Texas Tries To Rewrite History (Again) With Deceptive Textbooks

Textbooks in Texas are making headlines again after the Texas Board of Education postponed a vote on Tuesday about whether or not to rewrite history approve new history and social studies textbooks with controversial material. At least for the time being, the answer is ?no.?

Emile Lester, who reviewed several of the textbooks, described to Rick Jervis of USA Today a litany of inaccuracies in the proposed learning material, including ?passages that suggested the Ten Commandments had an influence on the writing of the U.S. Constitution and that Moses was a democratic leader who influenced the Founding Fathers.”

Will Weissert of ABC News quoted another reviewer who noted that some of the books ?so exaggerate Moses? influence on U.S. democracy that students will grow up believing the biblical figure ?was the first American.??

Will Weissert describes a host of other complaints, including ?overpraising Capitalism, sugarcoating historical racial segregation, and unfairly portraying Muslims, American Indians, and Hispanics.?? What many feel is the most egregious, however, is the inclusion of statements that cast doubt on humans? contribution to climate change.? Roben Cortez, a Democratic board member, states the obvious to USA Today:

?We shouldn’t be lying to our students. [Textbooks] need to be based on actual science and facts.?

But it wasn’t just liberal organizations and academics with gripes about the material. ABC News reports that a conservative organization called Truth in Texas Textbooks raised over 1,500 complaints about the books, noting the absence of Islam’s ?occasional glorification of violence? and beheadings, an embrace of ?pro-Islam? values, and of course, the downplaying of the many achievements of President Ronald Reagan.? ?The vice president of the conservative Texas Eagle Forum, MerryLynn Gerstenschlager, told ABC News that books ?should describe the ?forced wealth distribution? imposed by the United Nations via misleading propaganda about climate change.?

Facing scrutiny in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s vote over ?climate skepticism?, Pearson Education announced last week they were removing the statement, ?Scientists disagree about what is causing climate change? from a proposed social studies textbook. Holding out a little longer, Mc-Graw-Hill has finally agreed to make similar changes to their textbooks, including the removal of an activity that asked students to ?analyze two different points of view? on global warming.

All of this may sound vaguely familiar to you, and there’s a reason why.? In 2010, the State Board of Education approved a set of standards that created waves for, among other things, ?stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers? commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light,? as described by James C. McKinley, Jr. of the New York Times.? While many of these members have since been voted out of office, the board is still required to adhere to these strict standards, while also addressing the inaccuracies they produced.

Why is this a big deal, you ask?? Texas is so large that publishers will often market their textbooks to other states, USA Today reports, so if they are approved by the Texas school board, these textbooks could well be distributed throughout the country for the next decade.? Even without approval, however, the books can still be widely distributed, thanks to iPads and e-readers that allow publishers to tweak material to fit the needs of other states.

The vote has been postponed until Friday, when the board will either have to approve the books (revised or not) or miss the deadline to have them distributed to millions of students by the fall of 2015.? Will sanity prevail?? Magic 8 Ball says:

?Outlook not so good.?

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