Texas Social Studies Standards Receive Failing Grade
A report from a national conservative education think tank says social studies standards in Texas are "an unwieldy tangle" of "misrepresentations at every turn" that give students a "politicized distortion of history."
Texas joins 28 other states in receiving a failing grade — a D or below — from the Washington-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute. (Among the states faring worse than Texas: Alaska, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Vermont.) That's a downgrade from last year, when the state's social studies standards received a C. Among the criteria the group used to evaluate the standards were whether they had a coherent, chronological overviews ...
Comments (12)
Kathy Kennemer Genet via Texas Tribune on Facebook
But Alaskans should be good at Social Studies, they can see Russia!
Anonymous User via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Somehow the idea of a failing grade in social studies from a conservative antithinking tank makes me feel much better. They could have LIKED what they saw.
Donna Prothro Streetenberger via Texas Tribune on Facebook
We are the laughing stock of the rest of the world and our kids are paying the price.
Brian Dunn via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Washington receives a failing grade from Me.
Mac Mcclure via Texas Tribune on Facebook
The conclusion is that you have a group of overpaid teachers who do not like the curriculum they teach. What kind of results would you expect?
"Many Texas teachers have criticized the new standards as too long and that they emphasize memorization over critical thinking; more than a thousand college historians have denounced them as historically inaccurate."
Connor Kilpatrick via Texas Tribune on Facebook
"overpaid teachers"
Puppydog Man, this is ridiculous as all hell.
M G
"Overpaid teachers," what? Median teacher salary in TX is about 43K, that's overpaid? It's among the lowest in the country. Teachers are degreed professionals. You can't ask someone to shell out the money/take out loans for a bachelor's degree if they can't expect to make a middle class wage.
Mac Mcclure via Texas Tribune on Facebook
She's a cute puppydog isn't she.
Linda Childs via Texas Tribune on Facebook
Her cuteness does nothing to mitigate how asinine your statement was, however. The point of the article was that even conservatives (like yourself, as far as I can tell from your comments on this and other articles from TX Trib) think that the new educational standards are awful and ought to be changed.
Also, teachers are most definitely NOT overpaid.
JJ Baskin
My observation is that Fordham is pretty fair minded about their work. They certainly tilt more toward the market side of things, but it is hard to suggest that they are conservative ideologues when the report itself criticizes the SBOE's actions of the past year and cites the revisionist approach as one of the reasons for the low ranking.
One of the objectives of social studies should be to cultivate critical thinking. I think we would all benefit from less focus on labels of the think tank and more focus on the ideas inside the report.
David Walls
The report is biased and completely inaccurate. It claims the Texas standards are missing slavery and that the standards explicitly urge students to condemn federal entitlement programs. Further, apparently it is not acceptable for students to be taught the benefits of our free enterprise system. So many of the reports' statement are so baseless and downright untrue that it is laughable.
For a comparison of the reports statements vs what the Texas standards actually say visit http://texaslegislativeupdate.wordpress.com/ and www.juststatethefacts.com/
Jerry Thompson
Having not read all the changes made by the "ultra" conservative bloc, I cannot honestly say that all of them were bad. What I can say is that for over twenty years the SBOE was just as far left in its decisions as the recent members were to the right. For many years, decisions as to what to include were made by ultra liberals. There was much about the previous texts that were much too liberal in the treatment of various subjects that could just as easily been called indoctrination material. As far as the college professors who don't like the material, let's remember that the vast majority of them are ultra liberal; therefore, their views are going to be biased (assuming they even read all the changes before commenting - which I doubt). Before anyone throws out all that was done, let's get a politically "neutral" group to review what has been done. Just in case anyone cares, this nation WAS established on a Judeo-Christian foundation, and still operates on that basis, when it operates smoothly. The first settlers came primarily to escape religious persecution and yes, there were some who came for economic, and other, reasons. Primarily, though, religion played the major role in reasons for coming to the "new" world.