AUSTIN, Texas (ABP) — A Texas board that sets curriculum standards for the nation’s second-largest textbook market has voted, along party lines, to leave a conservative imprint on history, social studies and economics courses. And the effects won't be felt in the Lone Star State alone.
The Texas State Board of Education voted 10-5 March 12 to approve a set of social-studies standards that many textbook publishers use to guide their publication standards. All of the board’s Republican members voted in favor of the guidelines, and all of its Democratic members voted against them.
A Religious Right voting bloc on the board had, over the previous two months, won scores of contentious votes inserting more than 100 amendments into a set of standards that a group of professional educators had recommended.
Among the amendments was the move to excise Thomas Jefferson from a section on how Enlightenment philosophy influenced the founders, replacing him with 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas and 16th-century Reformer John Calvin.
And the board’s conservative majority rejected — again along party lines — an amendment that would have required textbooks to “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.”
Several of the board’s conservative members have argued — both during board meetings and in other public statements — that church-state separation is a myth or an incorrect interpretation of the First Amendment. The first 16 words of that amendment — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — are generally divided by legal scholars into two halves known as the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. Thinkers, politicians and judges dating back to Jefferson have interpreted the two clauses, when taken together, as requiring an institutional separation of religion and government.
Stephen Reeves
|
An official of the Baptist General Convention of Texas’ Christian Life Commission — which, among other responsibilities, promotes religious liberty and church-state separation — expressed dismay March 16 that the board rejected the amendment.
“I think what we’d like to say in reaction to that is that it’s unfortunate that such a basic understanding of the First Amendment was victim to the hyper-politicization on the State Board of Education,” said Stephen Reeves, the CLC’s legislative counsel. “But it just reinforces the need for churches — Baptists and others — to educate their students about how the First Amendment protects religion in this country.”
Reeves emphasized “that the First Amendment — both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise [Clause] — protect religion, and do so even when the government tries to favor religion.”
Other critics were less measured in their reaction to the board’s decisions on the First Amendment as well as other changes to educators’ original recommendation for the standards.
“What I’ve been telling people is the Texas State Board of Education obviously can’t remove the First Amendment to the Constitution, but they can do something equally frightening — they can erase it from kids’ history classes. And that’s what they voted to do last week,” said Ryan Valentine, deputy director of the progressive group Texas Freedom Network and a member of University Baptist Church in Austin.
Ryan Valentine
|
“They’re hostile to the very idea of church-state separation,” Valentine continued. “But the amendment they rejected didn’t use the church-state language … I think that’s a fairly uncontroversial restatement of the Establishment Clause, and yet they rejected its validity.”
Other changes to the curriculum include:
- Requiring students to learn about the “Judeo-Christian” influences on the nation’s founders.
- Requiring that students learn about the conservative political groups and figures that arose in the 1980s and '90s in the United States — such as the Moral Majority and Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly — without having a similar requirement for learning about liberal movements.
- Replacing the term “capitalism” with “free enterprise” in economics and history standards, because conservative board members thought the term “capitalism” had been tainted by liberal academics who, they contended, use it in a pejorative fashion.
- Including information about Congress’ votes on civil-rights legislation in the 1960s to emphasize that many Democrats at the time opposed desegregation and voting rights for African Americans while many Republicans supported them. However, the standards do not note that many of those conservative Southern Democrats later became Republicans.
- Excising references to the Tejanos who fought at the 1836 Battle of the Alamo alongside more-famous Anglo heroes of Texas history like Davy Crockett and James Bowie. The move caused some of the Democratic members of the board — all of whom are Hispanic or African American — to storm out of the meeting in protest.
Members of the board’s conservative bloc said their actions were necessary to correct a liberal bias they said had become commonplace among social studies textbooks.
“We are adding balance,” said Don McLeroy, generally considered the leader of the board’s conservatives, according to The New York Times. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”
-30-
Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.
Previous ABP stories:
In Texas, Religious Right loses fight with national curriculum implications (3/3/2010)
Texas textbook decisions on science standards have national implications (4/1/2009)