A truly momentous and impressive public hearing by the Texas House Public Education Committee has just wrapped up in Austin (July 16, 2008).
I did not hear all of it. I heard State Board chairman McLeroy’s presentation and some of the questioning. Hours later I heard the witness before Steven Schafersman (Texas Citizens for Science) through [...]
Category Archives: textbooks
Momentous TX education hearing
July 16, 2008 – 3:59 pm
TX House Committe testimony by Texas Citizens for Science
July 15, 2008 – 11:19 am
Testimony by Steven D. Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, is now posted at the TCS website. Here’s an overview of their recoomendations:
I urge you to take even more powers away from the SBOE. Specifically, I urge you to revise the law so that textbooks in Texas are adopted by each [...]
like teaching Klingon in French class
June 22, 2008 – 7:57 pm
It would be more like the situation where a teacher hired to teach French in French class decides instead to mix in grammar and vocabulary from Italian (or Klingon, maybe, to make the analogy more precise — since Italian is another real language, after all), without letting students know that what they’re learning is not really French, and with state law protecting the teacher against any kind of repercussions.
TX GOP 2008 platform on Education
June 22, 2008 – 11:51 am
The Republican Party of Texas has now posted its State Party Platform for 2008.
I have also excerpted and posted here the four pages of that platform with the Preamble, Principles, and positions on Education.
As usual the Texas GOP takes interesting positions on many things, but in this post I’ll just quote their statement on “theories [...]
¿ against teaching the controversies (or “strengths and weaknesses”) ?
June 10, 2008 – 2:16 pm
While the ridicule is well deserved, I want to take exception to something possibly implied in Curmudgeon’s response, where he says that “High school students don’t know how to reach ‘their own conclusions’ about science. That’s why they’re in school! That’s why we call them students! “
Texas forebodings: textbooks and science standards
November 17, 2007 – 12:49 pm
Although the specific textbooks involved this time were in elementary mathematics, the broader concern here is that, if the Board is allowed to get away with rejecting textbooks without and explanation, they could use that practice to censor textbooks for ideological reasons in controversial areas such as teaching about evolution in biology.
Good use for Impenetrable Textbooks
October 22, 2006 – 3:27 pm
A candidate for Oklahoma state superintendent of education has come up with a way to put those massively impenetrable textbooks to good use: If students can use them to protect themselves from gunfire in the schools, school safety can be improved without using more taxpayer money.
