April 14th, 2009
Texas state legislators have apparently had enough of the endless arguments over evolution and other charged topics that regularly put the state’s Board of Education in the national spotlight. The Wall Street Journal reports they are considering stripping the Board of its authority to set curricula and approve textbooks.
While the science standards have drawn the most attention, the 15-member elected board has been embroiled in other controversies as well. Last year, it rejected a reading curriculum that teachers had spent nearly three years drafting. In its place, the board approved a document that a few members hastily assembled just hours before the vote.
Various proposals being drawn up in Texas would transfer curriculum oversight and textbook adoptions to the state education agency, a legislative board or the commissioner of education. “Other bills would transform the board to an appointed rather than elected body, require Webcasting of meetings, and take away the board’s control of a vast pot of school funding,” the Journal reports.
Tags: Board of Education, evolution, Texas, textbooks
Posted in Curriculum, Education News | No Comments »
January 23rd, 2009
The Texas Board of Education voted Thursday to drop a 20-year old state requirement that high school science teachers cover “strengths and weaknesses” in the theory of evolution. The vote is being characterized as a major defeat for social conservatives and sharply divided the Board.
“Under the science curriculum standards recommended by a panel of science educators and tentatively adopted by the board, biology teachers and biology textbooks would no longer have to cover the ’strengths and weaknesses’ of Charles Darwin’s theory that man evolved from lower forms of life,” the Dallas Morning News reports.
A panel of science teachers had recommended that the “strengths and weaknesses” language be dropped. Critics had argued that the word weaknesses “has become a code word in the culture wars to attack evolution and promote creationism.” The Texas science standards have ripple effects from coast-to-cost, influencing how textbook publishers publishers handle the topic, since the Lone Star state is the largest statewide textbook adoption state.
Tags: evolution, Texas, textbooks
Posted in Education News | 7 Comments »
