| People have protested, petitioned, and wrung their hands about the May Texas State Board of Education meeting. What struck me most clearly about this board, beyond the ideological mania that motivates them, was their utter incompetence in running a meeting, conducting analysis, or making logical decisions. It's amazing that these people actually have jobs out in the real world. Anyone who carried on a business in such an illogical and inefficient manner would have a difficult time keeping it afloat.
This group of ideologues is hopeless, and attempting to conduct a reasonable dialogue with them is doomed to failure. Only the election in November will change things. People ask what we will be able to do if we are elected. With real leadership, we can return the board to a reasonable process with the clear goal of improving education in Texas. |
| The May meeting provided a good blueprint of what is wrong with the current board. At the outset of the public testimony, Chair Gail Lowe stated that with 205 signed up to speak, it would take ten hours for all the participants to deliver their three-minute statements. Ha! By mid-afternoon, they had only made their way through about seventeen speakers. Instead of simply sticking to their stated rules and allowing all of those signed up a chance to say their piece, board members indulged themselves in the opportunity to speak and air their own views at every possible occasion. Meanwhile, people who had driven 800 miles from El Paso and other far corners of the state fretted over whether they would have a chance to speak at all.
The board demonstrated the same lack of discipline in their own editing process. At times people were mired in minutiae of language or "grammarical changes," as Terri Leo put it. On other occasions extremist board members soared with their intoxication over big ideas. Terri Leo struggled to keep John Calvin in the Enlightenment, completely failing to understand what the Enlightenment was all about.
After hearing again and again that they should delay their final vote and send the mangled curriculum back to the review committees to clean up the mess board members had made, the board trudged through hundreds of tiny revisions, with no method and no plan. Instead of grouping revisions into some reasonable categories, say, and voting on "grammarical" and non-substantive changes in large blocks, the extremists on the board worry over every item with mind-numbing thoroughness. They are not thorough, however, in checking what really counts, such as plagiarized passages in their own suggested revisions.
This board has exactly the same problems I recognize in my students: poor critical thinking, research, language, and problem-solving skills. They mix up big concepts with specific examples. Their method for making the curriculum "fair" is simply to throw in a name from "their side" everyplace they recognize someone from the "other side," thus muddying such concepts as the Enlightenment or reform and muckracker movements by trying to add in totally unrelated figures who represented completely different schools of thought.
One story from the day seems to sum up both the current board's attitude and its incompetence: it appears that this board left a plagiarized section in the current version, but they did change the UCLA website's phrase (http://gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/american-exceptionalism.htm) from "democratic" republic to "constitutional" republic.
May the board learn what plagiarism is and stop doing it.
So what are we going to do? Stop dithering, like the current SBOE, and put our time, donations, and energy into electing good people in November.
Please visit www.VoteRebecca.com and sign up for e-mail about the campaign. And please contribute now to my campaign so that we can ensure that the extremists are not able to write the final chapter.
Contribute now and help me reach my goal of $1,5000 today.
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