Capping a contentious meeting in May and after months of discussions, the Republican-dominated Texas Board of Education, voting along party lines, adopted a history and social studies curriculum that amended or watered down the teaching of the civil-rights movement, religious freedoms, America’s relationship with the United Nations, and hundreds of other items. Supporters said the revisions were intended to correct decisions by a previous board a decade earlier.
“This is like in your face, like showing the ultimate in disrespect,” Bledsoe said. “To suggest the positive aspects of slavery or to exalt Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy is just an abomination. I mean no disrespect to people who may have had ancestors who were part of that, but it is what it is.”
The ideological decisions by the Texas Board of Education contribute to what 4.8 million Texas students learn about political events and figures over the next decade. The request by the civil-rights groups argued those decisions might have influence beyond the state boundaries because Texas, as one of the nation’s largest textbook purchasers, influences publishers whose textbooks are sold elsewhere.
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“It is our contention that the [social studies] curriculum changes were made with the intention to discriminate,” Bledsoe and Cardenas said in their filing to ED’s Office for Civil Rights in Washington, and the board’s action “has violated or will violate” the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution.
“It’s not a lawsuit, but it is kind of a potential legal proceeding,” Bledsoe said of the request in an interview with the Associated Press. “We’ve asked them to do a proactive review, to do a more in-depth review in reference to the concerns we’ve raised, and in the course of that review we’re asking that if we’re vindicated that some of the things we get would be stopping them from implementing these standards.”
The civil-rights groups’ request for a federal review also pointed to “high stakes” state assessment tests “that do not adequately test for all relevant and important educational information,” contending the standardized tests given to students “disproportionately fail minority students and ultimately are important factors in causing large numbers of minority students to drop out of Texas public schools.”
In addition, they contended that disciplinary actions against minority students as compared to white students “are grossly disproportionate and unjustified.”
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