Remember the (all-white) Alamo!
The Texas State Board of Education approved standards for U.S. history and other social studies courses Friday. That is national news because of Texas’ huge role in shaping textbooks across the country. Given that conservative Christians dominate the board, the result was predictable.
The Mississippi Misstep
A school district in northern Mississippi has cancelled its high school prom rather than let a lesbian student wearing a tuxedo attend with her girlfriend.
Texas Takes Another Crack at Textbooks
The Texas State Board of Education has made nationwide headlines in recent weeks by rewriting the curriculum standards for its k-12 textbooks. Texas is the 500-pound guerilla in textbook publishing. It has the second-largest textbook market after California and a highly centralized way of buying the books. Long story short, Texas often creates the template for others states’ textbooks.
When Schools Dump Diversity
Teaching Tolerance has reported many times and in many ways that the United States is plunging headlong toward racial and cultural re-segregation. That process took an enormous leap in the wrong direction last week when the Wake County school board in North Carolina voted to dismantle its policy of diversifying the schools.
Remembering Bloody Sunday
On March 7, 1965, millions of Americans sat watching their television sets in horror. Grainy black-and-white news images from Selma, Ala., showed about 600 mostly African-American protesters trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were marching to the state capital, Montgomery, to win voting rights in the Jim Crow South.
