read this article linked from google news.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html
and it worries me that we are re-writing history more than usual
Your thread title doesn’t explain what you’re talking about. The post doesn’t explain it either. The first three paragraphs of your link don’t explain it either. Please use descriptive thread titles. Please use descriptive posts. Please quote relevant parts of your link.
appologies for the brevity of my first post, had just gotten home and was called away to make dinner.
"Following the appeals from the public, the members of what is the most influential state board of education in the country, and one of the most politically conservative, submitted their own proposed changes to the new social-studies curriculum guidelines, whose adoption was the subject of all the attention — guidelines that will affect students around the country, from kindergarten to 12th grade, for the next 10 years. "
"Since the election of two Christian conservatives in 2006, there are now seven on the Texas state board who are quite open about the fact that they vote in concert to advance a Christian agenda. “They do vote as a bloc,” Pat Hardy, a board member who considers herself a conservative Republican but who stands apart from the Christian faction, told me. “They work consciously to pull one more vote in with them on an issue so they’ll have a majority.”
“The board has the power to accept, reject or rewrite the TEKS, and over the past few years, in language arts, science and now social studies, the members have done all of the above. Yet few of these elected overseers are trained in the fields they are reviewing.”
"As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
the most worrisome to me is not that they are “re-writing” history, its that they are using a voting bloc to do so. if you cant change peoples minds on your own, with a well reasoned argument, you shouldn’t get your friends voted in to back you.
Don McLeroy strikes again. He’s among the most powerful idiots you’ve never heard of. The inability of Texas to elect a education board that isn’t full of retards and the laziness of book publishers to only make one edition of their books, combined with the fact that Texas buys all their books at the state level, and you have a horrible situation in which a few people can dictate the curriculum of the entire country. And most of those elected officials come in districts full of backward yokels who don’t care a bit about the quality of education, just pushing their agenda.
If you check for Mr. McLeroy on youtube, you can see his stellar moments like when he describes his historic crusade of ignorance and stupidity as “someone has to stand up to all these experts!”. I wish I could find a video of him I saw getting interviewed on fox news a few months back - he was advocating the point that … well, I can’t be sure, because it was the most stumbling non-sensical interview I’ve probably ever seen. As I tried to decipher his point, the best thing I could come up with was something like:
‘Our country is a Christian country founded on the bible… and I can prove this because it’s in the constitution… we have three branches of government, to have checks and balances… because man is imperfect… and so we need those… and the bible says that man is imperfect… therefore we’re a country based on the bible and we should teach it in schools’
I’m botching it and paraphrasing from memory, but I’m actually giving him more credit than he deserves - what I just said now was more coherent than what he said. Incidentally, the fox news anchor (not a “news personality” or entertainer, one of their actual newspeople) basically nodded and agreed and softballed him.
The solutions to this problem: The citizens of Texas could stop being fucking idiots and electing half their state board of education with people who think that God created the world in 7 days 6000 years ago. Book publishers could do the decent thing and make Texas-only editions of books and stop the spread of the idiocy. Other states could refuse to buy textbooks which have been dumb downed to Texas standards. Or my preferred solution, let’s just nuke ourselves and give up. If these are the issues we’re still struggling with in the 21st century, then we have failed as a species and should just give up.
Well, you came back to the thread and added some meat to the thread, so we’ll call it even. 
My dad is a retired history professor. One of the things he prided himself on as an educator was the fact that none of his students knew his political beliefs based on the content of his lectures. He believes, and I agree, that history should be presented from a neutral perspective–this happened at that time and caused these consequences.
I only skimmed the article, but I find it difficult to panic. For instance -
Two liberals, two conservatives, and a religious leader. Seems pretty balanced to me. And the article leads off with people asking to include Cesar Chavez and references to Sikhism, neither of whom are particularly conservative or Christian.
Gosh, how awful - they try to get people to vote with them.
Could you explain why exactly you think this might be happening?
Regards,
Shodan
I’ll take a stab at that; to advance a Christian agenda?
You picked up on that subtle sub-text, eh? 
I worked almost a decade in the textbook publishing industry – in Texas, no less – and I have to say that while it is worrisome, it is not necessarily happening more than usual.
Shodan, if you read the whole article – and I don’t blame you for not reading it, as it’s long – you’ll see that it’s more than just namechecks at stake, and while various interest groups (of varying wackiness) do try to be heard, the Christian fundamentalist bloc is far more powerful than any other and has a disproportionate influence. Among their primary goals for public schools: teaching of intelligent design and discrediting the idea of the separation of church and state as being either positive or intended by the Founding Fathers. They are clear and upfront about this.
The underlying problem is that textbook-wise, for intricate and boring reasons briefly outlined in the article, whatever Texas wants, the whole country gets. However, the whole country does not have a chance to influence the Texas standards process.
In fifteen or twenty years, I predict this particular problem (Texas textbook domination) will evaporate or at least become unrecognizable, since the days of massive, standardized, printed textbooks are numbered. They’re no longer economically sustainable, and I’ll bet you a nickel they will be largely replaced by things like electronic texts and customized, modular, print-on-demand materials. So Texas can choose to go quietly nuts without ruining it for everyone else.
well, im glad that the relevance of text books is waning.
i’m still unsure why its ok to get 6 friends on the board to vote with you in lockstep.
if you cannot cause people to change their minds with a clear, well thought out argument… please don’t force your “opinion” on others by bloc voting.
All members of the board are publicly elected. You might argue that they don’t represent the interests of all their constituents, but they do represent the interests of a majority of those who voted. They vote “in lockstep” because they largely agree with each other, as do those who voted for them.
*I *would argue that they don’t represent the best interests of Texas students and that education standards might best be handled by experts (who, as mentioned in the article, are available in Texas, but are frequently either ignored or manipulated by the board members), but then I have lots of ideas about wholesale reform of American education that would never pass muster in Texas. Fortunately, I no longer live there.
the problem with being publicly elected to office other than mayor or senate or congress… is that most people are apathetic about the choices, and choose either not to vote, or to vote randomly ( A . B. A. B. A. B. sort of thing)
that gives the group of people who can push votes an inordinate amount of control over council representatives.
im not sure what the solution is, and i realize that being able to vote with your peers is part of our societies framework.
perhaps some must vote rule such as in the presidential elections in austrailia would even things out?
on a personal opinion side… and not to deride the importance of religion in peoples lives… if you use your church as your voting pool because they feel required to vote for you due to strong-arm techniques… you are getting an advantage that people who genuinely try to get votes from the community do not have.
It seems like they do change minds with a clear, well-thought out argument -
As to why it is OK, that is how majority rule works, after all. I notice that the people the reporter is so afraid of do not constitutes a majority of the board. So I rather doubt they are forcing anything on the rest of the board.
I wasn’t clear - I wanted to know what in the article indicated that they were “re-writing history”. As I mentioned, half liberal historical figures, and half conservative, Sikhism and Cesar Chavez - these don’t strike me as anything like re-writing history. Even the reporter who wrote the article says
So I suppose you could see this as “re-writing history” but if history is currently giving a distorted picture of important aspects of American life, then history needs to be re-written.
Like I say, I can’t bring myself to panic. If the fear of offending, or a distorted view of the separation of church and state, gives a distorted or unrealistic view of the American experience, I don’t see a down side in making it better. Part of the purpose of studying history is to learn from the past. Ignoring a major influence means that we cannot learn from it.
It would be like a history of the 60s that did not make any reference to the Viet Nam war. Sure, it was controversial. But to minimize its importance, or leave it out for fear of offending? I kind of expect I would vote in a bloc too if someone tried that.
What “strong-arm” tactics do you mean?
Regards,
Shodan
I’d like to address this, since it may help clear up why Texas is so influential.
a) It’s not laziness or indecency. It’s economics. Textbook publishers, like any other corporations, need to make a profit. Note that they do not make a very high degree of profit – single digit margins are the rule for even the most successful ones. That is to say, it’s neither laziness nor indecency nor greed. Textbooks are expensive to write, print, warehouse, distribute, market, sell, and update. In addition, there are more de facto government restrictions on them than on nearly any other product; they are really not subject to a free-market system.
b) Textbook publishers do, in fact, make Texas-only editions of textbooks. They also make California-only and Florida-only editions, as well as lightly adapted editions for dozens of other states. (California has historically demanded the highest degree of adaptation, but since they’re currently bankrupt, Texas is all the more important.)
c) Texas is so influential because it has so many students concentrated into one buying bloc. California, Texas, and Florida combined have more textbook-needing public school students than the other 47 states combined; California alone has more than 3 million (but its buying is more fragmented than Texas’s even when they have money).
I have more to say on the subject, but I have to go for now and I suspect it’s not that interesting to a layperson anyway.
after researching on the net for awhile, i wasn’t able to find cites for church strong-arm tactics. however I did find a document specifically restricting churches from partisan politics… so it must have been a problem, and i would imagine that it still is in places that ignore or do not know the rules.
http://www.ecfa.org/TopicDisplay.aspx?PageName=TopicIRSWarns_Politicking
my personal thoughts were that people would be at the church asking for votes from the congregations, and since they felt obligated to assist them due to being in the same church, would vote the way they were asked to. (not in all cases, but certainly enough to tip the balance) but of course, no cites found for my personal thoughts
Sharpened my reading finger this morning.
That article is a softball for some reason. If you google “Don McLeroy” you’ll see most of their crusade has been to attack the teaching of evolution in science classes, and their current quest is to actually teach the Bible in schools as if they were a religious institution. That article has false balance - it tries to portray them as far more reasonable than they are.
If they get their 8th vote, they’ll vote to use the Bible as a more or less textbook, to teach intelligent design in their science classes, etc. I’m not exaggerating - this isn’t a hidden agenda, Mr. McLeroy is quite open with it. Now why the NYT treated their position as somehow vaguely reasonable and moderate I have no idea.
Possibly because they were talking about history, and
Regards,
Shodan
Ah, I figured it was about time for another thread complaining about the existence of Christians. Here’s the last thread in which we toasted the notion that Texas somehow decides what gets taught nationwide. Nonetheless, some people are so wrapped up in the idea that those evil Texas Christians are pushing creationism on the whole country (or even on Texas) that they’re not going to let the facts get in their way.
How would church congregations be any different from any other organization? People vote the way they choose to vote. That’s democracy.
Because they will(or at least should) lose their tax-exempt status, according to law. Do try and keep up.