Here’s some provocative reading to ruin – no, enrich – your long weekend in between watching the Nordic combined and the biathlon.
Texas rules: Size matters when it comes to textbooks. I’m talking about the population of states that buy them, not the tonnage of the tomes that middle schoolers carry on their backs.
California is big enough to push its weight around with textbook publishers and control its autonomy. But pity small states that are prey to the looney dictates of the self-righteous majority on the Texas State Board of Education.
In “How Christian Were the Founders?” New York Times Magazine writer Russell Shorto details how a fundamentalist Christian bloc on the 15-member board has put its ideological stamp on science, language arts and history textbooks that end up in circulation around the nation. That explains why Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority and the NRA get inserted into the history of the ‘80s, while Ted Kennedy gets rubbed out, and why conservative views get inserted into standards texts.
There’s a larger agenda: In the candid words of Cynthia Dunbar, a Christian activist on the Texas board, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Tales from the crypt: If you’re not yet convinced that the state’s teacher tenure laws need changing, check out the exhaustive piece “LAUSD’s Dance of the Lemons” in the latest LA Weekly. The subtitle, “why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible,” says it all.
The Los Angeles Times did a good article in December on the district’s Sisyphean