Or Arizona, for that matter.
More conservative textbook curriculum OK'd
12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, May 22, 2010
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning NewsAUSTIN – In a landmark move that will shape the future education of millions of Texas schoolchildren, the State Board of Education on Friday approved new curriculum standards for U.S. history and other social studies courses that reflect a more conservative tone than in the past.
Texas has chosen to model its public school system after the Saudi Arabian "madrassas" Conservatives used to complain about, indoctrinating their children about who are their eternal enemies rather than letting them build their own world. And there's nothing we can do about it.
We can, however, deny the power Texas' educational decisions have traditionally had on the country. That power stems from the size of the book purchases their school system makes. Publisher slant textbooks such that they are acceptable to Texas and many school systems just...buy them.
They can't afford to do that anymore. School systems nationwide need to compare this curriculum Texas is using to their own. They need to be sure their future purchases meet their own standards.
I'm not suggesting a boycott or a punishment. Texas will get the books they want because they will pay for them. It's not a hardship on publishers; finding someone willing to write the crap textbooks Texas will need may be a bigger problem. I'm suggesting it will be best going forward not to assume a K-12 history book will contain actual history.
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Nonsense, a boycott would be a good idea
They can buy whatever textbooks they want, but we furriners should not help pay for them. Personally, I'll have enough expenses shipping supplemental books and videos to my young kinfolk there.
Texas is going to need brand
Texas is going to need brand new textbooks, which I am willing to bet will be added to those homeschooling kits that are so popular and so wrong. And we're going to help pay for them to the degree that their school system receives federal support.
It is a problem that people got people stuck in there...I think it would only be fair for the more competitive colleges and universities to say right now how a graduate of Texas' public education system as recently modified would have to overcome.
I don't think we are
I don't think we are supposed to do anything about the choice of parents to home school their own children. I don't want to take away their choices, even when I do not agree to their religious viewpoint. I have always understood these children are likely to go to college and they will hear and see plenty of diversity of thought, opinion and action, from that reality check. Technology will take care of the need to detoxify the religious indoctrination out of Texas school books. Many of these come with a cd and in the future we will see downloadable texts with more emphasis on local or state views.
@P6: their school system receives federal support
Yeah, I'm not even suggesting that federal funding can be affected short-term. But it's significant that neither Texas nor California got to the "Race to the Top" finals in the first round, and I wonder if Texas can talk its way to the finals in the next round while pushing enforced ignorance. As with Arizona, I am only suggesting that groups and individuals might prefer to spend their money elsewhere.
The textbook publishers have their own difficult calculus to deal with. Texas as the 800-pound gorilla may not be a sustainable model much longer, in this age of customizable textbooks, print-on-demand, and e-textbooks. In higher ed, the publishers have put their best (and, might I add, best-looking) sales reps on the job to sell their hardcover, high-cost wares to the profs. I don't think it's working. This has to trickle down to K-12 soon. California and New York, which I believe are the next-largest gorillas, each have distinct K-12 standards and I hope they won't adopt Texas history just to please the publishers' desire for hardcover sales.
Your suggestion is a good one about higher ed pointing out the potential impact of the new standards on Texas grads. Public universities, not to mention some of the more exclusive institutions, already do plenty of remediation in math and English. They really don't want to add history to this.
hell no,buying shit from Texas
uh uh
Your suggestion is a good
Too true. It's one thing to remediate disadvantaged students who're otherwise very bright. But to have an entire states' worth of uninformed teenagers? Like, whoa.
But on the upside, with all the new pre-intro classes that're gonna have to hold upwards of 200+ students at a time, grad students will have plenty of work. And maybe there'll be a healthy number of history majors from students who're interested in learning the truth. Especially minority students.
And it's really the minority students I feel most sorry for. And their parents! Most black and hispanic parents, not to mention Amerindians parents, have a hard enough time trying to combat the assault on children's self-esteem as it is. I can't imagine having to parent a child of color in Texas now.
Hopefully, we'll see some lawsuits. Though, I'm not sure about cutting federal funding, especially if it can be targeted to poverty-area schools. We can't make a bad situation worse, you know?
And by the way, I know Phylis Shaffly helped stop the equal rights amendment . . . so maybe she's more important than I thought? How much better would this nation be if we had an equal rights amendment? She's kinda to progress and general welfare what Stalin was to Trotsky? Maybe the CIA to Patrice Lamumba and Congo? Also, I went ahead and read Jefferson Davis's inaugral address. Can't say I hated it. I actually thought it was pretty good. Of course, the "people" whose rights they were fighting for were white men and the economy they were fighting for was slavery. He doesn't mention that anywhere, so that'll give creative teachers an opportunity to read back, read black. He does talk about "King Cotton" a good bit and how important cotton is, and therefore slavery, to the global and Union economy. And that made me think - let's imagine the South was allowed to secede, can you imagine the mess they'd be in by the Great Depression? They'd be the Greece of the early 20th century! - Okay, well "we" since I live in the upper South, but you get my gist.
@no1kstate: all the new pre-intro classes
Probably not. Remediation has to happen, but not necessarily at the 4-year schools. It's already been pushed to the community colleges at CUNY. And California State (CSU) is picking up on the idea:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/archives/2010/03/#a000759
This is touted as "wholesome and gentle" at the above link, but low-income (including white and minority) students are really going to feel the squeeze. From the K-12 side they will be deemed ready if they pass the high-school exit exam and graduate. The CSU English and math placement exams will say they're not ready for college, in the percentages described above. The current solution is to admit students and offer a combination of late summer and first semester remediation on campus. The new solution is actually a very old one: get any remediation done on your own before showing up. In principle, one can argue that 4-year colleges shouldn't do remediation. In reality, there's a need. Our community colleges are full now so everyone needing remediation won't be able to get it, starting in 2012.
Thanks for the info, Prof.
Thanks for the info, Prof. All California needs to do is raise taxes, properly support public education, and get on with it! But until then, do they not offer grants or anything?
grants or anything
I think the federal grant and loan picture for college is looking a little better since, oh, January 2009.
However, I don't believe this will help students who are caught with a learning gap between high school graduation and college admission. Once you're admitted to college you can get financial aid. But if the system says you're on your own for remediation, and get it done before admission-- which is the direction we're going-- I believe we'll lose a lot of people in that transition.
You'd think some of this would act as push-back on K-12, pressure to make sure high-school grads are college-ready, period. Or at least make sure the percentages of those who need remediation go down. I don't know if K-12 is getting that message or if they can really do something about it while dealing with other mandates.
@ profgeo I got my doubts
@ profgeo
I got my doubts about Cali's K-12 being able to rectify itself. Cali's on the brink of bankruptcy, and from what I watch of California state politics on national news, I just don't see y'all climbing out of this even after the economy is (hopefully) back on solid footing.
Which is odd, cause you'd think Cal would be the one state where the wealthy would be more progressive. Maybe Hollywood isn't as powerful as they're made out to be, despite Stephen Baldwin's claims. Another example of poisoning the well?
Three faces of Eve... er, California
We tend to see what we look at. So I see the state through the lens of higher education, and/or K-12 since I interact with incoming freshmen every year. I see the need for an educated workforce that is home-grown, and an informed electorate in the classic liberal sense. What we have, though, is a system with some good ideas, but the overall system has stagnated and the good ideas can't filter through. You can't fix the economy and then have K-12 fix itself. K-12 puts a new crop of 18-year-olds on the street every year while we're talking about it. The economic solution has to include or at least consider this. It will take a re-visioning of the California Master Plan of the early '60s.
This recent article is UC-centric but it reflects part of my personal view:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/20/ED6T1DI01K.DTL
As far as the progressive, or the wealthy progressive, they're around but they don't run the whole state. (I mean, Proposition 8 passed and was upheld.) Nor do the wealthy conservatives from what I can tell, but I miss a lot. Maybe nobody runs the state at this point thanks to term limits and a required supermajority to get anything economic done. I do perceive CA as being in 3 chunks: San Francisco-Los Angeles, Central Valley with its inland growers, Northern California-Gold Country isolationists. (San Diego-El Centro might be a 4th chunk with a lot of Arizona attitude.) There's overlap in who lives where. Many conservative rich (e.g. some Big Agriculture) people live in SF because hey, that's where the culture is. And I know people from Bakersfield who live here and mix with the ex-hippies, but they vote Republican. The geographic visualization just helps me.
Maybe nobody runs the state
The addition of term limits may have affected the state's governability but I doubt it. The passage of Proposition 13 has certainly had a serious consequence on state and local government; in addition, it seems to have smashed the political consensus that ruled the state with respect to education and infrastructure issues for decades. The state has always been divisible into three or four chunks but at times folks in a majority of the chunks could come together and do something beneficial for the whole. This may no longer be true. There seems to be hard right Christian contingent, for example, migrating into the I-5 and old Highway 99 corridor beginning slightly north of Sacramento and running up to Redding and Yreka. Folks there were always conservative but this new bunch seems qualitatively different.
I think churn is a factor
New people don't come in and change the system, they come in and figure out the existing system, and they will have to leave before they can have a big effect. (No fact, just theory here, as we haven't been doing it that long.)
As to Prop 13, I forgot about that, as fish forget about water (except maybe during an oil spill). My guess is that NO older property owner will support doing away with Prop 13 except maybe on their deathbed.
Concur with the Christian contingent north of Sacramento. I think we're both talking about a particular type of hard right Christian contingent. I have both black and mixed family in the Sac area and I fear more for the mixed, as they have a certain complacency and denial about attitudes up there.
As to Prop 13, I forgot
I still blame the Democrats, especially Jerry Brown and Willie Brown, for this draconian measure passing. I know my narrative runs counter to the accepted theological view of the People of the Donkey but I'm prepared to defend my position.
Yeah, you're right about older folks. Many of them should have been given some form of tax relief prior to the passage of Prop. 13 but the Democrats weren't having it. Post-Proposition 13, I paid fifteen times more in property taxes on the house I owned in San Francisco as opposed to what my parents paid although their house had a market value nearly 50 percent higher than my house. This is a recipe for endless governmental stalemate and conflict.
I had to wikipedia prop 13,
I had to wikipedia prop 13, but I think I got the gist.
What I thought of Cal was right - y'all need to raise taxes but can't do it because of partisan idiots. I think they probably should've capped what senior citizens would have to pay or some other tax relief; and I'm not sure about the average national rate; but 1%? That seems kinda low. Has it been raised to 4%? I think I saw that it was raised to 4%.
I agree that economic improvement and educational improvement go hand in hand. I just don't see Cal doing what it takes to fix education. At some point, the economy will level off; but the way it looks, Cal is gonna stay at the bottom in education. Forget racing to the top. You should throw a parade if Cal can get to the middle!
But that kinda brings up an issue that's a little off topic - conservative/libertarian economic ideology. Cal's education system wasn't that great before the recession, so my point can be quite easily made - their economic programs DON'T WORK!! Then, when they don't work, ideologs clamor for more of the same. Which, I really shouldn't be surprised at - I mean, we see what kind of edu(ma)cation people (ain't) getting.
To your earlier point about "brink of bankruptcy"
@no1kstate, this story illustrates the deadlock we've got. You would think there was something between "no new taxes" and "all new taxes" but maybe there isn't. The taxes that should be tolerable to everybody are the "Amazon tax" (mentioned in the story) and maybe returning the vehicle license fee to its former level. But don't count on it. I have no sympathy for avoiders of sales tax (remember we're talking non-food items bought by mail order or online). I do have some sympathy on the vehicle license fee but at least it hits everybody who owns a car.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/25/MN3V1DJTIC.DTL
We will, apparently, posture and pontificate our way to the poorhouse...
I agree with ptcruiser on
I agree with ptcruiser on this. That. . .
is the bane of children in the Chicago Public Schools.
@ profgeo - I think we also
@ profgeo - I think we also see (and I haven't read the article yet but will) the results of not investing in public education: of there's something between "no new taxes" and "all new taxes": some new taxes. That's kind of a joke but kind of not. Even children know how to ask for just some of your soda so you don't think they want all of it but they don't end up with none of it. Now of course, I drink as much as I want and then give the kid what's left so I don't end up drinking their backwash (and I do get a kick out of checking out their sugar high). But you get my gist.
And as for the vehicle fee - maybe there can be some sort of low/fixed-income exemption - but when you think about it, while it hits everybody who owns a car, some people own more cars than others. And who knows, if the vehicle fee is high enough, it could push more people to public transportation which in terms of cost and climate is good for everyone.
Btw - Even Charlotte has a light-rail service, what's up with LA's pitiful public transportation? I understand not having a subway in an earthquake zone, but San Fransisco has trolleys, right?