History teaching standards tilt to right for Texas high schoolers
08:57 AM CST on Saturday, January 16, 2010
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning Newststutz@dallasnews.com
AUSTIN – Texas high school students will have to learn about leading conservative groups from the 1980s and 1990s – but not about liberal or minority-rights groups – under U.S. history standards tentatively adopted by a politically divided State Board of Education on Friday.
The Republican majority on the board also gave a thumbs down to requiring history teachers and textbooks to provide coverage on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy and new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, as well as leading Hispanic civil-rights groups such as LULAC and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Led by the board's social-conservative bloc, Republicans left DemocratHillary Rodham Clinton and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the nation's first black justice, on the list of important figures that will have to be covered in history classes.
But they also added, on a 7-6 vote, Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, the National Rifle Association, Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation to the list of persons and groups that students will learn about.
Board member Don McLeroy, R-College Station, offered the amendment requiring coverage of "key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s." McLeroy said he offered the proposal because the history standards were already "rife with leftist political periods and events – the populists, the progressives, the New Deal and the Great Society."