History Revised, Teachers Sacked: The Book Wars in Texas and Beyond

History Revised, Teachers Sacked: The Book Wars in Texas and Beyond

Posted at Politics Daily 03/14/10 

Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

It's been a brawl for years, this education culture war that seems to take on a particularly vicious turn in the heart of Texas. The latest and most important round, a drastic revision of the social studies curriculum standards to put a conservative spin on history and economics textbooks, was given preliminary approval after a series of heated meetings of the Texas Board of Education that didn't do much to improve the image of the nation's second largest state as a sometimes small-minded political and educational backwater.

In a matter of days last week in Austin, the majority of the 15-member board, insisting they were only trying to offset liberal bias in textbooks, questioned Darwin's theory of evolution and the constitutional principle of separation of church and state; debated hip-hop and genocide in Darfur; deleted Albert Einstein and Thomas Alva Edison from textbooks; emphasized Christian teachings and fundamentalist values; adopted conservative articles of faith like American exceptionalism; promoted right-wing leaders and organizations like Phyllis Schlafly and the National Rifle Association; and refused to give adequate attention to Hispanic and African American contributions to U.S. and Texas history.

To no one's surprise, on the final round on Friday, the conservatives pulled a decisive victory, 10-5 -- a tally that broke along predictable party lines, Republicans to the right, Democrats to the left. Ethnic minority members stood on the losing side. According to published reports, no experts on the social sciences were consulted. Given the conservative cast of the board, whose members are elected, the changes it has proposed will stand when the final vote is taken in May.

Leaving the meeting, a Democratic board member, Mavis Knight, of Dallas, was fulminating, saying, she could not be a party to "perpetrating this fraud on the students of this state." It was not a pretty sight. The board will surely become, or has already become, the butt of jokes on late-night shows and "Saturday Night Live."

But this is not a local squabble or a local issue. It's not a colorful shoot 'em up in the Texas corral. It so happens that the Texas board is perhaps the most influential in the country. Its guidelines will affect not only the 4.7 million Texas public school students but will likely spread to many other states, from kindergarten to 12th grade for the next 10 years. Texas textbook standards are usually adopted by publishers because the state will buy 48 million of them every year, and many other states -- 47 by some counts -- will follow that model. In light of those figures, publishers will happily take their cue from the Lone Star State.

All in all, it has been a turbulent few weeks for public education in America.

On Saturday, President Obama called for major changes in the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, proposing to measure students' and schools' progress not on test scores alone but also on such metrics as attendance, graduation rates and learning environment, according to the New York Times. The president's educational blueprint, which he will send to the Congress on Monday, will fulfill a campaign promise to overhaul the federal law, which affects the nation's nearly 100,000 public schools, the Times reported.

Obama's move comes after the National Governors Association last week proposed tougher nationwide school standards with an eye to raising the world standing of the United States in math and science education. The proposals, which emphasize writing and reasoning skills, set out to prepare students to succeed in college. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia participated in setting the proposed standards, according to published reports. But this proposal is just that, a proposal. It's not a done deal.

In Rhode Island, a school board fired the entire faculty of a school that had not been performing up to par. The dismissal of 93 teachers and staff in Central Falls was shocking enough to the community and the school system. But what brought the firings to national attention was President Obama's support of the board's decision, which he saw as a major step in holding schools and teachers accountable.

A storm of charges and counter-charges followed, pitting the powerful teachers unions against the president whose candidacy the unions supported with sweat and money in 2008. Oddly, conservatives and Obama landed on the same side, with conservatives backing the move for holding a school responsible for failure. Whatever the outcome of the controversy, the Central Falls decision is likely to affect hundreds of school districts which are under pressure from the federal government to change or risk losing funds.

Following on the heels of Central Falls, the city of Boston demanded that staff members at six failing schools reapply for their jobs. The city was acting, like Central Falls, to meet the requirements of the Obama Administration's turnaround program, which expects failing schools to change by lengthening the school day, converting to charter schools, firing staff, or closing altogether.

The Kansas City Board of Education didn't have to pick among those choices when it voted on Wednesday to close half the city's public schools -- not necessarily because the schools were performing poorly, but because the system faced falling enrollment, smaller budgets and a $50 million deficit. They call it the Right-Size plan, and it will close 28 of the city's 61 schools and trim 700 of 3,000 jobs. Where the school children will go, no one really knows. For Kansas City, it was yet another blow to its public schools.

Back in Austin, initial reports of the board vote on Friday drew a flood of comments on the web site of the Austin American-Statesman. One of the earlier salvos -- "them white folks sure is crazy!" -- spoke volumes for the one side. It echoed the words of a frustrated board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, who was quoted by the New York Times as saying as she walked out of a meeting, "They can't just pretend this is a white America, and Hispanics don't exist."

And that's how it went.

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Obama plan to create 3 ½ million jobs by late 2010; but we’re now 8 ½ million jobs in the hole, and the states are firing TEACHERS!

New York Times column

July 3, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

That ’30s Show

By PAUL KRUGMAN

O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?

Let’s do the math.

Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.

And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?

Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.

So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.

So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger.

Just to be clear, I’m well aware of how difficult it will be to get such a plan enacted.

There won’t be any cooperation from Republican leaders, who have settled on a strategy of total opposition, unconstrained by facts or logic. Indeed, these leaders responded to the latest job numbers by proclaiming the failure of the Obama economic plan. That’s ludicrous, of course. The administration warned from the beginning that it would be several quarters before the plan had any major positive effects. But that didn’t stop the chairman of the Republican Study Committee from issuing a statement demanding: “Where are the jobs?”

It’s also not clear whether the administration will get much help from Senate “centrists,” who partially eviscerated the original stimulus plan by demanding cuts in aid to state and local governments — aid that, as we’re now seeing, was desperately needed. I’d like to think that some of these centrists are feeling remorse, but if they are, I haven’t seen any evidence to that effect.

And as an economist, I’d add that many members of my profession are playing a distinctly unhelpful role.

It has been a rude shock to see so many economists with good reputations recycling old fallacies — like the claim that any rise in government spending automatically displaces an equal amount of private spending, even when there is mass unemployment — and lending their names to grossly exaggerated claims about the evils of short-run budget deficits. (Right now the risks associated with additional debt are much less than the risks associated with failing to give the economy adequate support.)

Also, as in the 1930s, the opponents of action are peddling scare stories about inflation even as deflation looms.

So getting another round of stimulus will be difficult. But it’s essential.

Obama administration economists understand the stakes. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an article on the “lessons of 1937” — the year that F.D.R. gave in to the deficit and inflation hawks, with disastrous consequences both for the economy and for his political agenda.

What I don’t know is whether the administration has faced up to the inadequacy of what it has done so far.

So here’s my message to the president: You need to get both your economic team and your political people working on additional stimulus, now. Because if you don’t, you’ll soon be facing your own personal 1937.