Whitewashed and erased': There's a reason Juneteenth isn't taught in schools, educators say

[Lonestarblue]

12. It isn't just the Texas Board of Education.

Florida is equally as bad. Part of the Republican plan to remake the US into a backwards, rights-denying country was to get elected to state and local school boards. They were successful. The US has a system of two forms of textbook adoption: open territory and state adoption. Open territory states tend to be more progressive, like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, etc., and their schools make independent purchasing decisions based on their state’s curriculum standards.

State adoption states are mostly in the South and East, plus California up to 8th grade. Those states are the most educationally conservative, and they tend to have the most activists working to change social studies, science, and literature to teach what religious conservatives want taught—so no mention of climate change and teaching the religious intelligent design as equal to evolution as a theory. In social studies texts, history has been whitewashed to present only the white version. To maintain an appearance of balance, famous minorities are discussed in special features rather than being interwoven into the historical narrative. White people are presented as having built the country and essentially having never done anything wrong. Students never learn the context of major events or the attitudes of anyone but white people during the period studied.

Even literature does not escape since there is pressure to include white authors rather than minority authors, what is not so fondly called the canon of dead white guys.

The other way that conservatives control the content of textbooks is through writing state curriculum standards for each course. Teachers who write these standards, which are often reviewed by parents and other educators, can be just as biased as the general population, and their biases guide the content that publishers create. State standards in red states tend to be highly biased against minorities. We truly need a basic national curriculum that every state must teach so as to remove as much bias as possible, though many states would rebel against such a thing (which is one reason the Common Core failed). And we need textbooks that teach the truth, not just the one-sided version of reality that we have today. Electing more Democrats to boards of education would help, along with ensuring that teachers are required to take courses that help them identify their own biases.