Revisionaries: How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks (Wash Monthly)

[struggle4progress]

Washington Monthly, January/February 2010
By Mariah Blake

Don McLeroy .. greeted me at the door one evening last October, .. clutching .. a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr ... “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history ...

... McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement.

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come ...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.blake.html

[AwakeAtLast]

1. Needs a Kick

:kick:

Already gave it an R...

[Zoeisright]

2. I hate repukes.

They're consistently wrong, they eventually lose on every issue because they're wrong, then they lie and rewrite history.

I'm amazed their heads don't spin around 360 degrees.