What a great country!!!


LAST MONTH, A WEEK before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward
M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another
blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened
during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.

Over two days, more than a hundred people — Christians, Jews,
housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything
from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps —
streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in
Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of
15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of
Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.

“Please keep César Chávez” was the message of an elderly Hispanic man
with a floppy gray mustache.

“Sikhism is the fifth-largest religion in the world and should be
included in the curriculum,” a woman declared.

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. Gail Lowe — who publishes a twice-a-week newspaper when she is
not grappling with divisive education issues — is the official
chairwoman, but the meeting was dominated by another member. Don
McLeroy, a small, vigorous man with a shiny pate and bristling
mustache, proposed amendment after amendment on social issues to the
document that teams of professional educators had drawn up over 12
months, in what would have to be described as a single-handed display
of archconservative political strong-arming.

McLeroy moved that Margaret Sanger, the birth-control pioneer, be
included because she “and her followers promoted eugenics,” that
language be inserted about Ronald Reagan’s “leadership in restoring
national confidence” following Jimmy Carter’s presidency and that
students be instructed to “describe the causes and key organizations
and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s,
including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage
Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
The injection of partisan politics into education went so far that at
one point another Republican board member burst out in seemingly
embarrassed exasperation, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!”
Nevertheless, most of McLeroy’s proposed amendments passed by a show
of hands.

Finally, the board considered an amendment to require students to
evaluate the contributions of significant Americans. The names
proposed included Thurgood Marshall, Billy Graham, Newt Gingrich,
William F. Buckley Jr., Hillary Rodham Clinton and Edward Kennedy. All
passed muster except Kennedy, who was voted down.

This is how history is made — or rather, how the hue and cry of the
present and near past gets lodged into the long-term cultural memory
or else is allowed to quietly fade into an inaudible whisper. Public
education has always been a battleground between cultural forces; one
reason that Texas’ school-board members find themselves at the very
center of the battlefield is, not surprisingly, money. The state’s $22
billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in
the country. Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a
staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly
inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the
standards dictated by the Lone Star State. California is the largest
textbook market, but besides being bankrupt, it tends to be so
specific about what kinds of information its students should learn
that few other states follow its lead. Texas, on the other hand, was
one of the first states to adopt statewide curriculum guidelines, back
in 1998, and the guidelines it came up with (which are referred to as
TEKS — pronounced “teaks” — for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills)
were clear, broad and inclusive enough that many other states used
them as a model in devising their own. And while technology is
changing things, textbooks — printed or online —are still the backbone
of education.

The cultural roots of the Texas showdown may be said to date to the
late 1980s, when, in the wake of his failed presidential effort, the
Rev. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition partly on the logic
that conservative Christians should focus their energies at the
grass-roots level. One strategy was to put candidates forward for
state and local school-board elections — Robertson’s protégé, Ralph
Reed, once said, “I would rather have a thousand school-board members
than one president and no school-board members” — and Texas was a
beachhead. 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.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/ma...ooks-t.html?em