Rows of empty seats marked the final day of public testimony over school textbooks before the Texas State Board of Education.
About two dozen signed up to testify as the board considered last-minute changes to history and social studies materials after months of review.
“We want to make sure we have the correct information in the textbooks,” said Roy White with Truth in Texas Textbooks Coalition. The organization released hundreds of pages of suggested corrections, including to texts characterizing the U.S. as a democracy rather than a constitutional republic.
The group is pursuing other areas of concern as well, including passages it believes promotes Islam over Christianity. The organization argues “jihad” should be defined as a violent religious war, as opposed to the broader and more innocuous “struggle” used by most Muslims. One alleged example of Islamic bias cited in the executive summary references a passage from Worldview Software American History II: Post Civil War America to the Present. The text reads:
“On the other hand, the U.S. forced Israel to withdraw from the area around the Suez Canal in 1956, putting an end to an Israeli invasion of Egypt meant to assure its access to that canal. Most importantly, over the course of many years, the U.S. has prodded Israel (sometimes quite energetically) to seek a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East, particularly with the Palestinian people.”
The organization’s response states, “The language of invasion is very misleading and casts Israel in the role of aggressor, which is contrary to fact. Also, when it says the U.S. is prodding Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, it looks as though Israel is resisting peace and the Palestinians want it while the reverse is the case.”
“We had a variety of different issues, and we kind of ranked our top ten,” said White. “Some of those areas were pro-Islamic, anti-Christian issues, but there were also many others related to just how Israel is depicted in the Middle East. How our government, free-market system seems to be belittled and not emphasized versus communistic-type governments.”
Yet reviewers for the Texas Freedom Network found passages they felt treated Islam too harshly. In its own summary of concerns, the organization points to a portion of Social Studies School Service Active Classroom: World History which states, “Much of the violence you read or hear about in the Middle East is related to a jihad.”
“This broad charge effectively blames Islam for a very complex cycle of violence and counter-violence,” the Texas Freedom Network summary argues, “A cycle driven by a host of factors (e.g., natural resources, population pressures) besides radical Islam.”
“The scholars that reviewed those textbooks found that the portrayal of Islam was mostly done pretty fairly and accurately,” said president Kathy Miller. “I think the State Board of Education needs to listen to subject matter experts and teachers from our classrooms when they make decisions about our textbooks.”
The organization joined a coalition of science and education groups that successfully mobilized this year in response to textbooks questioning the validity of global climate change.
“More than 100,000 citizens from across the country signed a petition urging those publishers to remove that information,” said Miller. “And as of yesterday, the last publisher agreed. So climate change denial is out of the textbooks.”
The battle continued before the board on Tuesday. Texas Eagle Forum vice president MerryLynn Gerstenschlager suggested promoting climate change was part of a United Nations agenda, claiming, “The climate change debate is not about saving the planet, but about the redistribution of wealth.”
In the past, similar have been marked by high drama, but the intensity has waned since the Texas Legislature stripped much of the board’s power in 2011. Texas school districts are now free to choose whichever textbooks they like, regardless of what the board decides.
The board also received heartfelt praise from members of the Sikh community for working to include accurate information on Sikhism in school texts. Parent Harmander Singh thanked the board, telling members, “Now my son’s classmates and all students in Texas will be able to learn correct information in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt books about the basic beliefs and history of my faith, Sikhism.”