Issue Position: State Board of Education Issues

Issue Position

1. Texas is one of the wealthiest states in the United States but also has one of the poorest records of student academic achievement in the country. This is due to deeply-entrenched anti-intellectual attitudes and policies by Texas public officials, especially among some State Board members but also state legislators and the governor. These counterproductive attitudes and policies must be identified, publicized, and reversed if Texas students are going to do as well as students in other states and other countries.

2. Texas has a notorious and blatant record of censorship and bias in curriculum standards and instructional material selection. Although not as bad as decades ago, these policies continue today, as recently as August, 2011, and create conditions in which students receive second-rate educations compared to other states and countries. The SBOE is primarily responsible for these policies that affect Biology, Earth and Space Science, History, Government, and Health Education courses. The consequences of these policies in health education alone have been tragic, giving Texas one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy, sexually-transmitted diseases, and illegitimate births in the United States and even the world. The policies have earned Texas a well-deserved negative national reputation for its public education system.

3. The SBOE and TEA have been quietly funding the education of students for years using fundamentalist religious curriculums and not responsibly testing them to ensure that they are actually learning the state's required curriculum. This is done by public funding of charter schools and virtual home schools that promote religious instruction and by censoring state exit and end-of-course exams that measure achievement. These schools are 100% supported with public tax money but have little accountability to state education standards. My campaign will bring these early articles up-to-date with a more recent investigative report that reveals that these schools persist despite failing the state's accountability system. Today they are virtually unregulated despite being financed by state money.

4. Students must obviously be tested to ensure instructional accountability and student learning, but there are better ways to evaluate and motivate students that are not being used in Texas. Soon I will announce and describe a program that will provide students with both the personal motivation and positive reinforcement using proven behavioral techniques that will greatly increase student learning and appreciation for education. This program will result in higher student achievement and better performance on exams, especially exit exams.

5. Almost all the states except Texas have adopted the Common Core State Standards to provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. There is no reason why Texas needs to prepare its own state curriculum standards at such great expense, absurd controversy, and negative publicity when superior standards are so easily available.

6. The State Board adopted deeply flawed and inadequate curriculum standards for a Biblical literature course. This mistake should be corrected. The course itself is unneeded because it duplicates the Sunday School instruction of thousands of churches throughout the state. Instead, Texas public education greatly needs a Comparative Religion course to expose students to other religions in the world that are dramatically affecting their lives. Notoriously, Texans are ignorant about many of the world's major religions and this has created numerous problems.

7. The State Board has so far refused to fund the adoption of Earth Science instructional materials that could help education students about anthropogenic climate change, the Texas drought, the future of water shortages in the state, and the problems of obtaining energy from various sources in Texas. The reason for the lack of funding is to prevent giving students the opportunity to learn about how major Texas industries are responsible for the enormous amounts of air, water, and ground pollution in our state, amounts that exceed any other state and that also cause the illnesses and deaths of thousands of Texas citizens. Also, Earth and Space Science (ESS) deals with such topics as the evolution of ancient life, fossils, and the origin of life. The Republican members on the State Board in 2009 damaged the ESS standards for these topics but they would be presented correctly in any digital or paper instructional materials produced and adopted. Thus, ideological and politically-partisan censorship continues in Texas and this must be ended.

8. The State Board recently revised the Texas Social Studies curriculum standards in ways that includes historical revisionism, censorship, and propaganda. The Board's majority (with a 10-5 Republican-Democratic final vote) produced a curriculum that promotes a false understanding of American Exceptionalism, a false history of American Christian Nationhood, and a general suppression of the history of the American Enlightenment, our Founders' wish for a secular Constitution and government that respected the separation of religion and government, racism, labor unions, social legislation, and war profiteering. The Board repeatedly ignored the advice of professional historians, university professors, and history curriculum experts to write standards that aligned with a radical right-wing agenda. This process was thoroughly documented by both the mainstream media and by blogs.

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