Conservative group slams Texas education standards
AUSTIN — A conservative education think tank has severely criticized Texas’ new social studies curriculum standards as a “politicized distortion of history … offering misrepresentations at every turn.”
A conservative Republican majority of the State Board of Education adopted the new history standards last year. The indictment of the standards is sure to renew demands for the board to start over and develop an acceptable U.S. history curriculum to serve 5 million Texas public schoolchildren for the next decade.
In a report released today, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute gives the Texas social studies curriculum standards a “D” while accusing “the conservative majority” of using the curriculum “to promote its political priorities, molding the telling of the past to justify its current views and aims.”
“Biblical influences on America’s founding are exaggerated, if not invented. The complicated but undeniable history of separation between church and state is flatly dismissed.”
The broad swipe against the history curriculum standards from a respected conservative education think tank comes after civil rights groups and minority lawmakers have demanded the board scrap the standards and start over.
The Fordham Institute faults the new Texas standards for distorting or suppressing historical facts the board found politically unacceptable, such as slavery and segregation, while grossly exaggerating religious influences.
“The resulting fusion is a confusing, unteachable hodgepodge, blending the worst of two educational dogmas,” the report says.
Historian Sheldon Stern, co-author of the 50-state study, said much of the left-wing bias appearing in social studies standards during a 2003 report had disappeared.
But he said Texas standards now reflect a right-wing bias.
“They are trying to resurrect the old triumphal narrative in which everything in American history is wonderful as opposed to the left-wing narrative in which America is uniquely evil,” Stern said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. “In the end, who suffers but students, because they don’t learn real history at all?”
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