state and local level because some from the far-right think their kids are being "brainwashed" by "godless liberals".

 

[Wolfbeckett]

I was going to complain about people overly butthurt about subtle wording differences, but on second thought, I'm just happy the story isn't about creationists trying to get their anti-science garbage into science books again (still, since I'm pretty they are still fighting that battle).

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The consequence f that would be a decline in local educational goals. Children in New York would learn less about the Iroquois compact, those in the northwest, less about First Nation traditions in that area, and those in the southwest, fewer lessons about how it was the first area with European settlements.

Obviously there would have to be some flexibility to teach local history. I still remember my Grade 4 social studies class being heavy on the explorers in Western Canada (ie. Anthony Henday) and most reputable Canadian schools teach Louis Riel in elementary, junior high, and high school. During my school years, I seem to recall that least 5 of them included Louis Riel (plus a history option), and then even more in college - since a couple of the courses I took were on Canadian history.

Or take high school English, for example. The curriculum called for one Shakespeare play per year, but the teachers got to choose which one. So while my class did Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet, the other English teachers sometimes made different choices. The same can be said of the reading lists we were given. Grade 12 English was heavy on the really depressing, post-apocalyptic stuff. My class read The Chrysalids, while another class read A Canticle for Leibowitz.

 

[civvver]

There is only one sane way to solve this problem, so it will obviously never occur in the US as long as the Republican Party still exists.

The federal government should dictate standards for textbooks by using the advice and consent of noted educational experts, just as they do in every other modern country on the planet. They are the only group which should have any impact at all in what information is taught to our children at any level.

HA and what will you do then when some blowhard republican like ted cruz is president and mandates via executive orders the texas curriculum becomes standard for everyone?

Too much federal control of our educational system is the problem, it needs to return to a more local level where it can be done more efficiently and tailored to needs of the community. Then if your local schools are messed up at least you can move.

But considering you want to abolish states altogether and throw away the entire meaning of a republic I'm not really surprised you think that's the best solution.

 

[Formaldehyde]

First, there is absolutely no chance someone like Ted Cruz could become president.

Second, there is no way he would have the authority to change a mechanism of actual experts deciding the curriculum if it was done properly.

Third, the notion that the problem is actually due to "too much federal control of our educational system" is intentionally overlooking all the facts already presented that clearly show just the opposite.

There is nothing magical or fundamental at all in the completely absurd notion of so-called "states rights". This is the only advanced country that has such a clearly perverted system of contradictory laws on such a massive scale. It was a compromise in order to get the original colonies to even ratify the Constitution and never had any useful purpose. It even resulted in an absurd Civil War over a matter which should have been resolved long before in a peaceful manner.

Nowadays it is become blatantly obvious. There is no legitimate reason whatsoever for someone to be arrested, found guilty, and imprisoned as a felon for merely transporting a firearm from one state to another while merely being in the process of changing residences for work purposes. There is no legitimate reason for attorneys to have to specialize on the laws of one or two states. There is no legitimate reason to allow each and every state the authority to enact whatever silly laws they desire, which are frequently even unconstitutional as well as being nothing but Christian sharia laws in many cases.

Every single American has the right to be treated the same no matter what artificial and utterly silly boundary he may currently reside. It is nothing but an excuse for bigots and racists to enact their silly laws at the local or state level when they don't have the power to do so at the national level.