Texas Board of Education

Textbooks, Texas, and Discontent: The Fight against Inadequate Educational Resources

By Alejandra Garza and Maria Esther Hammack

Controversies surrounding textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas. For years, textbook selection in Texas has grabbed headlines and generated great discontent and debate. Textbooks adopted by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) are unusually important because they are also adopted for use in classrooms across the country. Whatever Texas adopts, students across the United States get. In 2014, a coalition of unpaid Texas citizens who called themselves “Truth In Texas Textbooks,” presented the SBOE with a report containing 469 pages of factual errors, “imbalanced presentation of materials, omission of information, and opinions disguised as facts,” found in three world history and geography textbooks that were being considered for adoption that November. And who can forget the 2015 textbook fiasco, when the Texas Board of Education refused to allow professors to review and fact-check textbooks that were to be implemented in Texas curricula that year. Historians and other academics protested because non-experts were writing and reviewing history textbooks.

Photograph of a 2015 Texas textbook caption that grossly mischaracterized the nature of slavery — A 2015 Texas textbook caption grossly mischaracterized the nature of slavery (Coby Burren via the San Antonio Current).

But that was not the only contentious issue surrounding textbooks in Texas last year. Mrs. Roni Dean-Burren split open a Pandora’s box of controversies when she posted a picture on Facebook of her teenage son’s textbook which explicitly portrayed slaves as immigrant workers. The Texas State Board of Education had adopted the textbook, published by McGraw Hill, a few years ago and sold about 140,000 in Texas and other states. McGraw Hill was quick to respond and quench the controversy. They immediately acknowledged that they had made “a mistake” and rapidly agreed to do their “utmost to fix it.”

This year’s controversy has had a different outcome. Unlike McGraw Hill, Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle, the authors of the Mexican American Heritage textbook and its publisher, Momentum Instruction, LLC, have yet to apologize for a widely criticized textbook. Beyond an unwillingness to acknowledge the large number of problems in their textbook, they have failed to respond to questions and comments from historians and experts challenging their work. The Mexican American Heritage textbook has more than 800 factual errors, errors of omission, and misleading representations of Mexican American history and culture.

Book cover of The Mexican American Heritage textbook by Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle — The Mexican American Heritage textbook (via authors).

In addition to factual errors, the book is riddled with what several historians have deemed “ethnic hostility” — clearly racist remarks, blatantly condescending portrayals of Mexican Americans and their historical roles, and a large number of specific instances where the authors’ opinions straightforwardly belittle Mexican-American history, heritage, and people of Mexican descent and their accomplishments and contributions. The authors and the publisher have refused to work with experts to fix the errors and have yet to demonstrate any intent to withdraw the book from consideration for adoption by the State Board of Education in hearings scheduled for November 15 and 18, 2016. The final decision pertaining to the adoption or rejection of the textbook is set to be made on November 18, 2016.

A textbook with an extensive number of errors, with clearly racist and condescending content does not belong in any classroom. Textbooks are meant to educate and empower our future generations through an emphasis on factual history and on understanding the heritage and identity of all the peoples of the country, but the Mexican American Heritage textbook is set to do just the opposite. Its content erases Mexican American history and culture and it presents historical information in manner that misinforms, rather than educates.

Black and white image of Moses Austin — Moses Austin, 1761-1821 (via Wikimedia Commons).

For instance, a passage in the book claims that “in 1822, Moses Austin obtained the first charter to start an American colony in Texas.” As most historians know, what Austin received was not a charter, but an offer for a land grant where up to 300 colonists could move and settle in Texas, then Mexican territory, with the stipulation that they swear allegiance to Mexico and become Mexican citizens. Also, expert historians made sure to note that Moses Austin died in 1821, so by 1822, the date provided in the textbook, Austin was in fact no longer alive and could not have obtained what the authors claimed was the first charter to colonize Texas.

Last month The Guardian reported that the passages in the textbook portray Mexican Americans as “anti-education and anti-English” and depict “true Mexican identity” as being inherently in rebellion against the establishment. They write that “High School and college youth may refuse to attend class, speak English or learn certain subjects because they perceive injustice in the school system,” and claiming Mexican American prosperity is hindered by their own identity. In addition to reports in the media, the Ad Hoc Committee, consisting of a group of scholars who took the initiative to read and review the textbook last spring, have highlighted some of the most disturbing errors. In chapter 3, for example, the authors wrote that “most Mexicans weren’t literate, they could not own land, and had been given the message that they should be subdued rather than lifted up. How would they invent a system from nothing that depended on participating in political and economic life?”[1] They portray Mexican Americans as having an all-encompassing cultural attitude of laziness that makes them put off important things for “mañana,” because, according to the textbook, they “have not been reared to put in a full day’s work so vigorously.”

Contrary to those portrayals, Mexican Americans and Mexican American scholars, historians and other professionals have begun the rigorous undertaking of meticulously reviewing the textbook by tabulating historical inaccuracies, listing factual errors, and conducting extensive and in depth analysis of the historical content of the textbook. The Mexican American scholars and the community were quick to organize in Austin and across Texas, and have managed to coordinate with other scholars, and historians across the country to write a strong case against the Mexican American Heritage textbook, so that it is not adopted by the Texas State Board of Education in the November hearings. The Ad Hoc Committee presented its report this past summer to the Texas State Board of Education’s Representative, Ruben Cortez, Jr., to explain why the proposed textbook was inadequate, how it failed to meet basic standards and guiding principles in the history profession. They provided an extensive list of suggested revisions to the publisher, suggestions that today, at one week until the hearing, have gone vastly unheeded.

Close-up photograph of the six flags over Texas emblems under state capitol dome — The Texas State Capitol (via Wikimedia Commons).

Here at UT Austin, the University of Texas Textbook Review Committee has six members working under the guidance of Dr. Emilio Zamora, of the UT Austin History Department, to produce a complete annotated list of factual errors, omissions, and misrepresentations, and also a list of suggested revisions. The committee’s goal is to serve historians and experts such as Dr. Zamora to prepare a written response based on their findings and historical evidence, to present to the Texas State Board of Education on November 15, and for that response to help prevent the Mexican American Heritage textbook from being adopted.

Despite the documented factual errors and wide criticism of the textbook, the hearing is not going to be an easy one. Conservative politicians have been supporting adoption of the textbook. For example, David Bradley, the Republican state representative for Southeast Texas on the Texas Board of Education, said that he had originally voted against the call for textbooks because he considers Mexican-American studies to be discriminatory against Americans of other ethnic backgrounds. He now plans to vote to adopt the book, because he is “going to give them what they asked for.” Bradley added “they wanted a course, and they wanted special treatment, and we had publisher step up.” He is intent on casting his vote for the adoption of this textbook.

The Main Building at the University of Texas - Austin (via Wikimedia Commons). — The Main Building at the University of Texas – Austin (via Wikimedia Commons).

Criticism of the textbook has come from historians across the nation, professional organizations, and activists’ platforms, including American Historical Association. In September, the AHA wrote a letter of concern to the Texas State Board of Education regarding the textbook because, they wrote, “the textbook does not adequately reflect the scholarship of historians who have worked in the field of Mexican American history, or measure up to the broad standards of history as a discipline.” The American Historical Association urged the Texas Board of Education “reject the use of this textbook as an option for institutions within the purview of the board’s adoption policies.”

We hope that more allies come to our support, and that many scholars, historians, educators, and students show up at the William B. Travis Building at the State Capitol for the hearings on November 15. It is imperative that textbooks such as The Mexican American Heritage do not get adopted. A textbook on Mexican Americans or Mexican American history or any other history that is filled with errors and racist allegations should not be used to educate our children, not now, not ever.

[1]District 2 Ad Hoc Committee Report on Proposed Social Studies Special Topic Textbook: Mexican American Heritage, presented to Ruben Cortez, Jr., State Board of Education Representative, September 6, 2016.

Board of Education agendas and information for the November 15th-18th meetings can be found here.
A map indicating the building location can be found here.
You can find out who your SBOE representative is here, and can contact members of the SBOE here.

You may also like:
Chris Babits offers Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy.
Christopher Rose recounts his experience testifying before the SBOE in this blog post.
NEP contributors relate what happens When a Government Tells Historians How to Write and How to Teach.

Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate

This week the State Board of Education holds a second round of hearings on the adoption of History textbooks for the entire state of Texas.

Here is Christopher Rose’s report on his testimony in the first round.

By Christopher Rose

The first time I tried to work with the State Board of Education, I inadvertently did something naïve and possibly a little foolish.

It was 2010, and the social studies standards—the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS (pronounced “tex”)—were up for revision in the state of Texas. Having worked with K-12 teachers of world history, world geography, and contemporary world cultures (the three required world studies classes in Texas) for a decade at that point, I really wanted to get in on the review committee for one of these courses. I had been involved in laying out the framework for a 6^th grade contemporary world cultures curriculum, and I knew those standards like the back of my hand, and I had what I thought were pretty solid suggestions about the way the course could be improved.

Texas' New Social Studies Textbooks. Courtesy of Texas Tribune — Texas’ New Social Studies Textbooks. Courtesy of Texas Tribune

Review panels are appointed by members of the SBOE, so I sat down and drafted an e-mail outlining my credentials, my commitment to global studies and cross-cultural understanding, and some of the issues in the 6^th grade course that I was hoping to address, and eagerly sent it off to the SBOE member who represented the district I lived in. I didn’t know until some time later that, around the same time, this member defended herself against public scrutiny for forwarding an e-mail from her SBOE e-mail account that declared that Barack Obama was going to place the US under martial law within the first year of his first term as presidency, and was on record in various places as opposing the study of the world outside of the US at all.

Needless to say, I wasn’t appointed to one of the review panels.

I submitted written comments, received a standard response, “Your submission has been received and logged,” and never heard another word.

Having missed that opportunity, I was determined not to miss another when the textbook adoption process came around earlier this summer. I had, in the intervening four years, assumed a dual identity as both an employee in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, designing and implementing community programming and professional development for educators, and as a doctoral student in the Department of History, sometimes taking classes with faculty members I’d worked alongside earlier the same day.

I had reviewed the textbooks at their last adoption in 2002, mostly to familiarize myself with the material so that I knew where the gaps were, and what material was covered. I began making inquiries around the network I’ve assembled over the past fifteen years about to how to access the textbooks submitted for adoption when an e-mail went out from the History Department. A local non-profit organization was looking for doctoral students to review textbooks for a written review they planned to publish prior to the SBOE meeting in September, which would be the first of two public hearings on the textbook adoption.

I sent in a letter of interest and this time, I was appointed to a panel looking at books submitted for the 10^th grade World History course. The organization had a list of areas they wanted to review for fear of political bias, but I read the books cover to cover, taking notes anywhere I felt there was a problem.

Over the course of the review, one of the three sets of materials I read stood out—for all the wrong reasons. An e-book with no corresponding print edition, the errors I kept finding went beyond politically-charged bias into a much more black and white realm: the material was, in many cases, just wrong. I found a statement that the Romans made no major achievements in science and mathematics. A similar statement was made about the Aztec, Inca, and Maya—which was compounded with an assignment asking students to write an essay explaining why these civilizations didn’t develop further. A quick Google search revealed that, in every instance, these three Mesoamerican civilizations had, in fact, achieved everything that the text explicitly stated they had not.

The section on Islam—my own scholarly background—contained so much misinformation that my notes on the text were longer than the text itself. I feared the same for the section on Hinduism, although my knowledge of it is weaker and I am still convinced I missed some errors. Judaism, meanwhile, was covered as “Christianity without Christ,” although even this was up for debate as I found in the text of a sample essay a statement that “Jews and Muslims consider Jesus a teacher, but not the Son of God as Christians believe.” Muslims consider Jesus a Prophet. Jesus, however, has no standing within Judaism, and this text was saying that he was revered as a teacher!

The more I read, the more concerned I became. After the report was submitted, the general consensus among the reviewers was that this product was, across the board, poorly written, poorly edited, and riddled with factual errors. Since I’d spent nearly 80 hours with this text alone, who better to let the SBOE know exactly where the problems were? I decided that I would testify to the SBOE at the upcoming public hearing on the textbooks. Expecting a large crowd, I set an alarm on my computer, completed the paperwork to register, saved it as a draft and, when the clock hit 8:00 on the first day of registration, I pressed “send.”

Which is how I found myself sitting in the SBOE meeting room in the William B. Travis building, watching the board members assemble. The list with the order of testifiers came in barely ten minutes before the hearing was scheduled to start, and, to my surprise, I discovered that I was first on the list!

As we waited for the meeting to be called to order, a representative from the non-profit that had overseen the textbook review stopped by to tell me that two publishers had responded to the written report, which had been published the previous week. One had responded quite positively, asking for comments, and promising to look at areas identified as problematic and see what changes could be made. The other—the publisher of the materials that I was preparing to testify against shortly—had responded extremely negatively. While I never saw that message, it seemed clear that they didn’t like the report, and had gone further to criticize both the organization that sponsored it and the individuals who had written it.

State board of education meeting, Monday 20 Oct 2014. Courtesy of Texas Tribune

I looked at the 35 copies of my written testimony that I was about to hand over to go on the permanent record. My oral testimony, included as the cover sheet with a three-page appendix, was footnoted. Everything I was about to say appears in the text, I thought. They can call me names if they want, but they can’t deny that these things appear in print.

I had chosen to focus on areas of concern to the SBOE in my two minutes of testimony. The SBOE has, in the past, demonstrated a lack of interest in what they see as “politically correct” depictions of Islam, so I chose to focus on areas they were concerned about: the Romans; a passage that refers to Catholicism as a religion; the statement about Jesus being revered by Jews. For my dramatic opener I led with a direct quote from the text stating that most people living in sub-Saharan Africa were members of “the Negro race.” My rationale was that if I could get the board’s attention and get them to view the book unfavorably and pull it from the list of approved materials, then the material I was concerned about would be withdrawn as well.

As the first up, I got the board at their freshest. There were several gasps as I spoke, and several questions clarifying statements I had made. The two testifiers behind me spoke more thematically rather than about individual books, but at one point one of the board’s more outspoken conservative members expressed in astonishment, “We’ve been here half an hour and three of you have mentioned this book. Clearly we need to look at this one closely.” I may have done a fist pump in the back of the room where no one could see me.

While I hedged my bets and played it safe because I had ample non-controversial material to work with in my testimony, Jacqueline Jones, the Chair of UT’s History Department didn’t have that luxury. Her opening statement, which concluded with, “We do our students a disservice when we scrub history clean of unpleasant truths and when we present an inaccurate view of the past that promotes a simple-minded, ideologically driven point of view,” was quoted repeatedly in coverage of the hearing; I was pleased to hear it on the radio as I drove home that evening. I e-mailed to let her know that it was on the air, and she wrote back telling me that she had heard me on an earlier broadcast.

However, her criticism of a particular textbook’s decision to present an uncritical portrayal of the “American free enterprise system,” a term that replaced “capitalism” in the 2010 TEKS revision, landed on unsympathetic ears from two of the board members who had championed that cause. After a short speech from the floor from board member Ken Mercer, who seemed to be speaking mainly for the purpose of reminding everyone in the room that using the term had been his idea, board member Thomas Ratliff offered the rebuttal, “Well, the textbooks aren’t going to be perfect.”

Walking back to campus with Dr. Jones after her testimony, she wondered aloud, “If that’s the case, then what were we doing there?” A good question, indeed. If the SBOE, with all of its power, can’t hold textbook publishers to a higher standard, then who will?

A few days later, I received a message directly from the publisher that can best be described as “politely hostile.” Among other things, I was told that I didn’t understand what a textbook was, and that I was “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.” I am still not certain what that means. Despite this, in the written response to my comments, a number of the errors I cited were acknowledged and have been changed in the textbook.

What I have learned from this experience is that it is important for scholars like those in the Department of History to get their voice out there. As Dr. Jones pointed out in her testimony, what’s being taught in Texas schools has a direct bearing on what happens in university classrooms. We have to be active as public scholars and historians—and for me that’s the most important lesson I’ve learned.

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