The standards revision and related textbook adoption process in Texas occurs decennially, this time representing a huge victory for social conservatives and their think-tank allies. What happens in Texas is especially relevant nationally, since many publishers essentially write textbooks that adhere to standards set in Texas and California, the two biggest markets. A CNN report estimated that at least 40 percent of states use textbooks designed to meet Texas standards.
As reported broadly in the media, students in Texas will hereafter learn about…
• The conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.
• Phyllis Schlafly’s prominence as a thinker about women’s issues. (Susan B. Anthony loses prominence in the new standards.)
• The U.S. government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than a “democratic government.”
• The decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.
• The role of the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers, as counterbalance to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s nonviolent approach, when teaching the Civil Rights Movement.
• The relative unimportance of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as philosophical forces in the founding of the republic.
• The United Nations as an agency that “threatens U.S. sovereignty.”
The Texas textbook changes are part of an increasing effort by highly politicized boards of education and like-minded lobbying groups to reshape public educaton in service to their political agenda. Also in May of this year, the already controversial Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed into law a bill that forbids the teaching of much of what is known as “ethnic studies.”1 In a number of states (especially Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania), lawmakers continue to push for ways to require public schools to teach so-called “Intelligent Design” as an equally valid scientific theory as Evolution — undeterred by the fact that, in 2005, a federal district court banished the teaching of Intelligent Design as “science” in public schools. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that Intelligent Design is not science, that it “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents,” and that the school district’s promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
All of these efforts make dedicated educators wonder, “What’s going on here?”
The short answer: this is what happens when politicians legislate what we teach. Content — and, therefore, curriculum — fall prey to political posturing. Today, election to local or state public school boards has transcended “the phonics wars” of the 1970s and 1980s to manifest political preferences in the shifting sands of “the culture wars.” In such a charged atmosphere, professional expertise matters far less that political power. In the Texas decision, for instance, the expertise of teachers and professors within the state was essentially dismissed by the Texas State Board as it inserted its own self-serving ideas into the standards and, thereby, into the national textbooks and curriculum. And, in the end, schoolchildren lose out.
Like the vast majority of my colleagues who lead or teach in independent schools or who serve on their boards, my education was in public schools. And virtually all of us recognize that America’s public schools must be academically strong for our small part of the education industry to continue to thrive. For so many reasons — ranging from the nation’s need for a strong economy to our wish for individual health and happiness?— we’ll always need excellent public schools to produce lots of smart, independent-minded, morally grounded graduates who one day will be successful in their post-collegiate careers, with some of them seeking the “value-added” of private, independent school education for their own children. That’s why the current events in American public education today concern us deeply in the private school world. The short-term bump we’re getting in enrollments from middle class and upper middle class parents abandoning public schools may feel good, but it is, as it has been in the past, an ephemeral boon.
Public schools will no doubt get their bearings again, but this time the fight seems more intense — more entrenched. With the conflation of events, we’re now seeing a deep loss of confidence in the public schools. The introduction of highly polemical considerations into the standards, textbooks, and curriculum of public schools is the latest — and perhaps biggest — eruption. But smaller eruptions and rumblings have taken place for years. In particular, they include:
• the impact of debilitating budgetary cutbacks, resulting in classes in some cases growing to 30–40 kids and the elimination of, among other things, sports and the visual and performing arts;
• the No Child Left Behind Act’s preoccupation with high-stakes testing, which has taken any joy out of the discovery nature of learning about things that are meaningful and that pique one’s curiosity, while continually undermining its own goal of leaving no child behind; and
• as a side effect of all this, the poor quality of the pool of future teachers (those with the lowest GPAs and test scores make up the largest component of education majors).
I’ve read some of the flurry of responses to the Texas decision, you know that there are many reactions — almost none of them neutral. But, in a debate like this one, people who truly understand education will no doubt side with Texas state representative Mike Villareal, who said of the Texas State Board of Education’s actions, “They have ignored historians and teachers, allowing ideological activists to push the culture war further into our classrooms…. They fail to understand that we don’t want liberal textbooks or conservative textbooks. We want excellent textbooks, written by historians instead of activists.”2 Benjamin T. Jealous, president of the NAACP, put it another way in an interview with The New York Times, “The biggest danger is we’ll end up with children who don’t understand history. The school board members are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.”
It’s also hard to argue with the students in Texas, who turned out en masse for the State Board of Education meetings wearing T-shirts proclaiming, “Students for a smarter Board of Education.”
To this debate, I’d like to suggest that any state board of education that truly wants to improve the quality of public school education could take to heart a simple and 300-year-old demonstrably proven solution in independent schools: let the professionals themselves set the standards and conditions for attracting and training high-quality teachers (as Teach for America has so admirably done for public schools recently). Then, let these smart teachers decide for themselves what to teach, what texts (if any) to use, and how best to assess learning on the local level. Meanwhile, state authorities wanting to assess the success of their schools should put their efforts into the only assessments that really count: tracking where students go and how they do at the next level of schooling.
And for all those voters who want public schools to proselytize a particular political and/or religious ideology, I encourage them to support the funding of tuition tax credits so that all families have a partially publicly-funded choice to choose a private school that matches their belief system — schools owned and operated by parishes or synagogues or mosques.3 Families interested in doing so can choose to send their children to private schools with a particular social or religious philosophy that aligns with that of the family. For example, Christian evangelicals can choose to attend relatively low-tuition evangelical Christian schools (or even use very inexpensive Christian evangelical home school curricular materials) that eschew the teaching of Evolution and teach only creationist science in the name of the inerrancy of the Bible.
The U.S. Supreme Court (in Pierce vs. the Society of Sisters4) has made certain and perpetual the belief that “the child is not the mere creature of the state,” and that private schools can exist with alternate or religiously-based curricula. But institutionalizing the choice of a private school is a far cry from institutionalizing a social or religious curriculum in public schools, mandating that everyone be educated to believe that one belief system is the norm or the preferred belief system — a mandate that runs counter to the most basic and revolutionary principle of the founding of our great country, that the state will not impose a preference of any religion over any other.
The Texas decision is particularly chilling because it indicates either a lack of understanding of our founding principles or a willingness to trample these principles for personal political gain. Independent schools may not be directly affected by decisions made by the Texas State Board of Education, but time will bring the particulate matter and lava flows from this explosion to our doors. For the health of the nation that makes independent education possible, we need to get involved — push for a quality education system that includes both public and private schools and that works always on behalf of children.
Notes
1. “Arizona bill targeting ethnic studies signed into law.” http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/12/nation/la- na-ethnic-studies-201005122. “Texas OKs school textbook changes: Critics claim conservatives trying to revise history,”http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37271857/ns/us_news-life/.
3. Twenty percent of NAIS-member schools have religious affiliations, but the independent school vs. parochial schools distinction is that in the case of the independent schools, schools with a religious affiliation are still independent since they are owned corporately by themselves and operated by their own self-perpetuating boards, not owned, operated, and regulated by a church.
4. See “The Roots of Independence,” by Fred Calder www.nais.org/about/article.cfm?ItemNumber=145461.