Conservative Textbook Curriculum Passes Final Vote In Texas 895
suraj.sun sends in a followup to a story we've been following about the Texas Board of Education's efforts to put a more political spin on some of their state's textbooks. From the Dallas Morning News:
"In a landmark move that will shape the future education of millions of Texas schoolchildren, the State Board of Education on Friday approved new curriculum standards for US history and other social studies courses that reflect a more conservative tone than in the past. Split along party lines, the board delivered a pair of 9-5 votes to adopt the new standards, which will dictate what is taught in all Texas schools and provide the basis for future textbooks and student achievement tests over the next decade. Texas standards often wind up being taught in other states because national publishers typically tailor their materials to Texas, one of the biggest textbook purchasers in the country. Approval came after the GOP-dominated board approved a new curriculum standard that would encourage high school students to question the legal doctrine of church-state separation — a sore point for social conservative groups who disagree with court decisions that have affirmed the doctrine, including the ban on school-sponsored prayer."
Re:How will other states react? (Score:5, Informative)
California is all over this already. They're pushing to ban all textbooks using Texas' information.
Re:How will other states react? (Score:2, Informative)
Setting aside questions about Texas itself for the moment, I wonder if this will cause other states to go to greater lengths to separate their curriculum from Texas's. The curriculum change got a lot of opposition in Texas, and I can only imagine it would get a far greater amount in many of the other states, especially the more liberal ones.
California is already considering a measure requiring schools to not use Texas-authorized school books.
And the sides of the ideological civil war in our country become that much more defined...
Slashdot - tech news for freedom lovers? (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not going to create an account just for this, but there are a few points to make.
First, this isn't really 'technology' or even 'science' news. This is at this point political news and it seems many slashdot posters are simply taking a liberal/bi-coastal position against the conservative (sometime evangelical christian) position in many other states. This could be discussed on any number of sites; slashdot isn't really the best place for another offshoot of this typical argument.
Second, most of slashdot rails against central control, jack-booted thuggery of the RIAA or national censorship. However, when a community or state exercises its power to mandate community values which conflict with the particular person on slashdot, all that speech about freedom goes right out the window. Centralization to a DOE, mandated this and that, imposing morals on everyone - hypocrisy is exposed.
Examine yourselves.
Re:Can this be legally challenged? (Score:2, Informative)
What about the motivation of the board - whether they were religiously motivated in doing what they did? In the Dover "Intelligent Design" trial, one of the ways they could make their case was to establish whether the board were religiously motivated in introducing ID into the classroom. Based on some of the quoted statements, I'd say there's a fair chance the religion of the board members mixed into this decision pretty heavily.
Re:Isn't this just increasing the cost of educatio (Score:3, Informative)
You're assuming those are the same conservatives. In fact, you're almost certainly addressing two almost entirely different factions within the movement, the economic and social conservatives. They have only the thinnest of threads in common, but are allied because they would lose every election if they competed for votes.
Re:When did progress... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Time to stop relying on Texas... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the superior educational system in Germany has helped them a lot. They are the number one exporter of manufactured goods. And they're able to make all these superior manufactured goods despite the fact that they are among the most labor-friendly societies in the world. Labor unions in Germany are much stronger than here in the US and take a greater role in management than their US counterparts. A single union, the German Confederation of Trade Unions, organizes 25% of all German workers. Even though they only have open shops in Germany, union membership is higher than in the US.
Meanwhile, here in the US, we're destroying labor unions and hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs.
It seems that Germany's superior educational system (which is government-funded through university by the way) has helped them a lot. You'd think that as America falls further and further behind the rest of the world in areas such as health care, education, legalized marijuana that there would be more of an effort to learn something from other countries. Instead, some of us (Texas, for example) seem intent on making our society dumber.
The most important thing to note is that this decision by the Texas School Board will effect the textbooks in many other states. Yet Texas ranks 49th out of the 50 states in education. Instead of trying to raise the standards to match the states that are the most successful in education students, we're intent on lowering our standards to match the states that are the worst.
Re:When did progress... (Score:2, Informative)
You have no idea what socialism is.
Go back to Glenn Beck.
Re:When did progress... (Score:5, Informative)
Little by little the United States of America is becoming the Corporate Socialist States of Jesus.
"In God We Trust" did not show up on United States currency until around the time of the Civil War and was not officially a motto on the currency until 1956.
Sadly there is a large segment of the population that believe the United States is a Christian nation because of things like "One nation under God" and "In God We Trust" but they never actually studied any real history and don't realize those statements are in our government because they put them there not the people who formed this nation.
Not only that, but . . . (Score:2, Informative)
Francis Bellamy was OMG a socialist! Really. And a Christian Socialist at that. See his Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org].
Imagine the reaction nowadays if schools anywhere in the U.S. were to adopt anything written by a socialist!
Re:Open Source Textbooks? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a few projects like that. As far as I know, they aren't really in widespread use.
A professor of mine once said that if you really want to know the material you should try writing a textbook on it. He was in the middle of writing various textbooks on Group Theory and Abstract Algebra. I think that's good advice for any expert in any field.
Here are some links I found after a quick google search:
California Open Source Textbook Project [opensourcetext.org]
Textbook Revolution [textbookrevolution.org]
Open Textbook Repository [opentextbook.org]
An open source Linear Algebra Textbook [ups.edu]
A list of open source Math textbooks [ups.edu]
Hope this helps!
Re:Well, that says a lot about you then doesn't it (Score:2, Informative)
It's not spin at all. There are more people without health care coverage by choice in the US then there are because of resources. The US doesn't abandon most of it's poor population, they get handouts like free medical coverage and so on. Between the welfare role and medicare, the US was already paying for roughly 60% of the non-elective medical treatments i the US.
It doesn't really matter who can afford coverage or not or if you purchase insurance or not because you still have the choice of who pays for what. Also, in the US, it's illegal for a hospital to deny life saving treatment on the grounds of someone's ability to pay. So no, it's not the insurance company taking on the role of the death panel unless you specifically allow them to. Talk about spin.....
Take that into contrast with the system in the UK for instance. Suppose there is some miracle drug that cures 50% of people with a specific condition during trials. Now gov' health won't cover the drug or treatment because it isn't established, it's expensive, and the results are 50/50. If you as a citizen of that country, secure funding for the drug and seek treatment outside their health system in hopes of being cured, they will refuse to ever treat you or pay for your treatment for that illness again. SO potentially, here is Johny, a 30 year old Cancer patient who gets his care from the government, he heard about a break through drug and has the opportunity to try it because a rich uncle died and left him with just enough money to pay for the treatment, and if it doesn't work, he will be broke and without coverage because the gob'ment got their feelings hurt when someone attempted to better their life without them.
But hey, I guess that's better then then the free systems where the patient still has some choices.
Re:Time to stop relying on Texas... (Score:3, Informative)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Board member Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, another social conservative, opened Friday's board meeting with an invocation that referred to the U.S. and its history as a "Christian land governed by Christian principles."
"I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses," she said.
Enough said. Please take your trolling elsewhere.
Re:Time to stop relying on Texas... (Score:2, Informative)
Though it appears he denied the deity of Christ, Thomas Jefferson used public monies to teach American Indians the words of Jesus, attended Christian services held in Congress during his time as President, and declared the following:
"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever."
"To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others . . . ."
"I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented . . . ."
Nice bag o' wind (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sure many foreigners might jump on in disagreement if they look at how it was passed. There wasn't enough time to read and comprehend the bill before the vote.
HR 3200 was introduced OVER A YEAR before the final bill passed. HR3950 was passed in December of '09, over 4 MONTHS before the final vote. To claim that there "wasn't enough time to read" the bill is complete horse shit.
A lot of the rejection of the health care bill has to do with how it was created and passed. The current administration ran on being open but this thing was created in some back room deal and all members of his party was expected to bless it without even knowing what was in it.
And the only reason for all that backroom debating crap was because of people, on both sides, toeing the party line and the Republican threats of filibuster. If it hadn't required 60 votes to override the Republican filibuster, a lot of those back room deals wouldn't have been necesary. But since the Dems had to effectively buy off a hand full of legislatures who were all "the 60th vote", we wound up with a worse bill.
That the Republican party been willing to take part in the democratic process, the health insurance reform bill would have been significantly better.
Hell, one of the main claims about covering children with preexisting conditions wasn't even going to take effect until 2014
Which was due to the REPUBLICAN introduction of the mandate. The purpose of the mandate is to keep people from abuisng the preexisting condition rule, and so the two were linked. And since the mandate doesn't kick in till 2014, neither does the preexisting coverage rule.
-Rick
Re:When did progress... (Score:2, Informative)
They never took anyone's rights away after 9/11. You must be confused with the expansion of powers that effect only a small amount of people engaged in a small amount of activities after 9/11.
Anyways, here is a link to it
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/print/51610 [cnsnews.com] one of them, I'm sure your google finger can find links to the tricks they used to get it passed and how debate was stifled.
Re:When did progress... (Score:4, Informative)
That's not at all an argument in favor of the "living document" mode of legal interpretation. It's an argument in favor of amending and updating the laws with the times, which is certainly what we should be doing. The idea of a "living [legal] document" that can mean a different thing now than it did 200 years ago without amendment is absurd, since it does, in fact, mean that we can interpret the laws however we please. As everyone knows, however, when every interpretation is true, none is true. Good progressives should step away from legal nihilism and simply advocate rewriting laws when we need to.
Re:When did progress... (Score:3, Informative)
The declaration of independence includes prayers to Christ.
Oh? Care to quote something specific?
That is what "divine providence" refers to,
Nope, that's Deism. It's not an atheist document, by any means, but it's far from a Christian document, either.
Also the phrase "endowed by our creator" is a reference to God,
Yep. Still Deist.
the christian one
Nope. You apparently don't know what deism is.
there weren't very many Jews or Muslims
Do you honestly believe those are the only other religions?
The phrase "judge of the world" is a direct reference to Christ since Christ is the only religious figure addressed by that phrase in religious texts.
You might have me there, but it's also quite clearly a phrase which could easily apply to any monotheistic god, or, indeed, a few from polytheistic religions -- Anubis, in particular, is the judge of where you go in the afterlife.
Does this make the US a "christian nation?" Maybe, maybe not.
Definitely not. If it was in the constitution, you'd have a tiny sliver of a case for saying that, but the Declaration is hardly a legal document, nor is it the foundation of our current nation. Or have you forgotten the Articles of Confederation?
it certainly wasn't meant to be a theocracy or an atheist nation.
No, but it was meant to be a secular one.
Re:Time to stop relying on Texas... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Time to stop relying on Texas... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the immigrants have raised the education level of Texas.
The rankings you point to are not for the schools, but for the education level of the population. A large number of Texans didn't grow up there but moved there for jobs. Also, those rankings are for the level of education achieved. People who graduate from high school in Texas are generally at about a 7th grade level.