How fifteen Texas school board members are rewriting America’s past
Story by Victoria Davila
Photo Illustration by Sarabeth Oppliger
It’s the first day of school at Sheldon High in Eugene, Oregon, and a stranger enters Irene Alderman’s classroom. The person walks up to the social studies teacher’s desk, and without a word, starts rifling through its contents.
Students gasp. However, unbeknownst to them, this intrusion was planned. Alderman turns to her class. “Well, what was that?” Alderman asks, feigning confusion. Swift and hesitant hands rise with responses. Alderman, who has taught at the school since 1994, listens to an array of answers from her students—each has a different perspective of what happened. History, says Alderman, is the stranger walking into the room. How we interpret history is as varied as the eyes that witness it and the hands that write it down.
The point of this exercise, explains Alderman, is to teach her students to evaluate the legitimacy of source material. “I’m going to give you many different sources but I want you to measure the evidence that you have, sometimes the evidence is incomplete,” Alderman says, giving her first lesson of the year in subjective history.
Alderman teaches according to Oregon education standards. Although she makes the effort to use outside sources, her textbooks are selected from a list of Oregon-approved materials chosen by teachers and later authorized by a smaller committee.
This is in sharp contrast with the Texas State Board of Education’s (SBOE) textbook-adoption process, in which a panel of reviewers evaluates instructional materials along with publisher-provided information and public recommendations for the Texas education commissioner. The commissioner then submits a final recommendation report according to the board’s standards.
United States public schools are run largely at the state and municipal level through school boards and parent-teacher associations. But when it comes to textbooks, the control rests in the hands of fifteen members of the Texas board—which recently voted to revise social studies standards in a move that created controversy across the nation. What gives these people so much power? The answer is simple economics.
Schools in Texas, and to a lesser extent California, are huge consumers of textbooks. Because Texas buys more textbooks than other states, textbook manufacturers nationwide have often catered to its schools and in turn, to the SBOE. Those textbooks are used in schools across the country, meaning that the Texas board doesn’t just decide what schoolchildren in Texas learn, it profoundly influences what schoolchildren are taught around the country. As Texas goes, so goes the nation.
Changes in educational standards are defining what students think of as the past. And with specific requirements stemming from a polarized and personally motivated board to which textbook companies are all but forced to adhere, teachers are left to struggle with teaching history from a “historical record” that has been cut and pasted together.
It’s no wonder that Alderman, a teacher for almost twenty years, doesn’t “teach by the book” as some teachers are rumored to do. To her, textbooks are generic, stripped down, vanilla versions of the past. “I would never use a textbook for half of the information that students get. It’s really a fraction, really just to get an overview,” she says.
A day of change for Texas State Educational Standards
It was a hot and humid Texas Friday when the board voted to change a number of standards that would affect the nation’s youth. Board members sat around a circle of desks in large brown chairs. Off to the side was an assemblage of cameras and media behind a velvet rope. Eager for a peak at the proceedings, the public filled the rest of the available seating, spilling out onto the walkways and into the doorways. With Republicans occupying two-thirds of the board’s seats, it looked as if the conservatives would rule the day. Still, tensions were high. Everyone knew the importance of the vote.
“It’s impossible to be inclusive of everything, of everybody, of every idea, of every historical figure that anybody anywhere decides is important to history,” Republican State Representative Wayne Christian said, addressing the crowd from beyond the podium.
Outside the building, protestors on all sides of the political spectrum were expressing their concerns by shouting and holding signs as reporters and camera crews filmed.
“Don’t mess with TEXtbooks,” one of the signs read.
“Let the history speak for itself, absent as much of ideology as we can,” said former U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige in an interview with camera crews outside the boardroom.
Amid the chaos, the two-thirds majority ruled. Social studies changes were decided by a 9:5 vote along party lines.
Whose standards are being met?
Teachers make up the first rung on the ladder of learning. Above them is a long line of selected panelists, state education board members, governors, and other politicians who all affect curriculum and textbook choices. SBOE member Mavis Knight, a Democrat, notes the distinction between setting standards and creating curriculum. “We set standards, not tell teachers how to teach.” an emphatic Knight says.
In 1980, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States radically challenged traditional American history curriculum. In his book, Zinn provided a look at history from the perspective of the conquered, not the conqueror. But his book, along with the books of fellow travelers such as sociologist James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, has not managed to find its way into standard U.S. curriculum.
Teams of teachers, academics, and others wrote the initial standards drafts for Texas schools roughly two years ago, board members said. The SBOE then revised the standards with a number of amendments finalized with the May 21 vote.
Knight points out that standards are actually being rewritten by the board; “[The amendment process] is only there to make tweaks as opposed to using the amendment process to totally rewrite the standards. None of us are curriculum standards writing specialists.” The Texas school board made more than 100 controversial amendments.
Conservative board members assert they are taking back from the already leftist-leaning textbooks by dictating standards to influence textbook companies.
Clash between political, racial, and religious tensions
It is on this politically polarized battlefield that the fight for history commenced two years ago when the standards-changing process began.
Various board members fought for different points, which resulted in a combination of curricular changes that tend to follow a conservative influence but include some more mysterious modifications like the exclusion of Columbus Day and Christmas.
To Knight, the changes are a travesty. “I had expected to work with more open-minded individuals—people to look at different points of view,” Knight says.
Active conservative Republican and evangelical Christian Cynthia Dunbar has been pushing for her interests since elected in the Texas board in 2006. Author of One Nation Under God, Dunbar, who is also a teacher and a lawyer, recently backed the amendment requiring students be taught that economic prosperity requires a “free enterprise” system of minimal government intrusion and taxation. The term “capitalism” has been removed because of its negative connotation.
One change in particular demonstrates the board’s clash of interests: the omission of Mexican-Americans in the history of the Alamo.
“[Political and racial issues] certainly polarized the board and depending on how teachers teach the subject it could polarize the students,” Knight says.
The Dallas Morning News reported that racial tensions were behind the debate of who to include in lessons about the San Antonio mission. Democrat board member Mary Helen Berlanga proposed that the “tejanos,” the Spanish word for Texans, who fought alongside Davy Crockett and James Bowie be studied. It was rejected and ruled that the Hispanic tejanos were not specific leaders deserving specific recognition, although eight died during the attack from the Mexican army.
For Loewen, the omission of Cesar Chavez struck a chord. “If I lived in Texas, a state with several million Mexican-Americans, I would want them to know about a Mexican- American who, within the American political system, managed to make a significant difference nationally,” Loewen says. “I think it’s asking for trouble to hide such people,” he continues. “Do we want Mexican-Americans to think that they cannot make a difference? Isn’t that just a recipe for frustration and bad educational results followed by bad results in the community? Makes no sense to me.”
The Texas influence and trail of money
“Texas historically has had a lot of influence,” says conservative board chair Gail Lowe of her home state, which has nearly five million students in its public school system.
Although there are other national and state standards, the proverbial purse strings of U.S. schools are what really determine the availability of educational materials. Recently, textbook companies are looking at Texas with a wider eye than California because of California’s current budget crisis, which limits the state’s book-buying power. It’s even projected that updated social studies books won’t be bought and in the hands of Texas students until 2014.
During Oregon’s textbook review process, textbook company representatives woo teachers by offering the occasional lunch as well as supplemental educational packages—a tactic that proves tempting during hard economic times.
Once all is said and done on the textbook side, it’s up to the teachers to educate students on how to interpret the lessons held between the hard-backed books of history.
“I would hope that the rest of the country would look at our standard and avoid our pitfalls,” Knight says.
“What Texas legislature has done is determined the interpreted framework, their own world-view, and is asking textbook companies to adhere to that world-view,” Alderman says. According to Alderman, this deprives children of the chance to examine various perspectives and understand interpretive theory.
Alderman chooses to not “teach by the book.” Instead, she continues to provide modern magazines, historical texts, and primary sources to help teach students that history is subjective and push them to draw their own conclusions. “In public education … teachers really need to give kids a wide variety of ideas. This is their chance to start forming ideas,” Alderman says.

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Erasing History