This strains credulity to the limit and beyond. In the middle of a confected crisis about critical race theory, a Texas Republican decides this would be a good time to clean up some harmless redundancy in the states education standards. Tell me another!
They removed a requirement to teach that the Klan was morally wrong from SB 3. The fact that outrage at that is labeled "race baiting propaganda" by certain people is just more proof that any expectation that we condemn white supremacy is permanently triggering to some, whether in the form of something ridiculous like CRT or something as basic as "teach explicitly the Klan is bad." Teaching about history and social changes without moral context is toothless and the people who passed this bill either should know that or do know it and are deliberately malicious. There is no excuse.
Texas has a well-documented history of undue political influence within its public education system, particularly when it comes to textbooks: https://billmoyers.com/content/messing-with-texas-textbooks/ This "defense" of Texas Republicans is in no way reassuring given past decisions about how particular aspects of history should be taught. No propaganda or stretch of the imagination is required to believe that Texas is willing to pull a "very fine people on both sides" with respect to the KKK when at one point in the recent past they had a textbook in circulation calling enslaved Africans "workers" and treating the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a typical "pattern of immigration" in U.S. history.
This strains credulity to the limit and beyond. In the middle of a confected crisis about critical race theory, a Texas Republican decides this would be a good time to clean up some harmless redundancy in the states education standards. Tell me another!
They removed a requirement to teach that the Klan was morally wrong from SB 3. The fact that outrage at that is labeled "race baiting propaganda" by certain people is just more proof that any expectation that we condemn white supremacy is permanently triggering to some, whether in the form of something ridiculous like CRT or something as basic as "teach explicitly the Klan is bad." Teaching about history and social changes without moral context is toothless and the people who passed this bill either should know that or do know it and are deliberately malicious. There is no excuse.
Texas has a well-documented history of undue political influence within its public education system, particularly when it comes to textbooks: https://billmoyers.com/content/messing-with-texas-textbooks/ This "defense" of Texas Republicans is in no way reassuring given past decisions about how particular aspects of history should be taught. No propaganda or stretch of the imagination is required to believe that Texas is willing to pull a "very fine people on both sides" with respect to the KKK when at one point in the recent past they had a textbook in circulation calling enslaved Africans "workers" and treating the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a typical "pattern of immigration" in U.S. history.
But persist with the excessive protestations...