State Board of Education
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06.02.10 | Rebecca's Blog, State Board of EducationSchool Bullies: Texas State Board of Education
After bullying the minority of sensible members into submission, extremists on the Texas State Board of Education managed to distort, water down, and politicize the curriculum. Now they complain that people have gotten the facts wrong in describing the latest version of Texas curriculum standards. It’s true that many people are confused about the current state of affairs, after hundreds of deletions, additions, and last-minute revisions.
Who is responsible for this confusion? I lay the blame squarely on the radicals who threw in inflammatory and unreasonable suggested revisions all along the way–from wanting to remove Cesar Chavez, Barbara Jordan, and Thurgood Marshall and substitute Sean Hannity and Phyllis Schlafly, to eleventh-hour attempts to call the slave trade the “triangular trade.” Even though the board ultimately rejected some of these extreme suggestions, it’s no wonder the public rebelled. Many people are left with the impression that the curriculum contains some outrages that have been removed or altered, but the fact remains that extremists bullied the board into passing a highly politicized document.
What remains is a damaged SBOE, with zero credibility and a butchered curriculum still riddled with inaccuracy and instances of plagiarism. This situation has hurt the entire education system in Texas. For every hour we engage in political bickering, we’re not spending that time addressing the need to lower our soaring dropout rate, grapple with problems of high-stakes testing, and determine how to hire and keep good teachers.
One might wonder why the board would engage in such a destructive and divisive process, wasting countless hours micromanaging the curriculum and squandering limited resources for education. The answer lies in the words of these extremists: Cynthia Dunbar’s calls public education a “subtly deceptive instrument of perversion.” My opponent, incumbent Ken Mercer, brags about giving a teacher coalition a “well deserved spanking.”
These radicals simply don’t respect public education. Mr. Mercer, didn’t even send his two children to public school. Many extremist backers have financial investments in charter schools, textbooks, and testing materials designed for private schools that purvey their own worldview. These members certainly have a right to send their children to private schools, but they should not have a right to undermine the reputation of public education, schools, and teachers. We can send them that message by voting them off the board in November.
At this point, it is useless to get mired in the specifics of the damaged curriculum, after the board’s “death by a thousand cuts.” Let’s focus on the big picture and determine what needs to be done. We must elect reasonable people in Districts 5 and 10 and then call for a complete review of the curriculum by teachers and experts in the field. Final decisions on the curriculum should take place in 2011, when we’ll have a board in place that reflects the will of the people. Many of the bullies who sit on the board managed to get there with money from a tiny minority of supporters with radical views. The board should reflect the views of the larger population in Texas. After the negative attention the board has received, more people are looking carefully at candidates, and this election in November will reflect the attitudes of a larger number of participating voters.
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05.24.10 | Rebecca's Blog, State Board of EducationTexas SBOE: One From Your Team, One From Our Team
People have protested, petitioned, and wrung their hands about the May Texas State Board of Education meeting. What struck me most clearly about this board, beyond the ideological mania that motivates them, was their utter incompetence in running a meeting, conducting analysis, or making logical decisions. It’s amazing that these people actually have jobs out in the real world. Anyone who carried on a business in such an illogical and inefficient manner would have a difficult time keeping it afloat.
This group of ideologues is hopeless, and attempting to conduct a reasonable dialogue with them is doomed to failure. Only the election in November will change things. People ask what we will be able to do if we are elected. With real leadership, we can return the board to a reasonable process with the clear goal of improving education in Texas.
The May meeting provided a good blueprint of what is wrong with the current board. At the outset of the public testimony, Chair Gail Lowe stated that with 205 signed up to speak, it would take ten hours for all the participants to deliver their three-minute statements. Ha! By mid-afternoon, they had only made their way through about seventeen speakers. Instead of simply sticking to their stated rules and allowing all of those signed up a chance to say their piece, board members indulged themselves in the opportunity to speak and air their own views at every possible occasion. Meanwhile, people who had driven 800 miles from El Paso and other far corners of the state fretted over whether they would have a chance to speak at all.
The board demonstrated the same lack of discipline in their own editing process. At times people were mired in minutiae of language or “grammarical changes,” as Terri Leo put it. On other occasions extremist board members soared with their intoxication over big ideas. Terri Leo struggled to keep John Calvin in the Enlightenment, completely failing to understand what the Enlightenment was all about.
After hearing again and again that they should delay their final vote and send the mangled curriculum back to the review committees to clean up the mess board members had made, the board trudged through hundreds of tiny revisions, with no method and no plan. Instead of grouping revisions into some reasonable categories, say, and voting on “grammarical” and non-substantive changes in large blocks, the extremists on the board worry over every item with mind-numbing thoroughness. They are not thorough, however, in checking what really counts, such as plagiarized passages in their own suggested revisions.
This board has exactly the same problems I recognize in my students: poor critical thinking, research, language, and problem-solving skills. They mix up big concepts with specific examples. Their method for making the curriculum “fair” is simply to throw in a name from “their side” every place they recognize someone from the “other side,” thus muddying such concepts as the Enlightenment or reform and muckracker movements by trying to add in totally unrelated figures who represented completely different schools of thought.
One story from the day seems to sum up both the current board’s attitude and its incompetence: it appears that this board left a plagiarized section in the current version, but they did change the UCLA website’s phrase (http://gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/american-exceptionalism.htm) from “democratic” republic to “constitutional” republic.
May the board learn what plagiarism is and stop doing it.
So what are we going to do? Stop dithering, like the current SBOE, and put our time, donations, and energy into electing good people in November.
Please visit www.VoteRebecca.com and sign up for e-mail about the campaign. And please contributenow to my campaign so that we can ensure that the extremists are not able to write the final chapter.
(Cross Posted at Daily Kos)
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04.15.10 | Rebecca's Blog, State Board of EducationTexas SBOE: Plagarism and Payback
Former Chairman of the Texas State Board of Education Don McLeroy plagiarized his contribution to curriculum standards on “American exceptionalism” from Wikipedia. Rick Perry’s appointee, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott, called the board’s recent curricular outrages mere “payback.” For Democratic SBOE candidates, these actions look like another gift from our opponents. We just need to stand back while these guys shoot themselves in the feet. We also need to thank the Mexican-American Legislative Caucus for holding hearings where Dr. Michael Soto, Trinity University Professor and candidate for District 3, pointed out McLeroy’s inaccurate interpretation of the sources from which he plagiarized his material. Meanwhile, Fox News launches a full counter attack on Saturday night, May 15th.
When Michael Soto delivered his testimony on the plagiarized material, you could literally see the lawmakers’ jaws drop. For academics, plagiarism and academic dishonesty merit a grade of F and possible expulsion from the university. Apparently for Mr. McLeroy, it’s just business as usual. Too bad he wasn’t there to explain himself. In fact, not a single board member bothered to attend the legislative hearing.
This hearing was important and informative, but Chairwoman Gail Lowe could not find time in her schedule to attend the hearings. She said at first that she couldn’t afford the travel, but when the legislative caucus offered her travel money and lodging, she claimed that she couldn’t take time out of her busy schedule. She is, by the way, self-employed.
The refusal of current board members to participate in discussions about the board’s actions with teachers and legislators is shocking but not surprising. The negligence and bad faith of certain members of this board are breath-taking, but we need to keep ourselves focused on a very simple goal: Elect Judy Jennings for District 10 and Rebecca Bell-Metereau (full disclosure–that’s me) in District 5. It’s just that simple. Mike Soto is running in a solidly Democratic district, and the races in 5 and 10 will be close. While we have a disadvantage historically, these two races are absolutely winnable, especially given the behavior of the current board. Every bit of bad publicity works to our benefit, but we need to follow up with the message that there is a simple solution to this problem. Contribute, no matter where you live, and vote in the November election if you live in Texas.
Now, I leave you with this question: What is the most effective way to convince everyone to contribute, even if it’s just a few dollars a month, to rescue Texas education. You can contribute if you want to help education in Texas and around the nation. As we have seen, bad education in Texas is infectious, and it may be coming to your state soon.
(Cross posted at Daily Kos)
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02.28.10 | Follow the Money, Public Schools, Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Rebecca's Blog, State Board of EducationHas Texas Seceded From the Union?
Rick Perry famously claimed his personal willingness to secede from the union, but sometimes I wonder if Texas hasn’t already seceded. Look at what has happened to the two-party system. Texas, with two Republican senators, is marginalized in national politics, and roughly half of the state has no voice for our views at the national level. With Perry as governor for so many years, a single person has now dictated most of the major appointees in the state.
Within the Republican Party, people no longer strive for compromise in a range of opinions. Rather, in a phenomenon called social norming, they vie for the position of most conservative. Each candidate tries to prove that he or she is even more right wing than the other, and the result is a party that swings further and further toward crazy. Fed by radio talk shows and Fox News, followers live in an odd echo chamber, in which pundits parrot identical phrases for each news story. These party lines make wonderful fodder for the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, but what are they doing to our ability to function as a civil society? What are they doing to promote an educated citizenry with a thriving economy?
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Hurt Feelings?
Science and Social Studies Are Not About Feelings
Extremists on the Texas State Board of Education are apparently very sensitive, and they want to engineer the curriculum so that none of it hurts their feelings. (more…)
