Appropriate to a discussion of textbook approvals and the Texas State Board of Education comes this news: Norma Gabler died in Phoenix, Sunday. She was 84.
Norma and her husband Mel started the practice of nit-picking textbooks during the approval process, always pushing to get a Christian view inserted into books, especially science and history books. Eventually they founded a non-profit group to criticize texts, Education Research Associates, based in Longview, Texas. Despite the deaths of both Gablers, the non-profit will continue.
Steven Schafersman of Texas Citizens for Science alerted me in an e-mail. The Longview News-Journal carried the news of Mrs. Gabler’s death:
The 84-year-old Longview resident died Sunday in Phoenix, Ariz., after serving for decades as the public face of an effort to bolster both accuracy and conservative beliefs in public school textbooks. She and her husband, Mel, who died in 2004, began their work in 1961 in Hawkins after finding errors in a textbook of one of their sons.
They became nationally famous, and a Rice University professor who was head of the Texas Council for Science Education in 1982 said the Gablers were “the most effective textbook censors in the country.”
They founded the Longview-based nonprofit organization Educational Research Analysts, which describes itself as a conservative Christian organization.
Educational Research Analysts is dedicated to finding factual errors in textbooks, as well as to pointing out “censorship of conservative political or social views,” said Neal Frey, president of the organization who worked with the Gablers since 1982. The group’s work will continue, he said.
The Gablers’ work, he said, had national impact because Texas is such a large buyer of textbooks; what is approved here is often repeated nationally by publishers.
Update, August 2, 2007: Afarensis points us to NPR, who seem to speak admiringly of the dead. Awfully polite of them to do so, unless it’s getting in the way of accuracy.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 