Texas must fix school curriculum process
By KATHY MILLER
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
May 29, 2010, 6:50PM
The State Board of Education's final approval of new social studies curriculum standards made something very clear: The way Texas decides what our children learn in their public school classrooms is seriously flawed.
Teams made up of teachers and scholars labored throughout much of last year to draft new standards. Then politicians on the state board sent the experts home. Over the course of three meetings this year, the board made detailed, ill-considered and blatantly political changes throughout the drafts. Educators could only watch in despair.
Our schoolchildren deserve far better, and a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll for the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund shows that the vast majority of Texans agree. The May 4-12 poll found that 72 percent of Texas likely voters, including 78 percent of parents, want teachers and scholars, not elected state board members, to be responsible for writing curriculum standards and textbook requirements for public schools.
That's just common sense. Throughout the state board's needlessly drawn-out and divisive debates over standards for language arts, science and now social studies, parents have grown tired of seeing their children's education turned into a political battleground. Texans don't want decisions about what their children learn based on the political biases of anyone, liberals or conservatives. They just want their children to get an education based on facts and sound scholarship — an education that prepares them to succeed in college and a 21st century economy.
But that's not what's happening in Texas. On social studies, for example, board members voted on hundreds of changes without one historian, economist or any other social studies expert in the room to advise them.
Individual board members claim they vetted their revisions with experts before the meetings. But other board members were forced to cast votes on changes they had never seen without the opportunity to consult any experts themselves. As a result, many decisions were based on what members could learn from Google and Wikipedia searches at their desks. Many others were based simply on board members' own limited personal knowledge and their personal and political biases. Some of the most embarrassing results have already been reported, including the temporary removal of a children's book author because board members mistakenly thought he was a Marxist.
Real experts were appalled. More than 1,200 historians from around the country signed an open letter calling on