Slate (from 2015): Texas Is Debuting Textbooks That Downplay Jim Crow

[inanna]

Last edited Sun Apr 1, 2018, 04:22 PM - Edit history (2)

...and Frame Slavery as a Side Issue in the Civil War

July 7 2015 12:26 PM

I grew up in Texas; I love the state deeply. But I am not raising my children there, in part because I want them to get a solid public education undistorted by the partisan fictions that are inundating Texas’ textbooks.

The embarrassments started five years ago, when the Texas Board of Education (as of last month chaired, incidentally, by a religious homeschooler who has never sent her kids to public school) voted along party lines to sanitize American history from a conservative standpoint. Or, as the leader of the board told the New York Times at the time, “We are adding balance. History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

The board’s revisions are a very big deal, because Texas isn’t just large in landmass but in population: Three of the 10 largest cities in the country are there. In the new standards passed, said “balance” consisted of upping the Founding Fathers’ commitment to Christianity, referring to capitalism (a term that the board believes has a “negative connotation”) as the “free enterprise system,” and offering a softer take on McCarthyism. And that’s just in social studies; we’ll leave the never-ending campaign to replace the “controversial” subject of evolution with a more measured conversation about intelligent design for another day.

Most egregious of all was Texas’ recasting of the slave trade as the “Atlantic triangular trade.” The textbooks based on these new standards, which will debut in Texas schools next month, barely touch on the subject of segregation, much less Jim Crow or the KKK, according to a report Sunday in the Washington Post. And the causes of the Civil War get the most distorted treatment of all. From the Post story:

[C]hildren are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict . . . .

That’s the totally unskewed perspective that will be presented to almost five million Texas students the same summer that Confederate flag-brandishing Dylann Roof gunned down black worshippers at their church in Charleston.

cont'd....

www.slate.com/blogs/schooled/2015/07/07/texas_textbook_revisionism_new_textbooks_in_the_lone_star_state_downplay.html

[Frustratedlady]

1. Don't a lot of states buy their textbooks from Texas?

During that period of time you are referring to, I think a lot quit because the facts were being skewed to favor conservatives. I may be wrong, but that comes to mind.

[Angry Dragon]

2. The publishers try to print only one version and because Texas buys so much

that is usually the one version printed..........that is what I have read in the past

[inanna]

3. I have read the same...

trying to find a link regarding this point.

[Igel]

4. For a brief while, this was true.

California and Texas shaped the market.

Then for a while California was out of the textbook buying business because of budget issues and the other states still had their individual standards.

Now most of the textbooks that I've seen have special Texas TEKS editions, what with California and Common Core states being large purchasers of textbooks. Even the Texas editions are usually just Common Core warmed over, even though Texas state law (last I checked, in 2015 I guess it was) specifically forbad the use of CC materials as the adopted textbook.

(At least in Texas we have officially adopted textbooks--not required to have a textbook. But then we can also use anything we want to as supplementary or non-district-adopted texts. They get antsy if a teacher uses as the main resource an unapproved textbook, but that's a district thing. It's okay to not use a textbook at all. My classes haven't accessed the online textbook the last three years.)

[inanna]

5. I don't know why the link isn't working...?