Texas and Textbooks | The Huffington Post

Sigh…

Some background history:

Conservative members of the Texas Board of Education don’t want to create a group of state university professors to fact-check students’ textbooks for potential errors, despite recent controversies…

Source: Texas Board of Education Refuses To Allow Professors To Fact-Check Textbooks

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A broken process at the Texas State Board of Education has allowed right-wing activists to politicize the facts—or fiction—that get taught in history class.

Source: Was Moses a Founding Father? – The Atlantic

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Moses and the American Constitution: If Texas wants biblical characters and states’ rights in textbooks, publishers are happy to deliver.

Source: Texas board of education hearings: Moses and states’ rights in social studies textbooks.

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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.

…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 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.

…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.  ..The [Thomas B. Fordham Institute evaluation of US history standards for public schools 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.

Source: How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us | by Gail Collins | The New York Review of Books