Well, that's appalling.

2016-05-26-well-thats-appalling
According to Slate, Texas has agreed to include a textbook on Mexican-Americans on its list of proposed titles for the 2017-2018 school year. Seeing as 51.3 percent of the state's public-school students in 2012-2013 were Hispanic, this seems like a perfectly appropriate gesture. Unfortunately, the only textbook that has thus far been presented to the Texas School Board—a book called Mexican American Heritage—is the product of a company called Momentum Instruction. Momentum is headed by Cynthia Dunbar, a former State Board of Education member and right-wing “Christian activist” who once wrote a book of her own (titled One Nation Under God) which apparently described public education as a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.” What a fine attitude for a public-school activist to have!

During her tenure with the BOE Dunbar successfully arranged for a number of modifications to the Texas K-12 social studies curriculum, including these (per Wikipedia):
1. [Sidelining] Thomas Jefferson, while introducing a new focus on the "significant contributions" of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war.
2. Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favor of examining scientific advances through military technology.
3. A suggestion that the anti-communist witch-hunt by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s may have been justified.
4. One curriculum amendment describes the civil rights movement as creating "unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes" among minorities.
5. [Dropping] references to the slave trade in favor of calling it the more innocuous "Atlantic triangular trade"
Unsurprisingly, Ms. Dunbar's book on Mexican-American heritage sounds pretty racist:
"...some experts might take issue with the characterization of members of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s as people who "adopted a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society." Or perhaps they’d prickle at the passages linking Mexican-Americans to undocumented immigration, which the textbook proceeds to blame for "a number of economic and security problems," including "poverty, drugs, crime, non-assimilation, and exploitation.""
Gross. Here's hoping this book is soundly rejected, but with Texas's Board of Education... well, you never know.
educationtextbookssuch-wrongness
Posted by: Julianka

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