Well, it’s truly official: Texas is doomed.He warns that where Texas goes in schooling, the nation follows. Let's hope this time he is wrong.
Why? I’ve talked before about the guy that’s the head of the State Board of Education. His name is Don McLeroy, and he’s perhaps the least qualified guy on the planet to head a BoE. He’s a creationist. He thinks science is evil. The list of his disqualifications to be in charge of a BoE would be so big… well, it would be Texas-sized big.
I predicted nothing but doom and shame for the BoE this year, and it brings me no joy at all to say I was right. McLeroy’s latest antic — though I would call it the first shot fired in a war, a war on reality — was over, of all things, the English standards. According to an article in the Dallas Morning News, teachers and experts had worked for two and a half to three years on new standards for English. So what did McLeroy do? He ignored all that work entirely, and let "social conservatives" on the board draft a new set overnight.
Overnight? Think that’s better than Standards teachers and experts spent nearly three years on?
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Texas, the lone idiot state....
Bablogger of Bad Astronomy:
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3 comments:
"He warns that where Texas goes in schooling, the nation follows. Let's hope this time he is wrong." - ellroon
I decided beforehand not to comment on this post, but found I needed to say some things after all.
Texas's influence on other states' education systems stems largely from the size of the population here: Texas inevitably spend more money than many small states put together, which means that suppliers of textbooks and other materials accommodate Texas. It's not so much that Texas influences other states as that their suppliers of materials influence other states. I don't doubt California is similarly "influential," to the extent that purchasing power is influence.
Another thing to note, and the reason I'm not ready to panic, is that this has all happened before, several decades ago, and the world did not collapse, the fundie agenda did not come to predominate nationwide, and your kids presumably did not study a "christianized" version of core subjects if they attended California public schools. There's a lot of opposition, in Texas as surely as elsewhere in America, to the kind of crap McLeroy is peddling. It's not that it is never a problem, but that sane people must actively fight the McLeroys to maintain educational standards. In Texas, we're accustomed to the fight. (Sometime I'll tell you about my late father's part in it.)
Third, it's not a fair assumption that Texas school boards are all like this, or always like this. From time to time, "stealth" candidates manage to seize control by lying in their campaigns... what else is new. It is an ongoing problem, but if you think it is only in Texas, you're in for more than one surprise.
(So much for my intention to give this post a miss...)
("spend more money" -> "spendS more money")
You've addressed this before ... in fact every time I decide that stupid people in Texas do stuff that will impact stupid people all over the US.
I feel in ways it's 'whack a mole' time and that every time they get more power to do more harm, they must be slammed back down.
The process will be eternal and we must be vigilant.
We had some fundamentalists take over the school board in San Diego county maybe ten years or so ago.
They then proceeded to jam through creationism and were thrown out of office on a recall.
So I know it happens all over. It's just that in this political climate and in this open struggle over church and state, anything like this scares the shit out of me.
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