Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 6:18am

Texas, Textbooks, the Washington Post and Ann Althouse

The Left in this country has been having a hissy fit over conservatives on the Texas State School Board amending the social studies standards in that state.  For example, California State Senator Leland Yee (D. San Francisco) has introduced a bill that would require the California Board of Education to be on the lookout for any Texas content in reviewing public school textbooks.  He also makes the hilarious statement that the Texas curriculum changes pose a threat “to the apolitical nature of public school governance and academic content standards in California.”  This in a state where the legislature has instituted a Harvey Milk Day to propagandize students in the gay rights agenda, and where the California Education Association, the teacher’s union, is the largest spender on politics in the state.

To support the meme of the Left that evil conservatives were perverting educational standards in Texas, the Washington Post wrote a hit piece that may be read here.  Ann Althouse, law professor and blogger decided to compare the claims of the Washington Post to the new standards.  Here is what she found:

Let me embarrass the Washington Post. Below, the material from the WaPo article, written by Michael Birnbaum, is indented. After the indented part, I’ve located the relevant quote from the Board of Education text, found here. (I’m searching 3 PDF documents: Economics with Emphasis on the Free Enterprise System and Its Benefits Subchapter A. High School; Social Studies Subchapter B. Middle School; Social Studies Subchapter C. High School.)

The Washington Post writes:

The Texas state school board gave final approval Friday to controversial social studies standards….

The new standards say that the McCarthyism of the 1950s was later vindicated — something most historians deny –…
The students are required to “describe how McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the arms race, and the space race increased Cold War tensions and how the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government…” The word “vindicated” is inflammatory and unfair. What is the Washington Post saying historians deny? One can be informed of the reality of what the Venona Papers revealed about communist infiltration into the U.S. government and still understand and deplore the excesses of “McCarthyism.”

…draw an equivalency between Jefferson Davis’s and Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural addresses…
Students are required to “analyze the ideas contained in Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address and Abraham Lincoln’s ideas about liberty, equality, union, and government as contained in his first and second inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address.” The word “equivalency” is uncalled for. The requirement is to analyze, not to be indoctrinated that the ideas are the same.

… say that international institutions such as the United Nations imperil American sovereignty…
What I’m seeing is “explain the significance of the League of Nations and the United Nations” and “analyze the human and physical factors that influence the power to control territory, create conflict/war, and impact international political relations such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), or the control of resources.” Where is the language that can be paraphrased “imperil American sovereignty”?

…. and include a long list of Confederate officials about whom students must learn.
Students are required to “explain the roles played by significant individuals and heroes during the Civil War, including Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and congressional Medal of Honor recipients William Carney and Philip Bazaar.” Only Davis and Lee were Confederate officials! There is also this: “describe the role of individuals such as governors George Wallace, Orval Faubus, and Lester Maddox and groups, including the Congressional bloc of southern Democrats, that sought to maintain the status quo [in the Civil Rights Era].” That’s obviously not from the Civil War, but I can see why it’s annoying to Democrats.

They also removed references to capitalism and replaced them with the term “free-enterprise system.”
The document on economics does use the term “free enterprise system” throughout, but students are required to “understand that the terms free enterprise, free market, and capitalism are synonymous terms to describe the U.S. economic system,” so what is the problem?

Virtually everything cited in the article to make the curriculum seem controversial is misstated! Appalling!

ADDED: Birnbaum had an article in the previous day’s Washington Post that does contain quotes, and these have to do with changes that went through on Thursday (and which do not — but should! — appear in the documents that are available at the Board of Education website):

Students will now study “efforts by global organizations to undermine U.S. sovereignty,” an addition late Thursday evening encouraged by board member Don McLeroy (R), who has put forward many of the most contentious changes….

Another one of the seven conservative board members, David Bradley (R), added a list of Confederate generals and officials to the list of topics that students must study.

This provides support for Birnbaum’s statement that the standards “include a long list of Confederate officials about whom students must learn.” And it answers my question “Where is the language that can be paraphrased ‘imperil American sovereignty’?” My criticisms about “vindicating” McCarthyism, “the equivalency between Jefferson Davis’s and Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural addresses,” and the term “free-enterprise system” remain.

I have not been defending the Texas standards, only attacking the quality of the journalism that fails to quote or link to a text that is referred to. Birnbaum’s Friday article contains some useful quotes (though still not a link to the whole text). The Saturday article was unanchored to text and forced me to look for what I could find on line. I’m also criticizing inaccurate paraphrasing, like the use of the words “vindicating” and “equivalency.” Birnbaum’s take on the standards might be true, but in an article that refers to a text, I do need to see the text. Paraphrasing, without the text, raises suspicions, and I don’t apologize for having those suspicions.

Here are the revisions made in the curriculum standards for high school social studies in Texas.  It is telling that these types of modest revisions can rouse such a tempest and to so little purpose.  Students in public schools in Texas will still be taught overwhelmingly by teachers who are members of the National Education Association, the teacher’s union, which routinely takes left wing stances on the political issues of the day.  More to the point, the teaching of social studies will still receive short shrift at most schools, judging from the historical illiteracy of most high school graduates.  Political bias in school textbooks I think is a problem, but the main issues are  too many teachers who cannot teach effectively, too many students who do not seem to want to learn and too many parents who could care less.  Of course this is why the homeschool movement is growing as parents flee an increasingly useless public school system.

Update:  Commenter J. Christian directs our attention to a great post by Steve Sailer:

“Steve Sailer wrote a pretty damning piece on one high school history textbook:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100425_schoolbook_massacre.htm

It’s hard to read that and not come to the conclusion that something in education has gone horribly wrong.”

From the post by Mr. Sailer:

But war heroes are, of course, in short supply in this textbook. American history’s greatest fighting admiral, Raymond Spruance, victor at the tremendously dramatic 1942 Battle of Midway, goes unmentioned.  Nor do we hear about Clarence Wade McClusky and Max Leslie, the dive bomber commanders who decided not to turn back from their search for the Japanese fleet despite being so low on fuel that half their planes would have to ditch in the Pacific. By pressing onward, they suddenly were rewarded with the most glittering panorama any American warriors have beheld: the heart of the Japanese navy three miles below them.

As Admiral Morison wrote of the Japanese fleet on the morning of June 4, 1942 after the heroic but fruitless sorties by the slow, low-flying American torpedo bombers had been shot to pieces by the Japanese fighters:

“The third torpedo attack was over by 1024, and for about one hundred seconds the Japanese were certain they had won the Battle of Midway, and the war. This was their high tide of victory. Then, a few seconds before 1026, with dramatic suddenness, there came a complete reversal of fortune… At 14,000 feet the American dive-bombers tipped over and swooped screaming down for the kill.”

Five minutes later, three Japanese aircraft carriers were sinking. The ultimate defeat of Japan was now inevitable.

How hard did the textbook authors have to work to make Midway dull?

Answer: Nation of Nations’ section entitled “The Naval War in the Pacific,” which covers the turning point years of 1942 and 1943, gets all of two pro forma paragraphs.

In contrast, eight paragraphs are devoted to the internment of Japanese, seven to women and the war, and five to “Minorities on the Job.”

Hilariously, the naval war gets the same amount of text as the 1943 Zoot Suit riot in East LA!

Another example: October 1944’s Battle of Leyte Gulf, perhaps the largest naval encounter of all time? The complicated Japanese battle plan succeeded in luring Admiral Bull Halsey out of position, opening the door for a Japanese task force centered around the Yamato, the largest battleship in history, to blast Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s landing force off the Philippine beach to which he had famously returned five days before.

Yet, the Japanese leviathans were driven off by the furious attack of Clifton Sprague’s small American ships in what Admiral Morison calls “the most gallant naval action in our history, and the most bloody.”

Leyte Gulf gets one (drama-free) sentence.

When I was growing up in Los Angeles, where so many veterans of the Pacific settled, the struggle with Japan loomed as a national epic. Since then, it’s largely disappeared from consciousness—especially compared to the war with the Nazis, which presents the more comfortable scenario of white Americans defeating white Europeans.

Poor Tom Hanks has been reduced to promoting his current HBO miniseries The Pacific, successor to his 2001 European theatre of operations miniseries Band of Brothers, as being about “a war of racism.” (I seem to recall it had something to do with Pearl Harbor, but what do I know?)

Of course, leaving out so many annoying white male Heroes of Accomplishment from the textbook doesn’t mean that the historians have managed to dig up comparable diverse Heroes of Accomplishment.

Instead, the space mostly gets filled with Heroes of Suffering.

And who made them suffer?

You get one guess.

At one point, I went looking in this textbook’s index for the Civil War hero, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, colonel of the XXth Maine Volunteers. By repelling repeated assaults on crucial Little Round Top hill on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Chamberlain more or less saved the Union. (He’s played by Jeff Daniels in Ron Maxwell’s movies Gettysburg and Gods and Generals.)

I suspect teenage boys might find him, you know, interesting. Maybe?

Well, needless to say, Joshua Chamberlain isn’t in the Nation of Nations’ index. I did find, however:

Chanax, Juan, 1096—1098, 1103, 1124, 1125

Who, exactly, is Chanax and why does he appear on six pages when Chamberlain can’t be squeezed in anywhere?

It turns out Chanax is an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who works in a supermarket in Houston. This hero’s accomplishment is that he brought in 1,000 other illegal aliens from his home village.

This is how history is taught in too many classrooms:  dull, politicized junk.  I can’t blame the students for not wasting their attention on this drek.

 

 

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Art Deco
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 7:27am

I will wager this fellow Birnbaum was acting as a mouthpiece for some advocacy group or looks at just about anything with a set of distorting lenses and has no idea he has said anything tendentious.

Eric Brown
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 11:58am

There is the issue that the role of Thomas Jefferson’s writings in influencing the founding of America is being de-emphasized. Allegedly, St. Thomas Aquinas’ thought in influencing America (more of a stretch than Jefferson) is being noted.

Moreover, the emphasis on the presidency of Lincoln, the unintended consequences of the Great Society, Reagan, the contract with America in 1994, and the emphasis of the Founding Fathers’ particular interest in a small, limited government leads me to believe that this is a politicized curriculum — in fact, the Chair of the State Board, Don McLeroy has said himself admits:

“It’s imperative that our children be taught the original direction of our country…And I think you tie that in with the concept of American exceptionalism that we’ve added to the standards. I think that it’s important to understand why America is such a wonderful place.”

McLeroy wrote in an Op-Ed in the USA Today that the curriculum will “challenge the powerful ideology of the left,” whose “principles are diametrically opposed to our founding principles.”

Sorry, but the curriculum is heavily politicized and I prefer history not historical revisionism.

Eric Brown
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 11:59am

And that need not be taken as a defense of the current curriculum — hardly. But this surely is not a remedy. I hope it fails.

Art Deco
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 12:18pm

Sorry, but the curriculum is heavily politicized and I prefer history not historical revisionism.

Why are you confident the extant curriculum is not ‘heavily politicized’? What, roughly, would a ‘non-politicized’ curriculum look like?

restrainedradical
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 12:51pm

How Texas decides its curriculum (start at 2:50): http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-march-17-2010/don-t-mess-with-textbooks

Jay Anderson
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 12:54pm

Texas is in the process of being “Arizonaed”.

Blackadder
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 1:51pm

Re: politicized curriculum, a few years back I noticed that my beliefs about political events were roughly that liberals were almost always right up until the 1980s, at which point conservatives were usually right. It occurred to me that my knowledge of pre-1980s politics came mainly from my public school education, whereas since then my knowledge of politics came from having experienced it as it happened.

Eric Brown
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 2:08pm

Art,

I didn’t say the current curriculum is not politicized. In fact, I stated explicitly that I’m not defending it.

Education curriculum is not my specialty nor need I devise a “non-politicized” scheme of education, but when the Chair of the Texas State Board of Education is making statements focus on reversing ideological trends in emphasis rather than providing a solid presentation of American social history for Texas children, I’m inclined to think the curriculum is being politicized and with the emphasis on the Judeo-Christian roots of America, small and limited government, Lincoln, Reagan, the unintended consequences of the Great Society, the 1994 Contract with America, it seems obvious that the shift in emphasis is to offer a certan reading of history and the filtering of information is to, more or less, generate students that have a more conservative (politically speaking) view of society. The education seems primarily aimed at that end and I simply don’t support that. And this does not mean that I support in totality the current liberal establishment in the education scene.

Blackadder
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 3:31pm

Eric,

Saying that “the curriculum is being politicized” suggests that it is not politicized already.

j. christian
j. christian
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 6:30pm

Steve Sailer wrote a pretty damning piece on one high school history textbook:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100425_schoolbook_massacre.htm

It’s hard to read that and not come to the conclusion that something in education has gone horribly wrong.

Mack
Mack
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 9:13pm

In my Texas public school I suffered a day of in-service regarding a computer instruction program. When I told the expert that the English IV segment contained nothing but two novels of manners (oh, yeah, boys go crazy over Jane Austen), she airily advised me that “It’s not all about Texas content.” My response was that Beowulf, Shakespeare, and Milton are still taught in Texas and, presumably, in Rhode Island.

Jay Anderson
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 9:53pm

This is one guy who’s a huge Jane Austen fan.

Tito Edwards
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 10:12pm

Nice icon pic Mr. Anderson!

Mike Petrik
Mike Petrik
Monday, May 24, AD 2010 10:38pm

I’m with you, Jay.

Nathan Zimmermann
Nathan Zimmermann
Wednesday, May 26, AD 2010 12:57am

I find the hullabaloo over the new standards to be most intriguing indeed. As a native Texan who attended public schools I have always viewed the curriculum as s starting point for education. I would humbly assert that it is the duty of parents to supplement the learning taught in the classroom. In thirty years I have seen three such battles and each time it was an exercise in futility.

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