I get e-mail, this time from the Texas Freedom Network:
The State Board of Education meeting is next week, and we need YOU to make a difference.
“Am I a religious fanatic? Absolutely. You’d have to be to do what I do.”
– State Board of Education member Don McLeroy
Don't White Out Our History! - Texas Freedom Network
Is this who you want to decide what Texas schoolchildren learn? Or would you rather entrust that task to someone who believes public education is a “tool of perversion,” as board member Cynthia Dunbar believes? Or maybe any one of the board members who believe the separation of church and state is a myth?
If this is not what you want for Texas children, NOW is the critical time to take a stand.
The controversial social studies curriculum process is coming to an end. Public testimony will be heard at the State Board of Education meeting on Wednesday, May 19, and we expect a vote on these standards to take place the following day. We need you to stand up to the State Board of Education by attending our rally on Wednesday, May 19. Or testifying in front of the board. Or both!
Also on Wednesday, the State Board of Education will hear public testimony on the social studies curriculum standards. Since you are already planning to be at the William B. Travis building for the rally, you can also sign up to testify! Read below for more information on registering to testify with the Texas Education Agency. (Testimony will begin in the morning and likely stretch into the evening — so if you wish to testify, be prepared for a long day.)
We look forward to seeing you next week. If you have any questions, e-mail Judie or call us at 512-322-0545.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
I get e-mail from the NAACP; the rest of the nation is paying attention to the follies run by the conservative bureaucrats at the SBOE:
Ed,
I wouldn’t want to be a Texas State Board member this week.
Last week, we asked you to write to your representative, telling him or her that rewriting Texas history textbooks is ignorant and unpatriotic.
Over 1,500 people have already written in, filling the inboxes of our school leaders.
This week, we’d like to offer you one more chance to get involved. The NAACP is planning rallies, hearings and press conferences in Texas to stop the state board from rewriting history. But we can’t do it without you.
An issue as controversial as rewriting history elicits strong emotions, and we want to give you the chance to speak out. Do you have something you would like to say at the hearing?
The NAACP works to ensure equal rights and to eliminate discrimination against all racial and ethnic groups. The proposed changes to our textbooks threaten our mission. This is not about Republicans or Democrats — it’s about our shared history as Texans. That’s why we want to use the words of our Texas supporters to turn the tide.
The Texas textbook vote is just two weeks away, so we need to push ourselves harder now than ever before.
The future of our children’s education is in the hands of just a few State Board members. Your voice could be the one to tip the scale.
Take a moment to tell us what you think about the Texas State Board rewriting history. The best submissions will be read at the hearing on May 19th.
We need your help to keep divisive politics out of Texas’ classrooms.
From now until May 14th, the State Board of Education is accepting public comments on its proposed curriculum changes.
The SBOE has proposed removing Thomas Jefferson from a part of the curriculum. They are also planning to exclude references to Hispanics who fought Santa Anna and died at the Alamo.
During the primaries, Texans voted against the most extreme and hyper-political SBOE candidates, sending a clear message about their approach of injecting politics into our classrooms.
Last month, I called on Rick Perry to ask his appointed chair of the SBOE to either send changes back to expert review teams or delay the vote until new board members are seated.
Perry’s response has been to say that he’s not going to “try to outsmart” the SBOE. He declined to show leadership, refusing to ask his appointed chair of SBOE to rein in the hyper-political curriculum amendment process.
Our next governor should be a leader who ensures our schools prepare young Texans for college and their careers. I am committed to improving education and working for our future.
Thank you for taking the time to weigh in.
Sincerely,
Bill White
P.S. If you would like to send your comments directly to the SBOE, click here.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Jeff Danziger cartoon, for the New York Times Syndicate, on Texas State Board of Education “changes” to Texas social studies texts.
People for the American Way have joined the fight for good education in Texas, pushing better social studies education standards. The Texas State Board of Education will conduct final votes on social studies standards in May.
Grotesque slashes damaged social studies standards in the last round of amendments. Conservatives will probably try to keep secret their proposed changes, offering a flurry of last-minute amendments carefully designed to gut serious education and make the standards work as indoctrination for young conservatives instead.
PFAW has good reason to fear. Here’s their letter. from PFAW President Michael Keegan:
Dear People For Supporter,
Thomas Jefferson banned in Texas schools? Maybe… if the Right has its way. The fight is still on to keep absurd changes out of the Texas social studies textbook standards, with the final standards set to be adopted by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) on May 21.
Right-wing members of the SBOE are using the textbook standards in Texas to rewrite history in a way that could impact students across the U.S., tossing out facts in favor of propaganda like:
America is a Christian country, founded on “Biblical principles.”
Conservative icons from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority and even Sen. Joseph McCarthy are history’s “good guys,” but progressives and progressive values are at odds with what it means to be “American.”
Words like “democracy” (sounds like “Democrat!”) have nothing to do with America — we’re a Republic — In fact, “capitalism” has sort of a negative connotation to some, so they want that word to be universally replaced with “free market.”
Some of the major contributions of Thomas Jefferson — arguably America’s greatest thinker — are on the chopping block, as are the contributions of other important figures not favored by the zealots on the Texas State Board of Education, like Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall. (Who’s next? Martin Luther King? FDR?)
Texas is just ground zero for what is clearly a national effort. We need to make sure that whatever standards are adopted in Texas, they do not affect the social studies textbooks used by students in other states.
The Texas State Board of Education traditionally has tremendous power in determining the content of textbooks not only for Texas students but for students across the U.S. Texas reviews and adapts textbook standards for the major subjects every six years, and because of the size of the state’s market, textbook publishers often print books consistent with the Texas standards. Last year, they attracted national ridicule for trying to inject creationism into science textbooks. This year, they’re voting on social studies standards.
The right-wing majority on the State Board wants indoctrinate Texas students into this new perverse revisionist history. PFAW is supporting our allies on the ground in Texas who are working to make sure students have the chance to learn history as it occurred, not how the Far Right wish it had happened. But we need to do all we can to make sure this is not exported to other states and school districts as well. Help us take extremism out of textbook decision making and let our children learn the truth in the classroom.
“Follow the Money” is a video summarizing the results from the project by Northwestern University grad students Daniel Grady and Christian Thiemann. Using data from the website Where’s George?, they have been able to track the movement of U.S. paper currency. What can you learn from this? That there are natural borders within the U.S. that don’t necessarily follow state borders, and it can also be used to predict the spread of disease because it maps movement of people within the U.S.
From Maria Popova on BrainPickings.org: This may sound like dry statistical uninterestingness, but the video visualization of the results is rather eye-opening, revealing how money — not state borders, not political maps, not ethnic clusters — is the real cartographer drawing our cultural geography. The project was a winner at the 2009 Visualization Challenge sponsored by the National Science Foundation and AAA.
Here’s another opportunity to put real, cutting edge technology in your classroom. In fact, your kids could probably invent all sorts of new uses for it.
Have you even heard of this stuff? Can you use it, live, with the equipment you’ve got?
Blaise Aguera y Arcas of MicroSoft demonstrated augmented-reality maps using the power of Bing maps, Flickr, Worldwide Telescope, Video overlays and Photosynth, to an appreciative and wowed audience at TEDS:
My prediction: One more advance in computer technology that classrooms will not see in a timely or useful manner.
But have you figured out how to use this stuff in your geography, history, economics or government classes? Please tell us about it in comments. Give examples and links, please.
Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times-Free Press, March 16, 2010
Bennett remains one of my favorite cartoonists today. His work is incisive, intelligent, and persuasive to the side of reason and light almost all of the time. Why hasn’t he won a Pulitzer yet?
Bennett is generally a powerful supporter of U.S. education; see the two other recent cartoons, below the fold.
SBOE isn’t exactly asking that the Bible be rewritten — or at least, not directly. Suggesting we replace Thomas Jefferson as a founder with John Calvin in high school standards, is just as silly.
With these new Social Studies TEKS, TX students won’t know what such a
book is about.
Small bit of humor from a truly sad situation. One of the leaders of the Texas State Soviet of Education defended the evisceration and defenestration of social studies standards saying they didn’t need to listen to liberal college professors.
In economics, the professor was a conservative, well-respected economics professor from Texas A&M University, one of the most conservative state universities in the nation (with a Corps of Cadets numbering in the thousands and tradition deeper than Palo Duro Canyon and broader than the Gulf of Mexico). Calling these people “liberal” is tantamount to complaining about the communism espoused by Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower — that is, it demonstrates a divorce from reality and rationality.
In the grand scheme of things it’s not a huge problem, but it’s more than a trifle. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to fully comprehend market economics in the U.S. without understanding what capitalism is, and how it works. Teachers will be left to find their own materials to explain “free enterprise” and, if the students ever make it into a real economics course in college, they will discover “free enterprise” is a quaint, political term that is not discussed in serious economics circles. Texas students will, once again, be pushed to the hindmost by Don McLeroy’s odd views of America and what he doesn’t want Americans to know.
For example, look at the Council for Economic Education — while “capitalism” is not the only word they use for market-based economies, you’ll have a tougher time finding any definition of “free enterprise.” Or, more telling, look at the Advanced Placement courses, or the International Baccalaureate courses. AP and IB courses are the most academically rigorous courses offered in American high schools. The Texas TEKS step away from such rigor, however (while the Texas Education Agency rides Texas schools to add rigor — go figure). IB courses talk a lot about enterprise, but they don’t censor “capitalism,” nor do they pretend it’s not an important concept.
At the very conservative and very good Library of Economics and Liberty (which every social studies teacher should have bookmarked and should use extensively), a search for “free enterprise” produces 77 entries (today). “Capitalism” produces almost ten times as much, with more than 750 listings.
Which phrase do you think is more useful in studying American economics, history and politics?
Teachers will deal with it. It’s one more hurdle to overcome on the path to trying to educate Texas students. It’s one more roadblock to their learning what they need to keep the freedom in America.
Capitalism - Warren Buffett - BusinessWeek image
Free Enterprise - Bernie Madoff
The real difference? Literature on capitalism frequently address the issue of moral investments, and the need for some regulation to bolster the Invisible Hand in producing discipline to steer markets from immoral and harmful investments. The essential history politics economic question of the 20th and 21st centuries is, can economic freedom exist without political freedom, and which one is more crucial to the other? We know from every period of chaos in history when governments did not function well, but bandits did, that free enterprise can exist without either political freedom or economic freedom. I think of it like this:
Capitalism
Free Enterprise
Adam Smith
Blackbeard the Pirate
Warren Buffett
Bernie Madoff
Investing
Spending
Building institutions
Taking profits
Retail
Robbery
Wholesale
Extortion
Save for a rainy day
debt-equity swap
Antitrust enforcement to keep markets fair
Don’t get caught, hope for acquittal
Milton Friedman
P. T. Barnum
Ludwig von Mises
Charles Ponzi
Friedrich von Hayek
Richard Cheney, “deficits don’t matter”
Paul Krugman
Kato Kaelin
Stockholders
Victims and suckers
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Cynthia Dunbar told Chris Matthews today that Thomas Aquinas played a more important role in the American Revolution than Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson, Texas students learn in other places, wrote the great body of the Declaration of Independence, and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which is the direct forebear of religious freedom in U.S. Constitutional law.
If you hurry, you can see it tonight (at 6:00 p.m and 11:00 p.m Central, I’m told) on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball.”
Isn’t it astounding people who claim to be Christian will tell such bold lies to children? It’s as if they think Jesus said “make the children suffer” instead of what Jesus did say. Voodoo history at its most voodoo; history revisionism of the rankest sort. Where’s Mermelstein?
Tuesday, March 16 was the 259th anniversary of the birth of James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, the sponsor of the Bill of Rights, the life-long campaigner for good government based on knowledge of the errors of history, especially in the area of religious freedom.
Under social studies standards proposed by the Texas State Board of Education, Texas students will never study Madison’s views, or Madison’s Constitution, without intervention by their parents or good teachers who run some risk to teach the glories of American history to students.
Newspaper stories across the nation concentrated on Madison’s birthday expressed revulsion and rejection of the crabbed and cramped views of the Texas SBOE, and the cup of revulsion runneth over.
A couple of months can make a big difference. Can.
A difference which way?
Two months ago the Texas State Board of Education suspended its revamping of social studies standards — the efforts to grind the standards into a right-wing crutch were so controversial that hearings, discussion and amending proposed standards took up more time than allotted. SBOE delayed final votes until March 10.
How will those primary losses affect them and their work on the board?
In addition, other members of the culture war ring are retiring, including Cynthia Dunbar. Will the lame ducks be content to vote up the changes urged by history and economic professionals and professional educators, or will they do as McLeroy suggested they need to do earlier, and fight against the recommendations of experts?
Most of us watching from outside of Austin (somebody has to stay back and grade the papers and teach to the test . . .) expect embarrassments. On English and science standards before, the culture war ring tactics were to make a flurry of last-minute, unprinted and undiscussed, unannounced amendments apparently conspired to gut the standards of accuracy (which would not make the right wing political statements they want) and, too often, rigor. Moderates on the board have not had the support mechanisms to combat these tactics successfully — secret e-mail and telephone-available friends standing by to lend advice and language on amendments. In at least two votes opponents of the culture war voted with the ring, not knowing that innocent-sounding amendments came loaded.
In a test of the No True Scotsman argument, religious people will be praying for Texas kids and Texas education. Meanwhile, culture warriors at SBOE will work to frustrate those prayers.
Oy.
Thomas Jefferson toyed with the idea of amendment the U.S. Constitution to provide a formal role for the federal government in guaranteeing education, which he regarded as the cornerstone of freedom and a free, democratic-style republic. Instead, American primary and secondary education are governed by more than 15,000 locally-elected school boards with no guidance from the national government on what should be taught. Alone among the industrial and free nations of the world, the U.S. has no mechanism for rigorous national standards on what should be taught.
For well over a century a combined commitment to educating kids better than their parents helped keep standards high and achievement rising. Public education got the nation through two world wars, and created a workforce that could perform without peer on Earth in producing a vibrant and strong economy.
That shared commitment to quality education now appears lost. Instead we have culture warriors hammering teachers and administrators, insisting that inaccurate views of Jefferson and history be taught to children, perhaps to prevent them from ever understanding what the drive for education meant to freedom, but surely to end Jeffersonian-style influences in the future.
Texas’s SBOE may make the case today that states cannot be trusted with our children’s future, and that we need a national body to create academic rigor to preserve our freedom. Or they will do the right thing.
Voters last week expressed their views that SBOE can’t be trusted to do the right thing. We’re only waiting to see how hard McLeroy is willing to work to put his thumb in the eye of Big Tex.
Texas Freedom Network gives you the background; watch TFN’s blog, TFN Insider, for more timely updates (heck, head over there now and learn a lot about today’s meeting). When you read the New York Times piece, you noted incisive comments by Kathy Miller — she’s the director of TFN. TFN is the tape that has held together the good parts of education standards so far, against the swords of the culture warriors. TFN’s blog will probably be updated through the meeting.
We are pro-growth. We are fierce advocates for a thriving, dynamic free market. But we do think that there have to be some rules of the road in place in the financial sector that will create an even playing field and allow businesses to raise capital and consumers to buy products with confidence.
Coming out of this past decade, there has been a sense on the part of a lot of middle-class families that they have been left behind, even when we were expanding. And I talked during the campaign about the need for us to restore a sense of balance to the compact between business, government, and employees all across the country.
If businesses are making record profits but employees are seeing their wages flatline—and in fact, incomes decline over the course of the decade—that puts enormous strains on families. It puts, I think, a dampening effect on consumers who help drive this economy. We are going to be better off if everybody feels like they have got a stake in growth and innovation moving forward. And I think that balance got lost.
Now, making sure that we restore that balance without tipping too far in the other direction in ways that squelch innovation and investment is going to be an important challenge, and one that we take very seriously. But the important message I would have for the business community—and this is something that I emphasize every time I have lunch with CEOs, and we have had a lot of them in here—is we have every interest in you succeeding.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 