Remember the Houston-area mom who sparked worldwide outrage by pointing out the description of slaves in her son’s geography textbook as “workers from Africa”? The really, really bad press that followed the viral Facebook photograph and video that mother Roni Dean-Burren posted was enough to make the Texas State Board of Education reconsider its textbook-review process. Sort of. Except not really.

OK, granted, at the same meeting on Wednesday, the board did approve increasing public participation in the textbook-review process and holding publishers accountable for errors. (McGraw-Hill’s already on the hook for stickering the offensive passage in the 800-page geography textbook, or replacing the book altogether.)

But in a close 8–7 vote, the Texas State Board of Education rejected a proposed amendment that would’ve empowered it to create an expert panel of academics charged with catching the type of embarrassing inaccuracies and omissions that keep getting the state in so much trouble. (See also: the “pro-Muslim” bias, the influence of the Ten Commandments on the composition of the Constitution, and of course the “side issue” of slavery in the Civil War.)