Two earthquakes ravage American nations, tsunamis, freakishly large snowstorms, still trouble in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran in turmoil and ruled by some sort of crazy, North Koreans still starve so the nation can make a nuclear sabre to rattle.
Another prominent, but much more reasonable Republican member of the SBOE also lost: Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, in Dallas. Miller was so expected to win that race that almost no one was watching, and little is in public about the winner of the race.
Election results from Tuesday’s primary election in Texas mean that the State Board of Education will change dramatically. It would be almost impossible for any of the changes to be bad ones. McLeroy led the anti-evolution force on the board. McLeroy was the ringleader to gut and racialize English standards earlier, and he’s been the point man in the attempt to gut and de-secularize social studies standards.
Board member Cynthia Dunbar, another “social conservative,” did not run for re-election.
In the governor’s race, anti-education, anti-science Gov. Rick Perry won big over the state’s popular Republican U.S. Sen. Kay Hutchison. Third place in that race went to the Teabagger candidate.
No Teabagger won any race in Texas.
It’s not that Texas has suddenly gained reason. The dissension on the SBOE, demonstrated by the Texas Senate’s rejection of McLeroy’s renomination to be chairman of the body, just got to be too much. Texans like their crazies to be sane enough to get things done, and not so noisily crazy as to attract attention to the state’s shared insanity.
Sunlight cast on the actions of the board, especially by groups like the Texas Freedom Network, informed Texans. And now the people of Texas have spoken.
News reports in Texas this morning said that several of the right-wing, gut-education-standards changes proposed to social studies standards had failed in voting on Thursday, January 14. But, much more was to be done, and the SBOE adjourned early last night to continue voting today.
In a pattern familiar to education advocates in Texas, board member Don McLeroy (R-Pluto) today proposed a long series of amendments, apparently off-the-cuff, but probably written up in earlier strategy sessions. These last-minute amendments tend to pass having missed any serious scrutiny.
Will he be able to ruin Texas education for the next decade? I cannot follow the live webcasts; Steve Schafersman is working to stop the amendments, rather than merely blog about them. We probably won’t know the extent of the damage for weeks. McLeroy cherishes his role as a Port-au-Prince-style earthquake to Texas education. (Pure coincidence, I’m sure — Ed Brayton summarizes McLeroy’s politics today.)
Watch that space, and other news sources. I may provide updates here, as I can get information.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Rapid updates or live-blogging should be available at the blog of the Texas Freedom Network, TFN Insider.
It’s Item #6 on the SBOE agenda, with a title that tips off the trouble:
Item #6 — Public Hearing Regarding Proposed Revisions to 19 TAC Chapter 113, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies, and Chapter 118, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Economics with Emphasis on the Free Enterprise System and Its Benefits.
Schafersman e-mailed an introduction to the meeting:
Some say the Social Studies public testimony by the religious right, liberals, etc., then the SBOE debate, motions to amend, votes, etc. is a bigger circus than adopting the science standards. Judge for yourself. You can watch the entire circus, carnival, and sideshow on the webcast video at http://www.texasadm in.com/cgi- bin/tea.cgi
This is Texas democracy in action, when sullen and tight-lipped State Board members listen to public testifiers for 3 minutes each and profoundly ignore them since they already know what they are going to do. But I, at least, feel better after speaking so I don’t later feel responsible for the crappy amendments, changes, and policies that come out of this horrible Board because I did nothing. The proposed Social Studies standards written by the panels composed of teachers and professors are excellent (when have I heard this before), but the SBOE can’t wait to shamelessly impose their own Religious Right agenda on them.
‘A rose by any other name’ you think, until you start thinking of how Texas kids do on standardized tests, college admission exams, and the punchline on the joke, about Texas kids being told not to study capitalism. No siree, no capitalism in the fictional home of J. R. Ewing, never mind the real-life capitalists like T. Boone Pickens or H. Ross Perot (Jr. and Sr.).
In Dallas, the city prepares to name a street after Cesar Chavez, the great Hispanic union organizer and advocate for working Americans. In Austin, SBOE works to strike all mentions of Chavez, because they dislike the politics of heroes of our ethnic minorities (soon to be a majority in Texas). In Washington historians and policy-makers follow the legacy of Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights attorney and first African-American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. In Austin, SBOE thinks Marshall should be left out of history books. Many of us suspect he’s anathema to the white right-wing in Austin: A smart, successful and noble man of color.
Mel and Norma Gabler died years ago, but their history lingers in the halls of education policy in Austin. It’s Shakespearean.
This is a massive battle. David Barton worked for 30 years to gut history standards nationally to teach a history of America that never was, and as the official religionist appointee of the right-wing SBOE members, he stands on the brink of accomplishing much of the revisionism he’s advocated. See the Texas Tribune story on the issue, “Hijacking History.”
Generally we shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists, Ronald Reagan said. At the SBOE, we’ve put the terrorists in charge of history and economic curricula — if not the terrorist themselves, at least the terrorists’ camels’ noses. Texas’s process has earned flashing red-light, claxon-sounding repeating of the words of Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Excellence in Education: If a foreign nation did this to us, we’d consider it an act of war [excerpt below the fold].
Make no mistake about it. SBOE’s goal is to roll back any of the reforms left from Reagan’s Commission’s work. Our nation is more at risk from foreign competition than ever before. SBOE plans to give away a bit more of our future to China, this week.
Our saving grace is the general incompetence of SBOE members to make significant reform in Texas’s wounded schools, reeling from unworkable and damaging requirements under the No Child Left Behind Act and a testing program that severely limits what can be taught in any social studies course other than those bastions of learning left in International Baccalaureate programs and Advanced Placement courses (estimates are that between 5% and 10% of Texas high school students can take one of those good courses). Whatever silliness, craziness or lies SBOE orders to be taught, it can’t be taught and tested well. Inertia preventing change works to save America in this case.
In business, most CEOs at least appreciate the value of having good front-line employees who are the ones who really deliver the service or product and produce the profit of the enterprise (even if they don’t treat those employees so well as the employees deserve). Education may be the last bastion of flogging the horse that should be pulling the cart instead. In this case, having well-trained teachers in the classroom is the last hope for Texas, Texas parents and Texas students — and Texas’s economic future and future in liberty. Teachers are the last defense of freedom in Texas. Today SBOE will make another assault on the ramparts that protect the teachers in their work.
Carol Haynes, who claims to have a doctorate in some discipline, told the board how to rewrite the standards to completely change the history of the civil rights movement in their last hearing on the topic. According to Haynes, apparently, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was opposed to civil rights and Barry Goldwater was in favor — the Board didn’t offer to correct her revisionism, but instead asked her to go beyond her three minutes in fawning acceptance. This appears to be SBOE’s approval of various Other Universe hypotheses offered by Star Trek, allowing any damned thing at all to be taught as history (except the right stuff). Haynes is scheduled to testify again (#128), probably very late at night, but perhaps in time for the 10:00 p.m. Texas television news broadcasts. Oy.
The Texas Freedom Network sent out the following press release after our press conference this morning at the Texas Education Agency:
The state’s leading religious liberties group today joined with clergy and scholars in calling on the State Board of Education to approve new curriculum standards that don’t undermine religious freedom in Texas social studies classrooms.
“Curriculum writers have drafted proposed standards that rightly acknowledge the influence of faith on the Founders and in our nation’s history,” Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller said today. “But those writers also respected religious freedom by rejecting political pressure to portray the United States as favoring one faith over all others. Doing otherwise would aid the teaching of bad history and promote something that is fundamentally un-American.”
Miller spoke in advance of a Wednesday public hearing on proposed new social studies curriculum standards. Teachers, academics and community members from around the state have spent the last year crafting the new standards. Publishers will use the standards to write new textbooks scheduled for adoption by Texas in 2011. The state board will debate the standards drafts on Thursday and has scheduled a final vote in March.
Derek Davis, dean of humanities and the graduate school and director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Mary Hardin-Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Belton, called on the board to respect the work of teachers and other experts who helped write the new standards.
“Religious liberty stands as one of our nation’s bedrock principles,” Davis said. “Yet it seems always under siege by those who fail to appreciate the astute thinking of the founding fathers that caused them to write into the Constitution the principle that guarantees religious liberty: the separation of church and state. This distinctly American value continues to set our nation apart from those embroiled in religious conflict in the rest of the world.”
Miller and Davis were joined at a press conference by the Rev. Marcus McFaul of Highland Park Baptist Church in Austin and Steven Green, a professor of law and of history and director of the Willamette Center for Religion at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
“The instruction of religious faith, discipleship, and a life of service and piety is the responsibility of each faith community, whether church, synagogue or mosque,” Rev. McFaul said. “It is the responsibility of parents and parishes, not public schools. We all note – as the curriculum writers did – the role and influence of religion in American history, but not to advance, promote or seek advantage for any particular religion’s point of view.”
The state board has revised curriculum standards for language arts and science over the past two years. In both cases the board either threw out or heavily revised standards crafted by curriculum writing teams that included teachers, curriculum specialists and academic experts. Last year, for example, creationists on the state board pushed through science standards that call into question long-established scientific evidence for evolution.
“This is not a good way to make sound education policy,” Miller said of the board’s habit of rejecting the work of teachers and experts. “It’s past time that state board members stop playing politics with the education of Texas children, respect the hard work teachers and other experts have put into writing standards, and acknowledge that experts – not politicians – know best what our children need to learn.”
Educate somebody else on this issue:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Dr. Steve Schafersman will testify on proposed new standards for social studies in Texas public schools, at a hearing before the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) scheduled for today, January 13, 2009.
Texas State Board of Education Public Hearing
Austin, Texas; Wednesday, 2009 January 13
I am grateful for the opportunity to address you about Social Studies standards for which I am testifying as a private citizen. Tomorrow you will begin your work to adopt the new Social Studies TEKS. I closely read and evaluated the proposed Grade 8 Social Studies, High School U. S. History, U. S. Government, World History, and World Geography standards and found them to be quite satisfactory. The standards were extremely comprehensive, balanced, fair-minded, and honest. The members of the panels who wrote them did an outstanding job and I was very impressed by their knowledge and professionalism. I urge that you adopt these Social Studies standards without change.
My experience with this Board leads me to suspect that some of you don’t want to adopt these excellent standards–written by social studies curriculum experts and teachers–without change. After all, these standards were written by experts and some of you feel obliged to stand up to the experts. Some of you may want to change some of the standards to correspond to your own political and religious beliefs, such as the mistaken notions that the United States is a Christian nation, that we do not have a secular government, or that separation of church and state is a myth. Some of you may want to add more unnecessary information about Christian documents or Christian history in America. If some of you do wish to make such changes, I request that you restrain yourselves. Please resist the temptation to engage in the same behavior some of you exhibited last year when you perverted the Science standards and embarrassed the citizens of Texas by engaging in pseudoscientific anti-intellectual behavior. While the Texas State Board of Education has a long and proud history of anti-intellectualism, the economic conditions today demand that we stop that practice and return to professionalism and respect for academic achievement so that our children have a future in which they will use their minds to make a living in intellectual pursuits and not their limbs in a service economy.
During the adoption of the science standards, some Board members amended the Biology and Earth and Space Science standards by engaging in fast talking, omitting pertinent information about what was being changed, offering bogus “compromises” that were not really fair compromises, and referring to “experts” who were in fact pseudoscientists and not real experts at all. I hope to not witness the same behavior tomorrow but I am pessimistic. Two pseudo-historians, David Barton and Peter Marshall, were appointed as “experts” and there is plenty of evidence available that demonstrates that these two gentlemen are preachers and polemicists for their radical agendas, not legitimate history experts.
I urge the rational and conservative Board members–whom I hope still make up a majority of this Board–to resist proposed radical amendments that attempt to insert bogus histories of American exceptionalism, America’s presumed Christian heritage as the source of our liberties and Constitutional principles, and other historical myths perpetrated by the American Religious Right. I urge you to vote No to such radical amendments, not Abstain or your radical opponents will gain the same advantage that they enjoyed during the amendment process for the Science standards, where they were delighted when some of you abstained or did not vote since that made it easier for them to obtain majorities which allowed them to win several amendments that made changes detrimental to science education. Unlike last year, when you were prevented from consulting your legitimate Science experts during debate, please consult your genuine Social Studies experts, Texas Professors Kracht, Hodges, and de la Teja. Please try to avoid the same mistakes with the Social Studies adoption process that occurred with the Science standards adoption, so no one will be able to accuse you of being anti-intellectual.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Here is a news rundown of stories on the Texas State Board of Education, who have been planning for a year now to mess up social studies standards for Texas public schools, this week.
Austin American-Statesman details part of the trouble: Officials at the SBOE have hired a couple of radical religious historical revisionists, David Barton and Peter Marshall, and ignored educators, historians and economists in revising the standards; both are ministers with a history of conflict with historians and educators. Both have called for emphasis on their Christian sects’ beliefs in history classes.
Once, a guy in a schoolbook storage room was the killer.
Now, the books themselves are becoming dangerous.
You can help. You can testify next week. You can send comments. The Texas Freedom Network can help you be heard.
Please let the State Board of Education know that Texas, and the nation, needs good social studies standards. As we noted last month, it’s time to stand up for education and social studies:
Make Your Voice Heard at January Public Hearing
The process of revising social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools is moving into a critical stage. And a public hearing the board has scheduled for January may be the only opportunity for you to speak out against the far right’s efforts to corrupt standards for history, government and other social studies classes.
The final drafts of the proposed standards prepared by writing teams made up of teachers, academics and other community members are reflective of mainstream academic scholarship in the various subject areas. It is clear that members of these writing teams largely resisted intense political pressure from far right, rejecting attempts to remove key civil rights figures and make other politically motivated revisions. (See the Background section at the bottom of this e-mail for a more detailed account of the politicization of this curriculum process.)
The State Board of Education so far has scheduled only one public hearing on the proposed standards. That hearing is likely to occur either on January 13 or January 14 in Austin.
If you are interested in speaking at the hearing, pleaseclick here. TFN will help you register to speak before the board and be an effective voice against efforts to politicize our children’s classrooms.
This may be the only opportunity the board provides for Texans to speak out on the proposed standards. If we are to prevent far-right SBOE members from turning social studies classrooms into tools for promoting political agendas, then it’s critical that the board hears from people like you! Click here to sign up for more information on how to testify in January.
Background on Social Studies Review Process to Date
Earlier this year, TFN exposed and derailed several attempts by the far right to hijack the social studies curriculum revision process. Members of the state board – or their appointees to review panels and writing teams – tried at various times to:
Remove civil rights champions like César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall from the standards, calling them poor examples of citizenship
Turn Joseph McCarthy – who discredited himself and dishonored Congress with his infamous Red-baiting smear campaign in the 1950s – into an American hero
Rewrite history and portray America’s Founders as intending to establish a Christian nation with laws based on a fundamentalist reading of the Bible
Members of the writing teams largely rejected these fringe ideas in the final drafts of the standards they submitted to the board. Chávez and Marshall remain in the curriculum. The American history standards do not whitewash the damaging history of McCarthyism. And under the proposed standards students would still learn that the Founders created a nation in which all people are free to worship – or not – as they choose without coercion or interference by government.
We must ensure that the board adopts curriculum standards that reflect mainstream academic scholarship in social studies. This is vitally important because the results of this decision will be reflected in the next generation of social studies textbooks around the country.
Jon Taplin explains why knowing world history is valuable. The sad thing is that, of course, the story that makes his reason doesn’t appear in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills list for world history, nor in any other social studies course.
The Renaissance, and Florence, were more than just a minor question on the TAKS test. Santayana’s Ghost weeps bitterly.
Why isn’t Jon Taplin’s blog required reading in more places, by more people in government and politics? We know why the Texas State School Board doesn’t want anyone to read it — that alone should make people fight to see what Taplin says.
Promote this idea in your own study group:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Star-spangled Banner and the War of 1812 – The original Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the song that would become our national anthem, is among the most treasured artifacts in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Every school kid learns the story of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” or should.
During the War of 1812, Georgetown lawyer Francis Scott Key, stood aboard a British ship in Baltimore Harbor to negotiate the release of his friend, Dr. William Beanes, who had been taken prisoner while the British stormed through Bladensburg, Maryland, after burning Washington, D.C. Key witnessed the British shelling of Fort McHenry, the guardian of Baltimore’s harbor. Inspired when he saw the U.S. flag still waving at dawn after a night of constant shelling, Key wrote a poem.
Key published the poem, suggested it might be put to the tune of “Anachreon in Heaven” (a tavern tune popular at the time) — and the popularity of the song grew until Congress designated it the national anthem in 1931. In telling the story of the latest restoration of that garrison flag now housed at the Smithsonian Museum of American History,Smithsonian Magazine repeated the story in the July 2000 issue: “Our Flag Was Still There.”
It’s a wonderful history with lots of splendid, interesting details (Dolley Madison fleeing the Executive Mansion clutching the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, the guy who had introduced Dolley to James Madison and then snubbed them after they were married; the British troops eating the White House dinner the Madisons left in their haste; the gigantic, 42 by 30 foot flag sewn by Mary Pickersgill, a Baltimore widow trying to support her family; the rag-tag Baltimore militia stopping cold “Wellington’s Invicibles;” the British massing of 50 boats and gunships; and much more).
It’s a grand and glorious history that stirs the patriotic embers of the most cynical Americans.
And it’s all true.
So it doesn’t deserve the voodoo history version, the bogus history created by some person preaching in a church (I gather from the “amens”) that is making the rounds of the internet, stripped of attribution so we cannot hunt down the fool who is at fault.
We got this in an e-mail yesterday; patriots save us, there must be a hundred repetitions that turn up on Google, not one correcting this horrible distortion of American history.
Horrible distortion of American history
(The full version is a mind-numbing 11 minutes plus. Some people have put it on other sites.)
Why do I complain?
It was the War of 1812, not the Revolutionary War — there were 15 states, not 13 colonies.
There was no ultimatum to to Baltimore, nor to the U.S., as this fellow describes it.
Key negotiated for the release of one man, Dr. Beanes. There was no brig full of U.S. prisoners.
It’s Fort McHenry, not “Henry.” The fort was named after James McHenry, a physician who was one of the foreign-born signers of the Constitution, who had assisted Generals Washington and Lafayette during the American Revolution, and who had served as Secretary of War to Presidents Washington and Adams.
Fort McHenry was a military institution, a fort defending Baltimore Harbor. It was not a refuge for women and children.
The nation would not have reverted to British rule had Fort McHenry fallen.
There were 50 ships, not hundreds. Most of them were rafts with guns on them. Baltimore Harbor is an arm of Chesapeake Bay; Fort McHenry is not on the ocean.
The battle started in daylight.
Bogus quote: George Washington never said “What sets the American Christian apart from all other people in this world is he will die on his feet before he will live on his knees.” Tough words. Spanish Civil War. Not George Washington. I particularly hate it when people make up stuff to put in the mouths of great men. Washington left his diaries and considerably more — we don’t have to make up inspiring stuff, and when we do, we get it wrong.
The battle was not over the flag; the British were trying to take Baltimore, one of America’s great ports. At this point, they rather needed to since the Baltimore militia had stunned and stopped the ground troops east of the city. There’s enough American bravery and pluck in this part of the story to merit no exaggerations.
To the best of our knowledge, the British did not specifically target the flag.
There were about 25 American casualties. Bodies of the dead were not used to hold up the flag pole — a 42 by 30 foot flag has to be on a well-anchored pole, not held up by a few dead bodies stacked around it.
You can probably find even more inaccuracies (please note them in comments if you do).
The entire enterprise is voodoo history. The name of Key is right; the flag is right; almost everything else is wrong.
Please help: Can you find who wrote this piece of crap? Can you learn who the narrator is, and where it was recorded?
I keep finding troubling notes with this on the internet: ‘My school kids are going to see this to get the real story.’ ‘Why are the libs suppressing the truth?’ ‘I didn’t know this true story before, and now I wonder why my teachers wouldn’t tell it.’
If Peter Marshall and David Barton gave a gosh darn about American history, they would muster their mighty “ministries” to correct the inaccuracies in this piece. But they are silent.
Just when you thought it was safe to take a serious summer vacation, finish the latest Doris Kearns Goodwin, and catch up on a couple of novels . . .
The sharks of education policy are back.
Or the long knives are about to come out (vicious historical reference, of course, but I’m wagering the anti-education folks didn’t catch it). Pick your metaphor.
Our friend Steve Schafersman sent out an e-mail alert this morning:
The Expert Reviews of the proposed TexasSocial Studies curriculum are now available at
David Barton, President, WallBuilders
Review of Current Social Studies TEKS
Jesus Francisco de la Teja, Professor and Chair, Department of History, Texas State University
Review of Current Social Studies TEKS
Daniel L. Dreisbach, Professor, American University Review of Current Social Studies TEKS
Lybeth Hodges, Professor, History, Texas Woman’s University
Review of Current Social Studies TEKS
Jim Kracht, Associate Dean and Professor, College of Education and Human Development, Texas A&M University
Review of Current Social Studies TEKS
Peter Marshall, President, Peter Marshall Ministries
Review of Current Social Studies TEKS
You can download their review as a pdf file.
Three of these reviewers are legitimate, knowledgeable, and respected academics who undoubtedly did a fair, competent, and professional job. The other three are anti-church- state separation, anti-secular public government, and pseudoscholars and pseudohistorians. I expect their contributions to be biased, unprofessional, and pseudoscholarly. Here are the bad ones:
Barton may be the worst of the three. He founded Wallbuilders to deliberately destroy C-S separation and promote Fundamentalist Christianity in US government. Just about everything he has written is unhistorical and inaccurate. For example, Barton has published numerous “quotes” about C-S separation made by the Founding Fathers that upon investigation turned out to be hoaxes. Here’s what Senator Arlen Specter had to say about Barton:
Probably the best refutation of Barton’s argument simply is to quote his own exegesis of the First Amendment: “Today,” Barton says, “we would best understand the actual context of the First Amendment by saying, ‘Congress shall make no law establishing one Christian denomination as the national denomination. ‘ ” In keeping with Barton’s restated First Amendment, Congress could presumably make a law establishing all Christian denominations as the national religion, and each state could pass a law establishing a particular Christian church as its official religion.
All of this pseudoscholarship would hardly be worth discussing, let alone disproving, were it not for the fact that it is taken so very seriously by so many people.
I am sure these six will participate in a Great Texas History Smackdown before our crazy SBOE. Perhaps this will finally sicken enough citizens that they will finally vote to get rid of the SBOE, either directly or indirectly. Be sure to listen to this hearing on the web audio. Even better, the web video might be working so you can watch the SBOE Carnival Sideshow.
Steven Schafersman, Ph.D.
President, Texas Citizens for Science
The non-expert experts were appointed by Don McLeroy before the Texas Senate refused to confirm his temporary chairmanship of the State Board of Education. The good McLeroy may have done as chairman is interred with his dead chairmanship; the evil he did lives on. (Under McLeroy and Barton’s reading of history and literature, most students won’t catch the reference for the previous sentence.)
Texas Freedom Network’s Insider blog reports that embattled chairman Don McLeroy is working to create a panel of experts to review studies curricula. The experts he has proposed so far are all well-known cranks in academia, people who bring their axes to grind on the minds of innocent children.
This panel is a bold insult to Texas’s community of economists, historians, and other practitioners of fields of social studies, not to mention educators. A more qualified panel of experts could be assembled in the coffee break rooms of the history departments at most of Texas’s lesser known state colleges and universities.
Why does Don McLeroy hate Texas so?
I’ve been buried in teaching, grading, planning and the other affairs of the life of a teacher, and had not paid much attention to the movement on this issue (“movement” because I cannot call it “progress”). My students passed the state tests by comfortable margins, more than 90% of them; this news from SBOE makes me despair even in the face of the news that our achievements are substantial in all categories.
The panel lacks knowledge and experience in economics, geography and history. The panel is grotesquely unbalanced — at least two of the panel members remind me of Ezra Taft Benson, who was Secretary of Agriculture for Dwight Eisenhower. When he resigned from that post, he complained that Eisenhower was too cozy with communism. Barton and Quist lean well to the right of Ezra Taft Benson. Quist has complained of socialist and Marxist leanings of Reagan administration education policy and policy makers.
Molly Ivins’ untimely passing becomes acutely painful when the Texas Lege comes down to the last days of a session. Who can make sense of it without Molly?
The Bryan dentist has presided over a contentious 15-member State Board of Education that fought over curriculum standards for science earlier this year and English language arts and reading last year. Critics faulted McLeroy for applying his strong religious beliefs in shaping new science standards. McLeroy believes in creationism and that the Earth is about 6,000 years old.
“This particular State Board of Education under the leadership of Dr. McLeroy has been divisive. It’s been dysfunctional, and it has been embarrassing to the point of having commentary on this in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal,” said Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus.
McLeroy’s leadership, she said, had made Texas “the laughing stock of the nation.”
It takes 11 votes to block a gubernatorial nomination. Van de Putte said all 12 Senate Democrats plan to vote against McLeroy
If the nomination fails, it is still foggy as Donora, Pennsylvania on its worst days as to who will head the group. The chairman must come from one of the 15 elected members. Most people who might win Rick Perry’s selection are creationists. If Perry is wise, he’ll try to choose someone who is a capable administrator, wise chairman of hearings, and who lacks the desire to annoy key players in education, like administrators, teachers, parents, Texas college presidents and professors, and state legislators. Alas for Texas, Winston Churchill is not a member of the SBOE, nor is Mitt Romney.
The Senate rarely blocks a governor’s appointment.
There is speculation in the Capitol and within the Texas Education Agency that Gov. Rick Perry might elevate Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, to lead the board. Like McLeroy, Dunbar also holds strong Christian beliefs and recently authored a book that advocates more religion in the public square.
“We believe that Texans deserve better than divisive, destructive, extreme leadership,” Shapleigh said. “If the governor chooses to appoint someone more extreme and more divisive, we’ll have to deal with that at the appropriate time.”
McLeroy’s tenure as chairman of SBOE is one of those waves we were warned about in 1983 lin the Excellence in Education Report, which warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity.” The divisions and crude politics, heavy-handed destruction of statutory and regulatory procedures, at best distracts from the drive for better education, but more often leans toward the worst, sabatoging the work of students, teachers, parents, administrators and legislatures.
Do you pray? Pray that Texas education be delivered safely and intact from this time of trial. Whether you pray or not, call your Texas legislator and tell her or him to straighten out the SBOE.
Texans, the information on finding your state representative and state senator are below — call them, today.
In a surprise move, the Senate has moved the nomination of Don McLeroy to the floor for an up-and-down vote.
McLeroy has ushered in a new era of bitter, partisan and divisive politics to the State Board of Education. In the past year he has insulted English teachers, citizens of Hispanic descent, unnecessarily gutted a good mathematics text from the approved list (just to show he can do it), and done his best to butcher science education standards for Texas. He suspended work on new social studies curricula because, in part, he doesn’t like the term “capitalism,” insisting on “free enterprise” instead, contrary to almost all scholarly writing on the topic.
The man is a menace to education. He uses wedge political issues to divide educators from parents, parents from schools, schools from the community, students from teachers, and education from propaganda.
In a surprise meeting on the Senate floor, the Senate Nominations Committee in Austin has just approved the appointment of Don McLeroy as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. It appears that McLeroy’s supporters plan to bring his confirmation to the full Senate early next week. Confirmation will require a two-thirds vote.
Committee Chairman Mike Jackson, R-La Porte, had said he would not bring up McLeroy’s confirmation for a vote in committee unless he thought there were enough votes to get it in the full Senate. We don’t know at this point whether opposition from nearly all Democrats and some Republicans has softened, but the signs are alarming.
Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller has released the following statement:
“If the Texas Senate genuinely cares about quality public education, they will reject as state board chairman a man who apparently agrees that parents who want to teach their kids about evolution are monsters. And we’ll see whether senators really want a chairman who presides over a board that is so focused on ‘culture war’ battles that it has made Texas look like an educational backwater to the rest of the country.”
Another casualty of my real life crises, trying to keep readers informed about education policy in Texas has suffered here in the Bathtub. My apologies.
The good news is that Don McLeroy’s attempts to eviscerate public school curricula have gotten some attention in the Texas Lege (as Molly Ivins called it). Gov. Rick Perry appointed McLeroy to a full term as chair of the State Board of Education (SBOE), but that appointment needs approval by the Texas Senate. The hearing (if you can call it that) was scheduled for yesterday, and when it actually occurred it became obvious that the senators noticed McLeroy is a one-man wrecking crew, apparently drunk, and loose in the state’s china cabinet.
Will there be more good news, that the Senate can rein in McLeroy?
Schafersman points to an article in the Austin American-Statesman by Kate Alexander, which suggests there’s a chance that McLeroy’s nomination might actually be rejected. The Lege leans so far to the right that the right shoulders of their suit coats are scraped by the pavement, but even the legislators understand that snubbing the economists of Texas A&M and every Spanish-speaking Texan is something your mother would not approve of, and shouldn’t be the normal business of an official state agency like the SBOE. (Austin American-Statesman — another of the great daily newspapers in America, still doing outstanding reporting despite staff cutbacks).
Legislators are rightly concerned about the simple incompetence SBOE demonstrates on every subject, not just science, and the general atmosphere of unnecessary bickering McLeroy has fostered. In the latest, but mostly unreported move, SBOE stopped the review of social studies standards by experts and expert teachers in Texas. Among the chief complaints is that the economics team recommended calling capitalism “capitalism.” McLeroy is unhappy with using the appropriate term to describe America’s economic system.
Is it possible to get much more divorced from reality than that, and still keep one’s driving and hunting licenses?
Schafersman has one paragraph that sums up the situation rather well:
Alexander writes: “Shapleigh said there is a perception that McLeroy is using the chairmanship of the State Board of Education as a bully pulpit for promoting his religious point-of-view and pushing it into the public arena.” McLeroy disingenuously denies this, claiming the fight is over different “educational philosophies,” and “that is the source of the controversy, not his religious views.” While that may be true of some actions, such as forcing a traditional English Language Arts curriculum unwanted by ELA professionals on the state and illegally throwing out a mathematics textbook, in most cases the Fundamentalist Protestant Christian religious beliefs of McLeroy and his six cronies on the State Board were definitely behind their actions. These include the adoption of flawed, damaged science standards, the explicit attacks on evolution, the fossil record, and ancient geological ages of the Earth and universe, adoption of a flawed and inadequate Bible curriculum that will permit unscholarly and unscientific Bible instruction, and the frequent threats to publishers–which is a form of extortion that publishers come to expect–to reject their textbooks if they don’t contain sufficient anti-scientific information against evolution and in favor of Intelligent Design Creationism. McLeroy tried to censor textbooks previously in 2003 by threatening publishers, but failed.
What happens if the Senate rejects Perry’s nomination of McLeroy? McLeroy would remain a member of SBOE. Who, or whether, Perry would appoint to replace McLeroy has not been discussed. Do any of the current members have the respect of a majority of the board, enough to do the job? Is anyone on the board capable of administering the group when religious fanatics appear so hell bent on shattering foundations of public education?
Don’t get hopes up. Rejecting McLeroy’s nomination might be the rational thing to do, but it might push Perry to even deeper acts of irrationality in appointing a new chair, difficult though it may be to imagine that.
Texas Freedom Network’s live-blogging of the McLeroy hearing, at TFN Insider; including this gem: “5:52 – McLeroy: We have to stand up to the education establishment to make sure our children learn. I’m glad if that means I have to stir up a hornets’ nest.” (McLeroy is the education establishment he’s complaining about.)
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 
May 21, 2009 at 9:23 pm Question: What do Don McLeroy and a catfish have in common?
Answer: A distant ancestor.
This might help to explain some of the behavior we’re seeing.