Textbooks and the Texas Taliban

a clip from Alternet:

. . . .The latest battle in the ongoing war to turn public schools into propaganda machines for the right is being fought in the state of Texas. The state is often at the center of conservative-fomented education controversies, as right-wingers there keep trying to sneak creationism into the science classroom. Texas also continues to maintain its abysmally high teen pregnancy rate by pushing sex “education” that usually doesn’t bother to mention contraception. While the right has been losing some ground on those two issues, a new report from the Texas Freedom Network suggests that conservatives have been able to inject a shocking number of lies and disinformation into public school history classrooms. . . . .

Learning about Hippies in Louisiana's Voucher Schools

Beka Books is owned by Arlin and Beka Horton, who both graduated from Bob Jones "University" in 1951.  The company, which now has an extensive product line of semi-literate ultra-fundamentalist teaching materials, made headlines a couple of years ago by changing the Christian unfriendly "Slave Trade" to the "Atlantic Triangular Trade."  How offensive an unwholesome to talk about slavery in a Christian environment.  From Political Research Associates:

On May 21, Texas School Board member Cynthia Dunbar opened the board’s meeting with an invocation: “Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England, or the charter of Massachusetts Bay, or the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the same objective is present—a Christian land governed by Christian principles.”¹ The board then voted nine to five, along party lines, to adopt new standards that will be used to teach the state’s 4.8 million students—resisting the pleas of educators, historians, and even Rod Paige, a former U.S. secretary of education under President George W. Bush. The new standards emphasize the role of Christianity in U.S. history and promote conservative values. A New York Times editorial pointed out that the Texas board did back down on a few of its “most outrageous efforts”—such as renaming the slave trade, the “Atlantic triangular trade”—but it nevertheless managed “to justify injecting more religion into government.” According to the Times, the curriculum differentiates between the Founders’ protection of religious freedom and “separation of church and state,”² which it deplores.______________________________________ 

Now Beka's books are being used in Louisiana's private voucher schools that are paid for with public money.  And Salon now reports that the following facts to be memorized about hippies are found in America: Land I Love:"They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music played an important part in the hippie movement and had great influence over the hippies. Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship."

Hmm.  Makes me wonder about the hygiene of that guy I've read about who spent 40 days in the wilderness meditating.

Voucher Gospels in Indiana Government

**Guest Post by Doug Martin

SCHOOL VOUCHER BULLYING, PURE POLITICS, AND THE INDIANA OFFICE OF MANAGEMENTAND BUDGET

When it comes to the corporate-religious-political bullying for the Amway/Walmart/ALEC/Overstock.com/Koch Brothers assault on Indiana school children, the Republicans will stop short of nothing.   House Bill 1342 was a perfect example.  Having moved out of committee but finally killed off yesterday by GOP House Speaker Brian Bosma, this bill sought to strip Indiana superintendent of public instruction Glenda Ritz and the Department of Education of all power to monitor the state voucher schools, giving instead, the Koch-Brothers/ALEC crony Chris Atkins and his Indiana Office of Management and Budget complete control over voucher school funding distribution, oversight, and even voucher school visits.

With OMB’s State Board of Accounts now handing charter school audits over to private companies, House Bill 1342 was meant to punish Ritz, who was originally involved in the lawsuit to stop Indiana’s school voucher system, and lead to even more lack of oversight.

THE INDIANA OMB AND THE CORPORATE RIGHTWING MACHINE

Mike Pence recently rehired Chris Atkins to lead OMB. A past tax and fiscal policy director at ALEC, the Anderson, Indiana-born Atkins began working for the sociopathic voucher lobbying and propaganda mill, the Milton & Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, after leaving as OMB policy director where he hammered out the Mitch Daniels’ anti-public school property tax plan, one of the first initiatives to drain funding from the schools.

Not surprisingly, Atkins is a member of the pro-school voucher Institute of Justice’s Human Action Network, a group of IJ student law conference alumni who volunteer for various cases IJ deems appropriate. IJ is battling in court to save the Indiana school voucher program.

Atkins is not a fan of increased spending to eliminate inequality in the public schools.  In 2007, while carrying corporate water for the Koch Brothers-supported/ Eli Lilly affiliated Tax Foundation, Atkins released a “study” at the Philadelphia ALEC meeting which claimed that lawsuits in favor of forcing states to pay adequate funding to inadequately funded school districts have not led to better schools or “long term increases in school spending” but only to higher tax rates. Atkins commented: "Lawsuits may be able to build schools, but they haven't proven effective at teaching kids.”

Atkins, however, is not the only OMB employee with ties to school voucher groups.  The Friedman Foundation-funded and Tea Party Americans for Prosperity is represented at OMB’s Department of Government Efficiency and Financial Planning by Gloria Downham, whose husband, Chase, heads the Americans for Prosperity’s Indiana branch.  Chase, a former Mike Pence intern, helped elect Republicans for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.  Chase and Gloria are parishioners at the St. Monica Catholic Church which operates its own Indianapolis school receiving state vouchers.

Former Ice Miller attorney Brian Bailey, OMB’s chief of staff & general counsel, is also a Tax Foundation crony.

Micah Vincent, at OMB’s Department of Local Government Finance, likes to attend Friedman Foundation events, too.

LIVING WITH DINOSAURS

Besides the American flags flying high in the Indiana religious schools accepting taxpayer money, OMB would have found no problem visiting schools promoting creationism, John Birch Society propaganda and paranoia, and free-market radicalism. Many of the schools receiving vouchers, as Steve Hinnefeld noted at School Matters, use the A Beka and Bob Jones curriculum texts, which vilify liberals, plug free-market inequality, lie about global warming, and see the Bible as the see-all-be-all to an education. Hinnefeld unearthed some disturbing examples, including these from the teacher’s guide to United States History in Christian Perspective: Heritage of Freedom, an A Beka 11th-grade history book:

FDR and the New Deal: “New Deal socialism is but a halfway house to Communism; what Communists seek by violent revolution, socialists seek by legislation, regulation, and taxation … The effects of the New Deal can be seen today in the Social Security system, Medicare, various welfare programs, and the numerous federal regulatory agencies in operation today. Many Americans depend on the government for their daily needs and all suffer from excessive government regulation in one way or another.”

Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s crusade against Communists: “Senator McCarthy’s aggressive manner and his physical appearance – he did not photograph well and often appeared to be scowling – did not play well in front of the television cameras … In addition, the print media and radio roundly castigated McCarthy. The combined effect of this propaganda turned many people against the senator.”

LBJ and the Great Society: “Higher taxes drained money from individuals and business to fund programs that destroyed the work ethic among the poor while eroding the self-sufficiency of the American family.”

These textbooks, as Professor Frances Paterson and Rachel Tabachnick have observed, compare gay people to child molesters and rapists and show hatred of Hinduism, Native American beliefs, and Buddhism, even lashing out at Roman Catholics and non-evangelical Protestants. Tabachnick also details the texts’ prejudice against African-Americans, writing that “Concerning slavery in America, a Bob Jones high school text states, ‘To help them endure the difficulties of slavery, God gave Christian slaves the ability to combine the African heritage of song with the dignity of Christian praise. Through the Negro spiritual, the slaves developed the patience to wait on the Lord and discovered that the truest freedom is from the bondage of sin.’”

If you want more on Indiana school voucher schemes, like visits to the Creation Museum, see Zack Kopplin’s report here.

Robert Behning, House Bill 1342’s author, told the Journal Gazette “The goal was to try to send a message that we don’t want to abuse our power but we want to make sure that everything we have moved that we value in terms of reform needs to be moving forward the way it was intended.”

In other words, it was an act of bullying and pure politics, plain and simple, one geared on “moving” Indiana back into another century, with a Good News Club in every public school still left standing. If one believes that OMB would have been capable or willing to regulate Hoosier schools receiving vouchers in any way, shape, or form, one would have to believe that humans walked hand in hand with the dinosaurs and that Jesus hated the poor, which many in the school voucher movement either believe or like to lie about.

Republican History: The Great Texas Whiteout of 2010

The Texas textbook Tea Party just wound down, and history will never be the same, or for ten years at least.  All the more reason to save an incredible amount of money by discontinuing the purchase of these super-sized tomes of snooze-worthy pablum that corporations have foisted on school children for 150 years at least. Until states get smart by hiring teachers to create custom texts using the myriad sources available free on the Web or for a minimal charge for educational use, we will have these social antiquarians shaping the future.

Here is the best summary I have found, and, of course, it is not from an American paper, but from the Independent:

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles

The slave trade was in fact the "Atlantic triangular trade". Capitalism, with all its negative connotations, should in future be referred to as the "free enterprise system". And don't even think about buying into the theory of evolution: children must instead be taught that God created Earth using a euphemistically-titled technique known as "intelligent design".

It may sound like the backdrop to a comedy sketch, but these are instead the guiding principles by which teachers in America's second-largest state will be forced to go about the business of education, according to critics of proposed changes to the school curriculum.

After months of increasingly fractious debate, the 15-member school board of Texas is expected today to approve more than 100 pages of new guidelines governing the teaching of social studies. They changes cover everything from Cold War history to the "correct" interpretation of the US Constitution.

The proposed rules stipulate, among other things, that Republican superstar Ronald Reagan should be added to a list of "great Americans". Country music can be described as an important cultural movement, but hip-hop can't. And speeches by Jefferson Davis, the slave-owning president of the Confederacy, should be taught alongside those of Abraham Lincoln.

Elsewhere, the new curriculum changes references to American "imperialism" to "expansionism", and forces teachers covering post-war politics to tell students that Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious anti-Communist show trials during the 1950s may have been justified.

Most controversial of all is a rewriting of a passage in the syllabus dealing with economics. Previously, it stipulated that eighth-grade students must learn how to, "explain reasons for the development of the plantation system, the slave trade, and the spread of slavery". In the re-worded version, the words "slave trade" were replaced with: "Atlantic triangular trade".

The elected school board includes dentists, housewives, and other laymen who have little teaching experience. Like a growing number of legislators in an increasingly-polarised country they are, however, politically divided: every one of the 10 Republicans on the committee support the proposed revisions; all five of the Democrats oppose them. At stake is education in not just the Lone Star State, but across the entire country. Texas has almost five million students, and is the largest market for new textbooks in the US. It is also one of the few states that gives its school board power to rewrite, rather than just rubber stamp, the curriculum.

In recent years, the board's annual meetings - they review a different subject each year - have turned into a noisy media circus, as lobbyists from both left and right seek to exert influence on the increasingly conservative committee. A record 206 people signed up to testify during this week's hearing.

Among the critics of the proposed changes was Rod Paige, the first African-American education secretary, under George Bush. "In Texas, we've allowed the pendulum to swing backwards and forward," he said. "I'm asking that the swing [should] be narrower and let history speak for itself."

Social conservatives, however, accuse the left of cherry-picking tiny passages from a wide-ranging document to criticise the new syllabus in its entirety.

"Most of the complaints are coming from a liberal fringe," said Jonathan Saenz, a spokesman for the Liberty Institute. "They're making a huge issue out of some very small changes. The people of Texas are simply trying to stop atheists and the extreme civil liberties lobby from taking over their history."

Triangular trade

Taking place from West Africa to America, America to Europe, and Europe back to West Africa, the lucrative international transactions from the 17th to 19th centuries were indeed triangular - and also reliant on slavery. First, slaves were shipped to North America, where they were put to work growing cash crops - such as tobacco - which were exported to Europe. The Europeans who made use of those crops went on to use their goods - such as rum, distilled from Caribbean sugar - to buy slaves in Africa. There have been other examples of triangular trade, but few so ruthlessly efficient.

Texas and Textbooks: What Could Go Wrong?

From the Dallas Morning News:

A school board vote looms this week on which companies to use, and irregularities have surfaced, raising concerns among Dallas ISD educators, trustees and one major textbook company.

Documents obtained by The Dallas Morning News show:

•The school district's textbook committee is recommending getting books from a publisher that could have been disqualified for breaking selection-process rules – a decision one publisher called "a blatant rewarding to dishonesty."

•Electronic voting by educators was skewed because two publishers were inexplicably missing from the list of companies from which teachers could vote.

•Teachers voted overwhelmingly for one company's elementary books, but the district's textbook selection committee picked another publisher.

The findings are in a district internal investigation, e-mail exchanges and other records that open a revealing window into the lucrative and competitive world of textbook sales. Across the country last year, textbook publishers reported sales of $3.5 billion, and in Texas, almost $500 million in taxpayer money is budgeted to buy books for K-12 students next school year.

You can read the entire article here.

Texas Becomes Laughingstock Once Again: State Board of Ed Determines History Is a Liberal Conspiracy

If you can't find any reputable biologists teaching the creation myth as science, you are about to run into an even more prominent shortage: historians who will ignore the existence of the Establishment Clause, Thomas Jefferson, the word "democratic" next to "Republic," and even "capitalism" (now replaced by the less toxic "free enterprise system").

But then who needs historians in Texas, since the cranks in control of the State Board of Education have decided to make up their own historical "facts" and teach them to the next generation of Texans--thus assuring that stupidity will live on in Texas, at least until global warming makes the state with one of the largest percentages of climate change deniers finally uninhabitable.

Textbooks have had much too much influence on teaching for much too long. The actions this past week by the majority of wingnuts on the Texas School Board could signal the end to such hegemony, since it is clear that most the country will treat this bad joke for what it is: the pathetic thrashings by scared and angry white conservatives who "want their country back" (as in back to the pre-Civil Rights era). From the NYTimes:

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

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.

“Republicans need a little credit for that,” he said. “I think it’s going to surprise some students.”

Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include “how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.” The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States.

Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.”

It was defeated on a party-line vote.

After the vote, Ms. Knight said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.”

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.

“The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said.

Even the course on world history did not escape the board’s scalpel.

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.

The Test-Textbook Cartel

What is that worthless thirty pounds that cost a hundred dollars in your child's backpack? Why, that is the latest tool developed by the education industrial complex to make the vast majority of children equally stupid around the world, or shall we say, as educationally flat as the EEG readings from Margaret Spellings' frontal lobes. But the children of the oligarchs and their guardians? No, no, they are still reading real books, so civilization is safe.

A sobering piece from the Guardian:

Exam boards are to review the way school textbooks are endorsed after leading authors complained that they are being leant on to write more simplistic texts to win the multi-million pound contracts.

Textbook writers today claim that they are being told to write books which encourage "parrot-learning" to get pupils through exams at the sacrifice of wider critical thinking and learning.

There is widespread concern that children are reading fewer books, losing confidence in reading and enjoying it less after an international study this week found that England had slipped to 19th of 45 countries and provinces in reading skills, down from third five years ago.

The Society of Authors says that in the competition to get an exam board's seal of approval and gain popularity in schools, publishers are producing increasingly narrow textbooks. Elizabeth Haylett, secretary of the society's educational writers group, said: "The textbooks that are being used are being reduced to answer books for the exams. There's no opportunity for children to read beyond the test. They are learning parrot-fashion."

One author of a science textbook, who asked not to be named, was told to write a factually incorrect answer because the mistake had been made in the curriculum and the book had to match. The guidelines say that examining bodies can endorse textbooks but not any one exclusively - schools have to be given options. Publishers cannot explicitly reference where the books' authors have been involved in the exam or curriculum design.

Sue Palmer worked in educational publishing from 1980 until four years ago when she left to write the book Toxic Childhood, which was highly critical of the government's testing regime. She said the guidelines were not being followed.

"It's a cartel - people are writing the exam and then the textbook. The long-term effect is it just becomes a tick list of learning."

Graham Taylor, of the Educational Publishers Council, said: "The idea that a textbook might be tailored to an exam curriculum is logical. Schools want to buy books which will help pupils. It's the schools making the decision and the publishers following."

John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of Schools and College Leaders, said: "Schools want good textbooks geared to the exam syllabus. There's nothing wrong with that but it has gone too far. The textbook should open up new areas of study as well as connecting with the syllabus."

A spokesman for the Joint Council for Qualifications, which represents the major exam boards, said: "Members of JCQ will be meeting next week to review the code of practice."

The educational publishing industry is worth hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Pearson, the largest educational publisher, projected profits of £491m last year.