Civil War material in textbooks under fire

New Texas textbooks, tailored to state standards that downplay the role of slavery in the Civil War and omit mentions of Jim Crow laws or the Ku Klux Klan, are drawing criticism again as the nation grapples with its racial history.

By portraying slavery as merely one of several factors pushing Southern states to secede, and by focusing on states’ rights as a primary cause, the standards fail to present a clear and accurate picture of the Civil War, some historians, educators and activists say.

The controversy has flared anew as legislators, educators and others consider removing Confederate symbols on public display across the South. An effort to remove statues honoring Confederate leader Jefferson Davis

and two of his compatriots at the University of Texas at Austin has gained steam. Meanwhile, South Carolina lawmakers are moving to take down the Confederate flag flying outside the statehouse after a gunman fatally shot nine black worshipers in a Charleston church.

Historians say the statues and flags honor a racist heritage; the only right Southern states were fighting for was the right to own slaves.

“The major issue here is that students are still not being told the truth about what was the cause of the Civil War,” said Dan Quinn, a spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network, which has driven much of the fight against the state’s social studies standards.

The standards, revised in 2010 in response to perceived liberal bias, also don’t call for textbooks to include material on Jim Crow laws that perpetuated segregation or on the Ku Klux Klan. The Texas Education Agency, however, said a review showed that the publishers on the approved list include those subjects in their books.

The new standards were adopted in May 2010 on a 9-5 vote after a bitter debate, with all Republicans voting for them and all Democrats against.

“There would be those who would say, you know, automatically say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery,” board member Patricia Hardy of Weatherford said during one meeting. “No. It was states’ rights.”

Last year, facing renewed criticism about the standards, Chairwoman Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, said the new materials were “much more fair and balanced than they were before.” ‘I want them to be aware’

It is unclear how many students might actually learn the version of history represented in the new textbooks, approved last fall by the State Board of Education. Some districts have opted to pick books that are off the state’s approved list, taking advantage of a 2011 state law that gave districts more freedom in purchasing books. Most districts still buy books from the list, but some are beginning to look elsewhere.

The Houston Independent School District, the state’s largest, is no longer buying printed textbooks for its high schools, instead using online materials. But in middle schools, where the Civil War is introduced, HISD is ordering state-approved social studies textbooks from the publishing company Pearson, said spokeswoman Holly Huffman.

According to Huffman, the district’s curriculum staff said the printed and digital materials “allow students the opportunity to examine complex issues surrounding the topics of slavery and Jim Crow laws, and organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.”

Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, the state’s third-largest district, has adopted state-approved social studies textbooks for middle and high school, but like HISD, it has its own curriculum, based on the state’s standards. Katy ISD also has adopted state-approved books at both levels.

Steve Antley, a sixth-grade social studies teacher in HISD, said textbooks remain an important resource, but teachers rely on their training and judgment.

“I don’t think there’s really the danger that some agenda can be pushed into (the standards) and that’s somehow going to impact all the kids in Texas,” said Antley, who represents HISD educators as president of the Congress of Houston Teachers. “In the end, teachers are still making decisions about how to teach the course.”

Although his class focuses on world cultures, Antley said he talks to his students about the Civil War, particularly about Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. His north Houston middle school feeds into Jefferson Davis High School.

“I want them to be aware of who he is,” Antley said. “Obviously my role as a teacher is not to tell the kids what they should think, but to try to get them to understand how things come about.”

HISD officials are considering renaming Davis High School and five other campuses named after Confederate generals or other loyalists. ‘More was going on’

Much of the textbook controversy in Texas focuses on how the state’s standards detail what led to the Civil War. The standards list slavery as only one factor, while historians say it was the driving factor — something Confederate leaders acknowledged before seceding, but later tried to revise.

The state emphasizes that students should learn from primary sources — speeches, articles and other materials from the time — but the only two primary sources related to the war that the standards require students to read are inaugural addresses by President Abraham Lincoln and Davis, both of whom avoided mentioning slavery for what historians say were political reasons. Many other documents, including Texas’ declaration of secession, cite slavery as the reason for leaving the Union.

“It’s really striking in this context of what the SBOE wanted kids to look at,” said Edward Countryman, a historian at Southern Methodist University who the Texas Freedom Network hired to review the stateapproved textbooks. “If these are the only two documents kids read, they’ll say, ‘Well, Lincoln didn’t say anything about it, Davis didn’t say anything about it — well, grandpappy was right, it was about something else.’ ”

Textbook publishers were “not completely subservient” to the state’s standards, Countryman said, but if they wanted into the huge Texas market, they had to acknowledge them. The books, he says, vary from outright compliance with the controversial standards to “using ways to say, ‘more was going on here.’ ”

Calling the Civil War a conflict over states’ rights is a revision of history that Confederate leaders began immediately after the war, Countryman said. And the effects of that battle of perception are still apparent, said Caleb McDaniel, an associate professor of history at Rice University.

“I would say that many of the students I teach here still come into my class with a sense that this was a states’ rights conflict,” McDaniel said. “But when policymakers decide to stress that oversimplified interpretation in our schools, they are diverging from mainstream scholarly opinion. I think what we’ve seen in recent weeks is that the Civil War is still very relevant. It matters that we get the history right.”