Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

SBOE standards for social studies appealed to feds
(By GARY SCHARRER, Houston Chronicle, Dec. 20, 2010)

AUSTIN — A school curriculum teaching children about violent Black Panthers while playing down Ku Klux Klan violence against blacks is not only inaccurate but discriminatory, the Texas NAACP and LULAC said Monday in a joint complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education.

The complaint asks the department's Office of Civil Rights to review Texas' new social studies curriculum standards approved by the State Board of Education and to take legal action if the state tries to implement the standards the groups call "racially or ethnically offensive," as well as historically inaccurate.

The new standards also balance the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis and attempt to point out positive aspects of slavery.

"It is our contention that the SBOE curriculum changes were made with the intention to discriminate, and the SBOE curriculum and other areas raised in this complaint were either the result of unnecessary policies that have a disparate or stigmatizing impact on African Americans and Latinos, or reflect disparate treatment or neglect," according to the complaint by Gary Bledsoe, president of the Texas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Joey Cardenas Jr., state director for the Texas League of United Latin American Citizens.

The complaint also asks federal officials to investigate a general "miseducation" of minority students in Texas, in addition to "disparate discipline for minority students," the use of school accountability standards to impose sanctions against schools with high populations of minority students and the under-representation of Latinos and African Americans in gifted and talented programs.

A review of the new social studies curriculum standards by historians and college professors indicates that 83 percent of the required historical figures and notable persons for students to study are white. Only 16 percent are African American or Latino.

Minority groups, including state legislators, warned the 15-member State Board of Education throughout the curriculum standards process that it was shortchanging the achievements of minorities. Of the 4.8 million children attending Texas public schools last year, 66 percent were minorities. Whites make up two-thirds of the State Board of Education.

State Board of Education member David Bradley, R-Beaumont, has been a leader in the effort to develop new curriculum standards, which, he said, "significantly increased the inclusion of minorities that were, indeed, patriots in American and Texas history."

"These activists are never satisfied, and their whining to the federal government is silly and without merit," Bradley said.

Many minority figures were included in categories that students can study as examples instead of rising to required reading, he said.

"We consider that to be fool's gold," Bledsoe said.

The complaint includes several academic reviews of the state's new social studies curriculum standards.

"The decision to accent in the curriculum standards positive aspects of slavery and of slaveholding leaders of the secessionist Confederacy like the treasonous Jefferson Davis will likely have a negative impact on all children who are taught this distorted and biased approach to one of the more brutal forms of oppression devised by mankind," Texas A&M sociology professor Joe Feagin wrote.

African-American children will get a warped sense of their own history and white children will get a perspective that plays down the culpability of whites, said Feagin, author of 52 books on racial, gender and urban issues and a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

LULAC and the NAACP are seeking federal intervention, in part, because the state gets about $5 billion a year in federal money for public education

"Federal funding is what would motivate the state to possibly act without necessarily litigation," said Robert Notzon, an Austin attorney who works with the state NAACP. "But the motivation for the feds to get involved would be the violations of (federal law and the U.S. Constitution)."

A spokesman said the civil rights office will evaluate the complaint.

And your's is not? LOL

During the past year the Texas State Board of Education has been criticized on standards for both science education and social studies education. Now, a complaint has been made to the federal government regarding the standards for social studies.

No matter, Sir, (said Johnson;) they consider it as a compliment to be talked to, as if they were wiser than they are. So true is this, Sir, that Baxter made it a rule in every sermon that he preached, to say something that was above the capacity of the audience.