From ABC News:
Debates over academic curriculum and textbooks have for years thrust Texas’ Board of Education into the national spotlight, sparking battles over issues such as how to teach climate change and natural selection. In 2010, while approving the history curriculum standards that this year’s round of new books are supposed to follow, conservatives on the board required that students evaluate whether the United Nations undermines U.S. sovereignty and study the Congressional GOP’s 1994 Contract with America.
This long-running ideological dispute over what gets taught in Texas classrooms flared anew over proposed history textbooks Tuesday, with academics decrying lessons they said exaggerate the importance of Christian values on the nation’s Founding Fathers while conservatives complained of anti-American, pro-Islam biases.
The Board of Education will approve new history textbooks for the state’s 5-plus million public school students in November. But it heard hours of complaints about 104 proposed books during a sometimes heated public hearing.
Jacqueline Jones, chairwoman of the University of Texas’ History Department, said one U.S. history high school book cheerleads for President Ronald Reagan and the significance of America’s free enterprise system while glossing over Gov. George Wallace’s attempt to block school integration in Alabama. She also pointed to a phrase stating that “the minimum wage remains one of the New Deal’s most controversial legacies.”
“We do our students a disservice when we scrub history clean of unpleasant truths,” Jones said “and when we present an inaccurate view of the past that promotes a simple-minded, ideologically driven point of view.”
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