Jul
7
Written by:
William Lutz
7/7/2009 4:03 PM
Congratulations, Rick Perry for signing the centerpiece of the Tony Sanchez’s education platform into law. Too bad Perry didn’t invite Sanchez to a signing ceremony.
Remember the Tony Sanchez campaign?
Ok. It was a long time ago (2002), and Sanchez’s election day performance was certainly forgettable.
In some ways, though, I miss the Tony Sanchez campaign because it was so easy to caricature. Spending $5,000 on confetti. All the consultants using (or abusing) the Sanchez campaign to build their kids’ college funds. It was like something out of a movie. Rick Perry’s rather creative efforts to connect Sanchez to illicit activity (like the infamous “Suitcases” ad, which questions whether Sanchez’s bank did all it should have to cooperate with law enforcement after folks landed in Laredo in a chopper and deposited some briefcases full of $100 bills in Sanchez’s bank, one that was lambasted by newspapers statewide for its creative spin on the truth.)
Well, it looks like one of the central educational ideas of the Sanchez campaign has been resurrected and is now law, as a part of HB 2488. Sanchez proposed letting university professors write “open source” textbooks that would go directly into classrooms.
Sounds like a plan, right? Let college professors write textbooks our high school students are using and cut out the middle-man.
There’s one problem – HB 2488 cuts the State Board of Education out of the review process for these books. If the university certifies that the books are error-free and covers the curriculum, the State Board of Education is required to accept them. The State Board of Education has worked really hard to ensure – not only that the curriculum is covered in all adopted books but that it is well covered. One mention is not enough to get SBOE approval, but it would likely be enough under the approach used in HB 2488.
Let’s be honest here – with the possible exception of Texas A&M (and even that has a somewhat liberal faculty in Arts and Sciences) – Texas institutions of higher learning aren’t exactly hotbeds of conservatism. The University of Texas at Austin, for example, has sponsored an outfit called The Charles A. Dana Center, which is often involved in school district efforts to foist fuzzy math onto Texas public school students and parents. And don’t even get me started about what’s going on at Texas university English and history departments. Let me just put it this way, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if HB 2488 leads to “history” books entering Texas classrooms that spend more time talking about Malcolm X and Cesar Chavez than they do about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.