Posted on 03/15/2010 5:16:02 PM PDT by Santa Fe_Conservative
The nation’s public school curriculum may be in for a Texas-sized overhaul, if the Lone Star state’s influential recommendations for changes to social studies, economics and history textbooks are fully ratified later this spring. Last Friday, in a 10-to-5 vote split right down party lines, the Texas State Board of Education approved some controversial right-leaning alterations to what most students in the state—and by extension, in much of the rest of the country—will be studying as received historical and social-scientific wisdom. After a public comment period, the board will vote on final recommendations in May.
Don McElroy, who leads the board’s powerful seven-member social conservative bloc, explained that the measure is a way of "adding balance" in the classroom, since "academia is skewed too far to the left." And the board's critics have labeled the move an attempt by political "extremists" to "promote their ideology."
The revised standards have far-reaching implications because Texas is a huge market leader in the school-textbook industry. The enormous print run for Texas textbooks leaves most districts in other states adopting the same course materials, so that the Texas School Board effectively spells out requirements for 80 percent of the nation’s textbook market. That means, for instance, that schools in left-leaning states like Oregon and Vermont could soon be teaching from textbooks that are short on references to Ted Kennedy but long on references to conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Thats the way to do it :p throw a temper tantrum when you don’t get your way!
I also find amusing how many complained about including country/western as an important cultural movement, but not hip-hop... Last I checked, hip-hop/rap is pretty recent and not exactly history...
Great Society programs such as Title IX—which provides for equal gender access to educational resources—and affirmative action, intended to remedy historic workplace discrimination against African-Americans, are said to have created adverse “unintended consequences” in the curriculum’s preferred language.
ANY teaching about government programs should include information about “unintended consequences”.
Way to go, Texas!
Textbook publishing is big money for the publishers. If they can get everyone (via lobby) to go for the same standards, it’s less work for them with the same amount coming in = more profit for less work.
This is why they want there to be national standards. I think that IS a bad thing. The federal government does not belong in education. The money needs to be local so that it can go where it needs to go without strings attached. That said, if all the individual states want to adopt Texas standards, more power to them.
bump
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