CA Lawmaker To TX: Your Textbooks Are Not Welcome Here
Ben Frumin | April 29, 2010, 1:02PM
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California state Sen. Leland Yee (D) doesn't want Texas teaching his state's kids.
Yee has introduced a bill that would require California's board of education to review in-production textbooks before they're purchased and reject any that have been influenced by Texas' new conservative standards.
Texas' new standards require students to learn about "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s," the Contract with America, NRA and Heritage Foundation -- and replace Thomas Jefferson's place in a world history standard with Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, among other things.
Because Texas is one of the country's largest textbook markets -- and because textbook makers want a single set of textbooks to be used nationwide -- it's possible that Texas' conservative curriculum could go national.
But not to California. At least not if Yee has anything to say about it.
"We here in California, those are not our values," said Yee spokesperson Adam Keigwin in an interview with TPM today.
"We're not gonna let another state dictate what we do in our classrooms."
The bill has passed its first policy committee, and goes to the appropriations committee next, and then, if successful, to the floor of the state senate. Keigwin said he's confident the bill will pass the state senate in the next couple weeks.
The bill would then have to go through the same process in the state assembly before going to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk.
Keigwich said "there are so many aspects to [Texas' standards that Yee] was troubled by." That includes the de-emphasis of Thomas Jefferson and Latino culture, and the emphasis on recent conservative movements.