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[UPDATE (July 16): The new chair of the Texas State Board of Education is not Cynthia Dunbar, but another socially conservative member, Gail Lowe. Texas commentators say Lowe's appointment will continue the anti-evolution, Reconstructionist bias of the board. The scary details are here.]
JISHOU, HUNAN — After doing some research, I have concluded that Texas is just plain wacko. Perhaps some of you are not surprised at this news.
Back in April, I wrote about the Texas State Board of Education’s efforts to weasel creationist ideas into the state science curriculum. Despite efforts by its overtly right-wing Christian chair, Donald McLeroy, and his cohorts on the board, most of the creationist ideas were tossed out.
Since then, McLeroy’s heavyhanded tactics and nutball pronouncements about evolution and science cost him a lot of the support he had in the state legislature. He lost the chair of the SBOE.
Republican Gov. Rick Perry now has to choose a new chair from the other board members. The leading candidate now is apparently Cynthia Dunbar, who may be even nuttier than McLeroy.
Dunbar has accused — in print — presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of being a terrorist, and then refused to retract her statement. And even weirder, she opposes the very existence of secular public schools and home schools her own two kids.
She is on the Texas State Board of Education.
From the Houston Chronicle:
This is a preview of Texas public schools and Christian Reconstructionism . Read the full post (1138 words, 1 image, estimated 4:33 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
A few posts back, I wrote about the efforts by anti-evolution members of the Texas State Board of Education to emasculate the state’s science standards. It was big news, because Texas periodically buys its textbooks en masse, giving it a disproportionate influence on the content of the nation’s school textbooks.
To put it another way, if the Texas SBOE had mandated that Texas children learn about Intelligent Design in Biology or the steady-state-universe theory in Earth Science, the SBOE would then prefer to buy textbooks that cover such topics. So, textbook publishers would scramble to add this content to their existing texts to remain competitive.
If the changes were limited to Texas, it would be bad for Texas schoolchildren. But textbook publishers cannot offer 50 or more different textbooks versions, one for each state and territory of the USA. It would be neither feasible nor economic. So they target their textbooks’ content to the three biggest buyers, Texas, California and Florida.
Tamim Ansary, who used to work in the textbook field, wrote an expose of sorts about the textbook mill for Edutopia in 2004. It’s been reprinted on the Edutopia website, and well worth the read, especially if you have school-age children.
Here’s a taste:
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Texas is a big state, with about 6 million schoolchildren. When the Texas State Board of Education speaks, textbook publishers listen. After all, if the publishers can sell their texts to Texas, it’s a big deal. It means money.
So, when the Texas BOE met in March to discuss controversial changes to the state’s proposed science standards, science educators all over the USA were worried. Would the BOE, chaired by an unapologetic creationist, introduce language into the standards to allow the teaching of creationism and and its clone, Intelligent Design, in the Texas schools?
To do so would be seriously damage science education in the Texas public schools. It would also likely influence textbook publishers’ treatment of evolution in biology texts, thereby affecting schools all over the USA.
The Texas BOE is nearly evenly composed of creationists and more sensible members, so the results were by no means predictable. In the end, the original changes, as proposed by the openly anti-evolution chairman and board members, were rejected. Instead, the BOE passed more coyly worded standards that still could be used to introduce pseudo-science and religion into Texas classrooms, but did not exactly trample science teaching.
Whether the new standards will induce textbook publishers to edit their books to make them more palatable to Texas remains to be seen.
A lot of bloggers have capably covered the Texas fracas already, so I will not go into the details here. Rather, I’d rather provide some background as an interested observer.
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