President Obama could learn a thing or two about ramming reform through a political body from the Texas State Board of Education. Less than two weeks after primary-election losses signaled the end of a the board’s control by a seven-person faction of far-right extremists, that same clique got to work making changes to textbooks that will affect students far outside the Lone Star State.
Among the changes are a euphemistic telling of McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt and the disqualification of hip-hop as a musical genre of cultural import and influence.
School reform expert Diane Ravitch warns in The Daily Beast that the adoption-model for textbook content, which gives undue weight to the right-leaning Texas and left-leaning California school boards, doesn’t work for the whole nation.
The folks over at the AOL blog Politics Daily have put up sample history textbook revisions that would be Onionesque in their brilliance, if not for the fact that they could come to pass. To get a better sense of what the changes will look like, try this New York Times graphic.
And if you’re looking for someone to ascribe the chill up your spine to, meet Don McLeroy, the fundamentalist school board member who was just voted out of office. (Though, you gotta admit he’s making sure that when his term ends in December, his presence will have been felt-assuming something doesn’t happen during the public comment period, which ends in May.)
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7qckl3W6W4
Photo (and video) via Discover‘s Bad Astronomy blog
