Having failed to insert Creationism into science textbooks, Texas activists now focus on social studies. Oh joy. Update!

Courtesy of TFN Insider:

 Another sign that the social studies textbook adoption in Texas this year is going to be messy: A political activist who helped write new curriculum standards for the state’s public schools in 2009 is insisting that new textbooks under consideration this year should promote his revisionist views on issues such as slavery and the Civil War, the civil rights movement and church-state separation. 

North Texas activist Bill Ames insisted in 2009 that the state’s previous social studies curriculum standards included an “overrepresentation of minorities” and had a leftist bias. He then served throughout the rest of the year on a state panel charged with drafting new curriculum standards for the high school U.S. history course. Don McLeroy, R-College Station, a State Board of Education (SBOE) member at the time, had insisted that the Texas Education Agency place Ames on the curriculum panel. 

Although fellow curriculum panel members appear to have rejected many of Ames’ demands as they drafted the new standards, Ames was pleased when SBOE members heavily revised the draft document. He now praises the state’s social studies standards, but even the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute has called the state’s U.S. history standards a “politicized distortion of history” with “misrepresentations at every turn.” 

In an article published last weekend on the right-wing website FreedomOutpost.com, Ames boasted that new social studies textbooks publishers will submit in April must be based on those deeply flawed standards. His article offers a guide for the kinds of textbook content he and other right-wing activists as well as some SBOE members will be looking for in the textbooks. Some examples: 

• Ames wants textbooks to play down the role of slavery in causing the American Civil War by teaching students that the primary causes of the war were sectionalism and states’ rights. He points approvingly to SBOE member Pat Hardy’s statement in 2010 that “slavery was a side issue.” 
• He gleefully points out that students will learn about “militant thugs and even cop killers” in the Black Panthers and other “militant black civil rights groups” when they get to textbook discussions on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 
• He insists that the textbooks must tell students about the “unrealistic expectations from civil rights legislation, resulting in the burning and looting of a number of U. S. inner cities.” 
• He wants the textbooks to suggest that Republicans were responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 even though northern congressional Democrats had long championed the measure, a Democratically controlled Congress passed it, and a Democratic president signed it into law. 
• He expresses pleasure over the possibility that textbooks for high school U.S. Government might be forced to imply, despite numerous rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court to the contrary, that separation of church and state isn’t a key constitutional principle. 

These and other issues raised by Ames are largely why the social studies textbook adoption this year will likely be far more controversial than the science textbook adoption — with its disputes over evolution and climate change — in 2013.

You know I am really trying not to hate Texas right now, but I am not being terribly successful.

The dumbing down of our public school textbooks, which have been the direct result of Texas tinkering with the standards, is indefensible and, in my opinion, traitorous. (Hey you attack our educational system you attack our country's future.)

Of course if Texans wants to win my affection (And really why wouldn't they?), then they can vote to make Wendy Davis their new Governor and I will take back every terrible thing I ever said about their state.

Well almost everything.

Update: Goods news, the Texas Board of Education has just imposed stricter guidelines: 

The Texas Board of Education imposed tighter rules Friday on the citizen review panels that scrutinize proposed textbooks, potentially softening fights over evolution, religion's role in U.S. history and other ideological matters that have long seeped into what students learn in school. 

Tension over the issue has been building for years in the country's second most populous state, where the textbook market is so large that changes can affect the industry nationwide. Critics complain that a few activists with religious or political objections have too much power to shape what the state's more than 5 million public school students are taught.

Now see Texas? This is what I was hoping for.

Very positive step.