I’m a Texan. Sometimes this fact comes in handy — people defer to me when it comes to assigning grades to enchiladas, for instance — and sometimes it compels me to write columns in defense of the good people of the Lone Star State who aren’t a) crazy, b) rabidly conservative, or c) both. This week, I can’t do anything to downplay the crazy. It’s more than any one right-thinking gaucho can stuff under a 10-gallon hat. The state of public education in Texas is far past alarming, well into “send in the carpetbaggers” desperation.
Exhibit A is a fresh controversy from Sulphur Springs, Texas. There, two middle school special education teachers thought it would be a laugh to hand out the “Eighth Annual Ghetto Classroom Awards.” One African-American student received the “Huh?” award, and his grandmother, Debra Jose, wasn’t laughing. “Back in the day, when I was growing up, they segregated us,” Jose told KLTV is Sulphur Springs. “They put us in a part where they said we were ‘ghetto.’ If she knew what ghetto meant, she would have never approached that, because, being an African-American, we were always thrown that.”
That’s bad enough, but the plot thickens. The local CBS affiliate claims the teachers claimed they didn’t know calling someone “ghetto” was considered derogatory. Which, to be kind, strains credibility. The teachers apologized. One, according to the school district superintendent, was responsible for the “eighth annual” part: “It’s something this teacher did for six years in a prior district. It went unnoticed.”
One of the two (it’s not clear whether it’s the same one who previously gave “Ghetto Awards”) bears an unusual distinction that’s representative of the enormous issue that’s threatening Texas public education. That teacher, Tim Couch, is also the pastor of the Cross Branch Cowboy Church in Sumner, Texas. There is not, of course, anything standing in the way of a member of the clergy teaching in a public school. Doing so in a pluralist non-theocracy, however, necessarily means leaving one’s religion outside the classroom. Texas isn’t always good with that dividing line. Conservative Christians have made enormous strides in invading the young minds of Texas in recent months, but it’s more than a head-shaking, “oh, those crazy Texans” problem: the details of the public education textbook system mean other states may get a dose of the same stuff. Crazy and wily can co-exist — it’s hardly lost on these culture warriors that publishers have often deferred to Texas standards thanks to the enormous numbers of books the state buys.
The right wing fundamentalist push for theocracy over democracy never really goes away. While the rest of us move on to other matters, the fundamentalists keep plugging away, as sure as ever of the righteousness of their cause.
The Texas textbook debates have become so rancorous and entrenched they became the subject of a 2013 documentary called Revisionaries. The Texas State Board of Education has become home to a bloc of right-wing revisionists whose proposed “corrections” to textbooks threaten to upend all sorts of sound scholarly matters. These revisionists haven’t hesitated to go beyond mere textbook tinkering. Last November, they debated whether it would be appropriate to jail teachers who use intructional materials tied to Common Core standards. (That idea, at least, failed.)
The vigilant folks at Right Watch catalogued some of the particulars of the proposed Texas textbooks last fall. The list included things like suggesting that Moses was a “major influence” on the Constitution and that the roots of democratic government come from the Old Testament. Some textbooks claimed that the spread of international terrorism is solely an outgrowth of Islam, despite even the proximity to Texas of Oklahoma City, where an American non-Muslim blew up a federal building and killed 168 people. One book offered the contention that the gay rights movement was part of society “spinning out of control.”
On the conservative side is Truth in Texas Textbooks. That group offered its own long list of problems in need of correction, most of them drably predictable. The Texas Tribune reported that their requests included insertion of a statement that coal mining has “minimal effect on the environment,” and pointing out that talk of Spanish colonization of Latin America should also address the “continuous discrimination and oppression practiced by the native American peoples on each other.”
The dust finally settled on the debate last November under less-than-ideal circumstances, and the coming school year should see the changes arrive in classroom. No one except the publishers, unfortunately, seems certain what the final revisions were. On the non-conservative side of the debate, Texas Freedom Network’s president Kathy Miller said, “[The] board adopted textbooks with numerous late changes that the public had little opportunity to review and comment on and that even board members themselves admitted they had not read. They can’t honestly say they know what’s in these textbooks, which could be in classrooms for a decade.”
I hate to tattle on my fellow Texans, but watch out for what shows up in your kids’ textbooks. This is a battle that won’t go away any time soon. It’s insidious stuff — in a final bout of pettiness, Truth in Texas Textbooks leveled a definitive piece of crazy, complaining that The Beatles and Bruce Springsteen were noted as having been influenced by Buddy Holly. They are not, however, Texans, so TTT suggests replacing the Fab Four and The Boss with Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. It’s that bad.•
