'T' is for 'Texas Textbooks'
Here is a newsflash from Texas: The conservative majority of the Texas State Board of Education adopted new guidelines for social-studies textbooks that reflect their conservative political views. The new guidelines will emphasize the Christian beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Students in Texas will be expected to learn about the emergence of the conservative movement in the 1980s and 1990s. The new textbooks are supposed to promote patriotism and respect for the “free-enterprise system.”
“Having a public agency decide which textbooks are right and what facts should be added or deleted is nonsensical. It is equivalent to having a public agency review movies and tell us which we will be allowed to see at taxpayer expense.”
No surprise here. For many years, the Texas state board has been telling textbook publishers what should appear in the books that the state will buy for its students. Nineteen other states decide which textbooks will qualify for “adoption” in their public schools. Books that are not approved by the state board cannot be purchased with state funds. This is a very powerful lever to bring about revisions in the textbooks. The two most consequential of the so-called adoption states are Texas and California, because they have the largest number of students and therefore the most clout with publishers. When Texas or California speak, publishers listen and change their textbooks to comply.
Typically, the Texas board demands that the textbooks, especially in history and science, toe the conservative line, while California insists that the textbooks it buys for grades K-8 comply with its “social content” guidelines, which require positive representations of all groups in society. Unlike California, which buys textbooks statewide for grades K-8, Texas buys textbooks en masse for all grades, so it has a lot of influence on high-school textbooks.
Given the strong conservative hold on the elected state board in Texas, it is not surprising that the board demands that its textbooks are patriotic and respectful of religion. Given the strong liberal character of California politics, it is not surprising that its state guidelines demand equal time and respectful representation of gender groups, ethnic and racial groups, and all minorities.
In 2003, I described the absurdities of the textbook adoption process in a book titledThe Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Children Learn. I showed how all sorts of groups from different ends of the political spectrum have used the textbook adoptions to impose their agenda. Feminists went before state boards to demand the excision of all words, phrases, and images that were offensive to them; consequently, textbook publishers gathered long lists of words that were banned from textbooks (and tests, as well). Thus, children are spared ever having to see the