Texas Curriculum Wars: The politics behind your children’s textbooks

This week the Texas State Board of Education is meeting to adopt new instructional materials. Board members choose the textbooks used in social studies, fine arts and high school math. But people from across the spectrum disagree with politically charged curriculum choices.

“I would like to strike the words women and minority,” said a board member in a meeting. “A motion to insert the name Hussein between Barack Obama.”

It’s the little things the Texas State Board of Education must sift through.

“I would like to delete hip hop and insert country music,” said another board member.

The board, made up of five Democrats and 10 Republicans, has come under criticism for it’s perceived conservative bias when choosing the instructional material taught in Texas classrooms.

“What you’re discussing now is if you will teach the denigration of evolution,” said a woman during public comment.

Politics should not be in this,” said veteran educator and elected State Board Representative for El Paso, Martha M. Dominguez. “This should be a bipartisan board.”

Dominguez tells me the adoption process is tedious. The board combs through new textbooks published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill, Edmentum and Pearson. Then takes hours, upon hours of public comment, coming parents all the way to professionals.

“The testimonies are also very powerful,” Dominguez said. “This is not a one person job. And it helps that we are able to reach out to teachers, the experts in the specific areas and ask okay, this is happening. How do you feel about this, what are the facts?”

One man asked to give input on new textbooks this year is UTEP Professor and historian Dr. Jose Maria Herrera.

“It’s like when somebody would tell you that Jefferson built Monticello,” Herrera said. “Well, Jefferson designed Monticello, but it was the whole gang of slaves who built it, and when you don’t actually acknowledge that he had all this free labor, to build his works, you are excising the agency of black Americans.”

Herrera wrote a report that found in new 7th grade social studies textbooks, there was a lack of Mexican-American history.

“There is almost a dismissal of Mexicans,” Herrera said. He points to deportations of legal resident Mexicans during the Great Depression, to open jobs for Americans.

“If it’s something that doesn’t function of what this history should be like, it’s not discussed or it’s given very little emphasis,” Herrera said.

Curriculum complaints transcend the political spectrum. Conservatives view a new framework for teaching AP-History as a liberal takeover. They say patriotism is minimized and civil disobedience promoted, that founders like Benjamin Franklin and James Madison are absent to focus more on slavery and treatment of Indians.

From radical Islam, to climate change, some teachers would say, it doesn’t matter what’s inside the textbook, or the perceived bias, all that matters is how the teacher engages the student’s critical thinking skills.

“The prime obligation of a teacher is to open students minds,” said retired, 20-year Yselta ISD teacher Ramnath Subramanian.

Subramanian isn’t concerned what’s presented as facts in textbooks could be tainted by bias.

“I think what is most important to the teacher is to present all the avenues of thought that a subject brings up for discussion,” Subramanian said. “And let the students be exposed to all that information so they can form their own opinion.”

“It starts a home,” said one parent. “I think as a parent I want to teach my kids that they can speak their mind and its up to them, whatever they believe. They don’t need to let someone else determine that.”