Conservative school board revolution: Column

[herding cats]

As most media attention is focused on national elections, there's been a quiet revolution rolling out on the state and local level. It has been launched by seemingly innocuous school board officials.

In conservative states and districts, Republicans have been stacking school boards with radical right wingers, with an eye towards rewriting textbook and educational standards so they are more amendable to the conservative cause.

While conservative attacks on science in classrooms get a lot of attention, the latest trend is, if anything, even more worrisome: Conservative school board officials are quietly trying to rewrite history and social studies curriculum, erasing parts of history they don't like and simply making up history they wish was true.

Students and teachers at Evergreen High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, are fighting back. Conservative school board member Julie Williams proposed a change to the school's history curriculum that appears aimed at replacing education with old-fashioned, Soviet-style propaganda, except in this case in the support of capitalism and American conservatism, instead of communism.

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Of course, as noted by Colorado Public Radio, the language being fought over is nearly identical to similar language that was adopted by the Texas State Board of Education, setting the standard for all kids in the state. And what has happened in Texas shows that the students and teachers protesting in Colorado are right: These standards open up the door not just to right wing indoctrination in lieu of education, but to outright lying to students.

The Texas Freedom Network gathered together a group of experts in history and political science to review social studies texts under review in the state, textbooks that publishers wrote specifically to meet the state's new social studies standards, which were written by a conservative state school board. What the review showed was that the books were not only slanted to the right, they were full of misinformation, some of it downright comical.

Link to full article: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/09/25/school-board-curriculum-conservative-history-column/16159795/

This is a well researched piece to share with others we know who may not understand the full scope of what's been taking place.

[RussBLib]

1. a good toon for this one

[msongs]

2. christian version of sharia law for everyone right now, starting with PUBLIC shcools nt

[Anansi1171]

3. RW influencers like Rush and David Brooks know...

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...that facts taught in school and the openning of eyes, hearts and minds to reality is the greatest threat to the bigotry and ignorance they push at the dinner table.

To them, white children must know that black slaves were happier than Pharrell, Stonewall is not worth a paragraph and Cesar Chavez was an Union thug invader and nothing more.

[blkmusclmachine]

4. ,

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[tuhaybey]

5. Texas

The scary thing is that Texas has such a big school system, and buys so many books so far in advance that it can basically dictate terms to the national textbook companies. None of them want to write a textbook that they can't sell in Texas, so they all just pretty much follow Texas on this stuff, and Texas is totally off the deepend on intelligent design and whatnot in the schools.