Academics castigate Texas’ 2010 history curriculum guidelines

AUSTIN—A group of academics slammed Texas’ 2010 history curriculum guidelines for public schools in a report released Thursday.

The state is considering revisions to its standards.

Complaints in the report deal with slavery’s role in the Civil War, the influence of Moses on U.S. democracy, the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America.

The report suggests some heavy editing, but the board’s 10 Republicans and five Democrats will not begin voting on rewrites until November.

“The best we can hope for right now is the more egregious mistakes are rectified,” one of the report’s authors, Edward Countryman, a history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said Thursday in a conference call. “I think it’s possible.”

The report was commissioned by frequent education board critic Texas Freedom Network, but its authors say their objections are about facts, not politics.

Their report notes how one board member in 2010 described slavery as an “after issue” and how Texas’ resulting curriculum standards suggested it was the Civil War’s third cause behind sectionalism and states’ rights. The board also asked the state’s nearly 5.4 million public school students to compare ideas from Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address with those of the one by Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

The report’s authors fault Texas’ standards for including Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson as an example of “effective leadership.”

Last year’s white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., and subsequent efforts to remove Confederate monuments around the country have underscored debates on how the Civil War is taught in different states. But the report states Texas’ Civil War lessons perpetuate “a historical mistruth promoted by southern apologists after the war.”

It suggests instead asking students to examine the conflict’s causes, “particularly the central role played by slavery” while recommending scrapping requirements that “glorify Confederate heroes.”

The report also calls for removing curriculum standards listing Moses among the people whose principles “informed the American founding documents” while trimming language suggesting that the separation of church and state wasn’t a fundamental ideal of the Constitution. It says that’s “one of the most blatant examples” of using “Texas curriculum standards to promote a political argument that is unsupported by sound scholarship” and past court cases nationwide.