Textbooks

Texas textbooks tout Christian heritage

By STEPHANIE SIMON

Texas students may soon be reading in their history textbooks that the American system of democracy was inspired by Moses, segregated schools weren't all that bad and taxes imposed for programs like Social Security haven’t measurably improved society.

Those passages are among dozens of biased, misleading or inaccurate lessons identified on Wednesday by a panel of scholars commissioned by a liberal advocacy group to analyze dozens of new history, geography and civics textbooks up for review by the state Board of Education.

Defenders of the new textbooks dismissed the criticism as sour grapes. But the controversy in Texas also hints at rising tensions across the U.S. over academic standards, as conservatives have mobilized aggressively to shape what students learn in science, social studies and beyond.

History has been a particularly fraught subject because it’s so intimately tied to our conception of our nation — “it quite literally defines who we are,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education history at New York University.

The Texas textbooks, most of them from major publishing houses, were written to align with instructional standards that the Board of Education approved back in 2010 — with the explicit intention of tugging social studies teaching to the right. The standards require teachers to emphasize America’s Christian heritage, praise the superiority of the unfettered free market and introduce students to conservative icons such as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation.

David Bradley, a board member who helped write the standards, said the textbooks are supposed to reflect the standards, and the standards are set by the politicians who win election to the board. At least in Texas, he said, conservatives usually win – especially if they run on pledges to bring conservative values back to public schools.

“If anything in politics can move a crowd, it’s holding up an American history book that diminishes the role of the Founding Fathers and Ronald Reagan,” Bradley said.

More and more politicians these days are learning that truth, and not just in Texas. The tea party movement, joined by some liberals, has launched an all-out war against the Common Core standards for math and language arts classes. Conservatives who have fought for years to limit teaching on evolution are now mobilizing against lessons on climate change. And a bruising national fight about social studies seems poised to erupt as tea-party groups organize against revisions to the Advanced Placement U.S. History course.

Texas has long been a battleground for these debates, as a bloc of conservative evangelicals on the Board of Education has moved aggressively to shape science and social studies instruction.
The 2010 standards drew national attention – and were widely panned by scholars, including reviewers at the conservative Fordham Institute, who called them a “confusing, unteachable hodgepodge” marred by “blatant politicizing” and bald distortions of fact to score political and religious “talking points.”

Given that assessment, Robert Pondiscio, a vice president at Fordham, said he was not surprised the new textbooks had myriad problems, including exaggerations of the Biblical influences on America’s founding.

“Bad standards lead to bad textbooks,” Pondiscio said.

A spokesperson for Pearson, one of the publishers called out in the report, said the company “works diligently to ensure its instructional materials are compliant with Texas standards.” Spokesman Brandon Pinette said the company would review the critiques “and listen to all interested stakeholders as we enter the public hearing process.”

Brian Belardi, a spokesman for McGraw-Hill Education also pledged to consider the critiques. “Many of the points in the report stem from the alignment of our products with Texas educational standards,” Belardi said.

The textbook review was commissioned by the Texas Freedom Network, a liberal advocacy group that has clashed with the conservative-dominated Board of Education for years. The network paid university professors and doctoral students to review, page by page, the books proposed for use by Texas’ 4.8 million students.

Emile Lester, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, summarized his report this way: He called the texts a “triumph of ideology over ideas.”

The standards and the textbooks will combine to make Texas students’ “knowledge of American history a casualty of the culture wars,” Lester wrote.

Among the dozens of flaws he and others pointed out:

One civics textbook explained that segregated schools for whites and blacks in the Jim Crow era “sometimes had similar buildings, buses and teachers” – and only “sometimes” were the black schools “lower in quality.” Another spent several paragraphs explaining the legal arguments for allowing prayer in schools and only gave cursory mention to the fact that the Supreme Court has held it unconstitutional.

Affirmative action also takes a beating in some textbooks, including one that shows students two cartoons about aliens arriving in UFOs eager to qualify for benefits under affirmative action programs. Lester called the cartoons “racially insensitive” for implying that recipients of affirmative action are not fully American.

A government textbook, meanwhile, quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as saying taxes are “what we pay for civilized society” — then flatly states that although taxes have gone up significantly since the 1920s, “society does not appear to be much more civilized today.” There’s no mention of programs such as Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid paid for by those rising taxes, and no attempt to put the tax burden in context either globally or as a percentage of the gross domestic product.

That paragraph “belongs at a tea-party rally, not in a history textbook,” Lester said.

Several world history textbooks omitted the role of conquest and coercion in the spread of Christianity, while emphasizing violent aspects of Islam, said David Brockman, an adjunct instructor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University. He found some textbooks fair and accurate, he said, but “many contain serious problems which must be corrected before they are approved for use in the classroom.”

Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, said she was impressed that some publishers were able to align their textbooks with the standards, yet avoid bias and errors.

“In all fairness, it’s clear that the publishers struggled with these flawed standards and still managed to do a good job in some areas,” Miller said. “On the other hand, a number of textbook passages essentially reflect the ideological beliefs of politicians on the state board rather than sound scholarship and factual history.” She urged publishers to take the critiques seriously and rewrite the sections the scholars deemed problematic.

For years, Texas academic standards were considered hugely influential nationally. Because the state is such a big market, publishers often shaped their textbooks to meet Texas guidelines, then sold the same books across the country. Now, however, technological advances have made it easier for publishers to revise portions of their textbooks for individual states.

A state law passed in 2011 also gives Texas school districts the right to use their state funding to buy instructional material, including textbooks, that don’t have an official stamp of approval from the state Board of Education. But to do so, the districts must certify to the state that their purchases cover every element of the state’s academic standards. In practice, many districts stick with buying off the list of textbooks recommended by state board.

Before voting on those recommendations, the board will hold at least two public hearings.
Members will also look at reports submitted by their own panel of reviewers, who are tasked with making sure that each book is both accurate and fully aligned to the state standards. In the past, those panels have drawn scathing criticism from liberals who point out that many reviewers have no subject-matter expertise or teaching experience.

This year is no exception; the Texas Freedom Network issued a press release complaining that just three of the 140 reviewers on the state panel are current faculty members at Texas colleges and that some individuals, such as a used-car-salesman-turned-pastor, seem to have few qualifications for the job. At the same time, several academics with more qualifications were rejected, “a clear sign that for the state Board of Education, years of study and teaching do not count,” said Edward Countryman, a history professor at Southern Methodist.

The network plans to air its critiques of the textbooks at the public hearings. But one moderate board member, Thomas Ratliffe, said the board’s power is limited. “We can reject a book if there are factual errors or if it doesn’t cover [the standards],” he said, “but we don’t get to express our views about which books we like or don’t like, or about how things are portrayed.”

Bradley, the conservative board member, said he doubted the critique from the Texas Freedom Network – which he prefers to call the “Texas Fruit Network” – would carry much weight with the board.

“I’ve been on the board for 18 years and they’ve never been happy with much of anything,” he said. “They just like to sit on the sidelines and throw stink bombs into the room.”

Rather than complain, “they need to put on their big-girl panties and go run for office,” he said. Not that they’re likely to win: “We’ve done battle in primaries before,” Bradley said. “They generally fail.”