Rep. Carol Alvarado: Stop Texas Curriculum Rewrite Until New Board Takes Over
[Ms. Alvarado represents Texas House District 145.]
The Texas State Board of Education is failing our children. With politically charged pens they have rewritten the state’s curriculum standards and are doing a disservice to history and our children’s education.
The proposed standards strip our rich and complex history down to distorted simplifications based too often simply on the personal beliefs of board members. How can board members claim that our students will be college-ready when those same members use curriculum standards to rewrite history?...
Our children’s education should not be based on what board members do or do not believe or on what they do or do not know. Instead, their education should reflect the sound scholarship of those who actually study the social sciences.
Simply put, promoting political and ideological agendas has no place in our children’s classrooms. On the contrary, our children’s classrooms should be shielded from politics, not made a political spectacle.
Board members should seriously reconsider this process and assure parents that they are putting the education of Texas schoolchildren first. Doing so requires only some fairly simple steps.
First, the current process should be halted and resumed only when the newly elected state board members take their seats in January. Doing so will help the board create a new process that is better insulated from personal and political agendas. There is no need to hurry through the revision of standards that will guide what our children learn for a decade....
By ignoring experts and taking things into their own unqualified hands, state board members have let ideology reign supreme over truth. They have let politics win out over historical facts. And they are permitting ignorance to triumph over knowledge.
Our schoolchildren deserve much better than that.
Read entire article at Houston Chronicle
The Texas State Board of Education is failing our children. With politically charged pens they have rewritten the state’s curriculum standards and are doing a disservice to history and our children’s education.
The proposed standards strip our rich and complex history down to distorted simplifications based too often simply on the personal beliefs of board members. How can board members claim that our students will be college-ready when those same members use curriculum standards to rewrite history?...
Our children’s education should not be based on what board members do or do not believe or on what they do or do not know. Instead, their education should reflect the sound scholarship of those who actually study the social sciences.
Simply put, promoting political and ideological agendas has no place in our children’s classrooms. On the contrary, our children’s classrooms should be shielded from politics, not made a political spectacle.
Board members should seriously reconsider this process and assure parents that they are putting the education of Texas schoolchildren first. Doing so requires only some fairly simple steps.
First, the current process should be halted and resumed only when the newly elected state board members take their seats in January. Doing so will help the board create a new process that is better insulated from personal and political agendas. There is no need to hurry through the revision of standards that will guide what our children learn for a decade....
By ignoring experts and taking things into their own unqualified hands, state board members have let ideology reign supreme over truth. They have let politics win out over historical facts. And they are permitting ignorance to triumph over knowledge.
Our schoolchildren deserve much better than that.