AG Gives State Board Of Education Carte Blanche To Destroy Public Education

If you happened to be sitting around this afternoon wondering, “hummm….could the Republicans screw up Texas public education any more?” you have your answer.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott today issued an opinion that will give the State Board of Education carte blanche to run wild with Texas’ textbook content standards.

This sentence from the opinion may be one of the most damning statements ever written for public education in Texas:

We accordingly conclude that the Board may adopt general textbook content standards to the extent such standards fall within the express powers granted by the Education Code and those implied powers necessary to effectuate its express powers.

I know that half of you are reading this and saying, “what the hell is the State Board of Education?” while the other half of you are now so frightened for the future of the state you just clicked over to Travelocity to investigate the possibility of moving to Costa Rica. So, I’ll try to digest this in a manner befitting both groups.

First off, the State Board of Education is a powerful, elected body of officials whom have the power to regulate various aspects of Texas education, in particular text books.

The SBOE once had much more power. However, in the 1990s, the Christian Coalition (led by current Texas GOP Executive Director Jeff Fisher, then Executive Director of the Texas Christian Coalition), Republican Party of Texas, and James Leininger-types started packing the board with tinfoil hat nutters. This caused the Legislature to strip the board of many of its powers.

Now that SBOE is ruled by the high handed lapdogs of the Religious Right, they’re doing everything they can to force the cornerstones of the conservative Christian movement on the public school children of Texas.

Anyway, the opinion, which was requested at the behest of SBOE Nutjob Supremo Terri Leo, was done under the guise of asking for clarification about fostering patriotism in textbooks.

However, as the Texas Freedom Network noted in a press release, it has instead given the right-wing SBOE full clearance to impose their own personal beliefs and values upon the schoolchildren of Texas via the textbook selection process:

Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, today released the following statements regarding Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s opinion on the State Board of Education’s authority over textbook content:

On the State Board’s lack of authority to set general textbook content standards:

“The Legislature and both Democratic and Republican attorneys general have now told the politicians on the State Board that they may not use public school textbooks to promote their own personal and political agendas. Nothing gives the board the authority to decide whether their personal opinions about U.S. and Texas history or the free enterprise system trump the facts. The Board is simply required to ensure, and rightly so, that our students learn about our history and the importance of the free enterprise system.”

There was also a second part to the opinion, and it concerned the board’s authority (or lack thereof) over ancillary materials. Basically, the board can use this portion of the opinion to make sure that things they don’t want kids to know about (like sexually transmitted diseases, condoms…Jews, black people, the Holocaust, the great Depression, evolution, cooking with real sugar, aphid reproduction and whatever other zany things the SOBE decides) in supplemental materials and not right in the text book where it could actually be of use.

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