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Textbooks

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07/23/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

A new Wall Street Journal report said the president's name "appeared multiple times" in the Jeffrey Epstein files — and he was told that during a briefing.

Forget about putting “everything out there and let the people decide it.” That was last week.

First Lady Brigitte Macron is suing right-wing firebrand Candace Owens for a “relentless and unjustified smear campaign” that alleges Macron is secretly a man.

Ryan Walters' far-right curriculum changes are getting snubbed by publishers who refuse to rewrite history.

Three Venezuelans, released last week from the Terrorism Confinement Center, said they were repeatedly beaten and denied access to lawyers.

The Trump administration said it was protecting Americans unjustly held abroad. One of the rescued men, Dahud Hanid Ortiz, killed three people, according to court documents.

On July 18, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard made a post on Twitter alleging “the most powerful people in the Obama administration,” including former President Barack Obama, were involved in a “years-long coup” and a “treasonous conspiracy” against Donald Trump. Her post quickly went viral, amassing over 13 million views over the weekend, and galvanized the online fringe to fantasize about violence against their political enemies. Trump fanned Gabbard’s flames, sharing a racist AI-generated video of Obama being arrested on Truth Social, which Trump owns.

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GOPers mull bill to reject OK academic standards that include 2020 election 'discrepancies'

Nuria Martinez-Keel, Oklahoma Voice

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'Great victory': School board defies red state Republicans to strip chapters from textbooks

woke math 5/22

fldoe-releases-math-textbook-reviews-00030503

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida’s Department of Education on Thursday released scores of documents shedding new light on why the agency rejected dozens of proposed math textbooks over what state leaders deemed “impermissible” content, including lessons on critical race theory.

The records, nearly 6,000 pages of book examinations, show that state reviewers flagged several traces of critical race theory and inklings of “social emotional learning” in proposed texts, two topics that have been explicitly targeted by the DeSantis administration. The slate of textbook denials gained national attention last month when state leaders, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, publicly blasted publishers for attempting to “indoctrinate” students.

At the time, many were left confused as to why the state would not accept dozens of math textbooks over issues like critical race theory, which are generally not part of the mathematics curriculum.

Ahead of the midterms and his reelection campaign, DeSantis has pushed measures limiting how race can be taught in classrooms and defended Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” bill, known by opponents as “Don’t Say Gay.” That bill bans teachers from leading classroom instructions on sexual orientation and gender identity for students in kindergarten through third grade.

DeSantis on Friday said the state will follow Florida standards and praised his education department for flagging the texts and sending them back to publishers to “take the nonsense out of the math books.”

“Two plus two equals four,” DeSantis said at an event in Ocala. “It’s not two plus two and let’s have a struggle session over that.”

The book reviews released Thursday illustrate that the Florida Department of Education asked its analysts a series of four questions on “special topics” that could ultimately disqualify a text from being adopted for use in classrooms across the state.

The state education department specifically sought to know if the books aligned with the state’s rule outlawing critical race theory, and if they included any snippets of “Culturally Responsive Teaching,” “Social Justice,” or social emotional learning, which aims to teach students how to manage their emotions and develop strong relationships with their peers. Florida’s Board of Education in 2021 passed a rule banning critical race theory along with The 1619 Project from The New York Times, claiming they are theories that “distort historical events.”

Critical race theory, an analytical framework developed by legal scholars, examines how race and racism have become ingrained in American law and institutions since slavery and Jim Crow.

In one example that caught the state’s attention, a reviewer noted that a high school statistics book included lessons on race that could violate the rule.

They pointed to pages that discussed “racial profiling in policing” and “discrimination in magnet school admission,” along with one instance in which the book mentioned there were “too many” white police officers in the NYPD compared with the racial makeup of the community.

This textbook, published by Pearson, was one of dozens renounced by the state. Another book from Pearson covering precalculus honors was dinged for a section that asked students what algebra can help tell about “racial bias.”

Florida originally rejected 54 of the 132 proposed math textbooks, some 41 percent, submitted by publishers, the bulk of which were proposed for kindergarten through fifth grade. Some 28 of the math textbooks — or 21 percent — were left off the adoption list due to “prohibited topics” including critical race theory, according to the state education department.

This decision initially left schools across Florida with only one textbook option for standard K-5 math. But the state has since adopted additional publishers after they tweaked their proposals.

To that end, two publishers seeking to provide K-5 math books were flagged by reviewers for broaching lessons on social emotional learning, according to the documents.

One second-grade book from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was penalized on its alignment to state standards because “attempts at multicultural teaching” were evident in its text. The example given was “types of housing for different groups of people.”

Similarly, a McGraw Hill LLC book for fifth graders was rated as “very poor” for its social emotional learning lessons. The reviewer noted that one question “asks students to think about social and emotional learning competencies, including relationship skills and social awareness.”

Another book on Florida’s “not recommended” list, a Mathematics for College Liberal Arts text, was allegedly “biased” on climate change and emphasized that “racism is embedded in American society dependent on age,” according to one reviewer.

This book, a Pearson publication for high school students, contained exercises based on “an argument” between former Vice President Al Gore and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh in which, the reviewer wrote, “You can tell the author favors Al Gore and dislikes Rush Limbaugh based on questions.”

This book includes a bar graph “measuring racial prejudice, by age,” an example previously cited by the FLDOE.

“Based solely on the Critical Race Theory elements, this book should not be considered for adoption,” according to the reviewer, who also criticized the author for “talking about a climate crisis as if it’s a proven fact.”

Textbook publishers, including McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, have indicated they are appealing the state’s decision against adopting the books.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/ron-desantis-florida-real-history/

October 16, Popular Information reported that Scholastic was facilitating the exclusion of books that feature people of color or LGBTQ characters from its book fairs. The company, under pressure from right-wing ideologues, created a collection of these titles and offered school officials the ability to remove all of them. Our report broke the news on what books were targeted, a list that included biographies of civil rights icon John Lewis and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Several hours later, the New York Times picked up the story, citing Popular Information's reporting. Soon, the story was covered by numerous national media outlets, including CNN, NPR, CBS, Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail, and The Intercept. On October 25, in a letter to authors and illustrators, Scholastic announced it was reversing the policy.

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Texas eighth graders will soon be required to learn about climate change — but not without a showdown

man and woman sitting on chairs

Erin DouglasandThe Texas TribuneAugust 30, 2023

Starting next year, Texas will require that eighth graders learn about climate change as part of a science curriculum overhaul approved two years ago.

But which textbooks they’ll use to learn about it will largely depend on the state board charged with setting curriculum standards, and questions during a Tuesday meeting to hear testimony on the proposed teaching materials showed that the 15-member body — which has taken a rightward turn since 2021 — could make its decision along partisan lines.

One Republican member of the State Board of Education asked whether students ought to learn about the benefits of burning fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Democrats advocated for texts that emphasized the scientific consensus on climate change.

Dozens of publishers submitted textbook proposals for the state’s overhaul of its science curriculums. Any resident of Texas can submit written comments on the instructional materials before Oct. 30. The board plans to adopt instructional materials in November; the new science standards and textbooks will take effect at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year.

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Many critics say the new curriculum standards, called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, don’t go far enough to teach kids that climate change is caused by human activities, primarily burning fossil fuels. And while the TEKS changes will require eighth graders to describe how human activities “can” influence climate, students won’t be required to learn about how “a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions” could mitigate climate change after the board previously declined to include that language.

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Publishers can choose to include information in textbooks that go beyond the state’s new minimum requirements for teaching climate change — the question is whether the board, which strengthened its Republican majority during last year’s election, will approve such textbooks.

The board’s decision could impact how science is taught in Texas classrooms for years. And while school districts aren’t required to use board-approved textbooks, many do so for the assurance that those materials meet the state’s standards.

At least one Republican board member, Will Hickman, who represents Houston, indicated that he’d advocate for instructional materials that do not include climate change solutions in science courses. He argued those solutions would be a better fit in social studies.

Hickman also asked one testifier if the textbooks should “also include the benefits we get from burning carbon,” arguing that many facets of modern society, such as air conditioning, are powered by fossil fuels. Hickman, an attorney who was elected to the board in 2021, has worked as in-house counsel forShell OilCompany since 2004.

The testifier, Susan Meredith, an Austin-based energy and education consultant who had testified that students should be presented with instructional materials that prepare them for climate change related jobs in the future, told Hickman he was conflating topics.

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“What you’re collapsing is that electricity has to come from gas and oil, and it doesn't,” Meredith said.

Another Republican SBOE member, Pat Hardy, who represents Tarrant and Parker counties and parts of Dallas County, has previously said she wants children to learn about the good fossil fuels have done for human society, such as helping the Texas economy grow. Texas is the nation’s largest oil and gas producing state.

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Texas is one of only six states that does not use the Next Generation Science Standards to guide its K-12 science curriculum. The standards — developed by states and a committee convened by the National Research Council in 2013 — emphasize that climate change is real, severe, caused by humans and can be mitigated with actions that reduce greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

A 2020 analysis of science curriculums in all 50 states by the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund gave Texas an F grade for how well schools in the state taught about the scientific consensus on climate change.

Some Democrats on the board pushed back on the soft-on-fossil-fuels language proposed by their Republican colleagues.

“We absolutely should say humans do impact climate change,” said Marisa Perez-Diaz, a Democrat who represents San Antonio on the board, in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “It doesn’t have to be political — it is just fact. But I think because sometimes we get into these culture-war conversations, it blurs what should and shouldn’t go into the standards.”

Although all the textbooks that have been submitted for approval explain that climate change is happening and “can” be due to human activity, not all of them explicitly say that human activities are the primary reason or include information on how to mitigate climate change. In other words, some of the textbooks don’t say that humans will need to quickly and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions, largely by phasing out fossil fuels, to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change, as international climate scientists have long warned.

During the Tuesday board meeting, Perez-Diaz asked the other board members to be cautious of only supporting textbooks that meet the state’s minimum requirements and nothing more.

“When publishers take the time to include additional information past the TEKS [standards], for me, that is a text that stands out above and beyond the others,” she said.

Some educators, former teachers and education advocates are concerned that the political influence of the fossil fuel industry in Texas has prevented, and may continue to block, robust education on climate science ahead of the board’s November vote on science instructional materials.

“Climate change might be politically controversial, but the scientific consensus is clear,” said Carisa Lopez, a senior political director for Texas Freedom Network, during a Tuesday press conference. “It’s past time for the board to be clear about textbooks: that textbooks in public schools should teach the truth.”

Judy Dickey, a graduate lecturer at Texas A&M in the department of atmospheric sciences, said she thought some of the textbooks were trying to “soft-peddle” climate change by not explicitly saying humans were the cause, casting doubt on the scientific consensus or not including solutions.

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But Dickey, who reviewed the textbooks for a Texas Freedom Network analysis of the proposals, said most of them did a good job of explaining climate science, treated climate change seriously and explained how it occurs.

“To me, that is a huge step forward,” said Dickey, who was previously a science teacher in Florida. “I was pleasantly surprised. … It was nice to see that no one was trying to pretend it was volcanoes.”

One 11th-grade student who testified during the Tuesday meeting, Marygrace Beinke, said none of her teachers have ever told her that climate change is a hoax or that evolution isn’t real. She emphasized to the board that all students in Texas should be given the opportunity to learn about those topics, which she said have reinforced her faith in God.

“I’ve never felt closer to God as when I’ve been learning about how fragile, beautiful and complex our Earth is,” Beinke told the board.

Geoff Carlisle, who taught eighth-grade science at a KIPP school in Austin for a decade, said in an interview with the Tribune that like Beinke’s teachers, he taught his students about climate change, even though it was not required by the state’s standards. Carlisle incorporated information about climate science into his own lesson plans — something he said most teachers in Texas don’t likely have the time or resources to do.

He said many of his students understood that climate change was happening and that it might have something to do with burning fossil fuels, but they could not explain the greenhouse gas effect or what role burning fossil fuels had in it. He wants the state to go further and require climate science to be taught at all levels. Other states, such as New Jersey, have such standards.

“When I think about the alarming emergency that our students are going to face or are facing, it’s unethical to not be talking about this in all grade levels,” Carlisle said. “Our students deserve the right to understand what’s happening.”

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sTEVE DOOCY(CO-HOST): Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, a brand new book that hits the shelves today. In it, Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin discuss how American education has been destroyed and what we can do to restore it. Here's an excerpt. "Make no mistake about it the historical singularity that was America's founding was a result of classical Christian education. Full stop. Our founders did not stumble their way to brilliance of 1776. They were forged in the foundry of the education of their time." And Pete and David join us live right now. And they've got the number one book in the world. Who's who?

PETE HEGSETH (AUTHOR, FOX AND FRIENDS WEEKEND CO-HOST): Pete. David.

DOOCY: Thank you very much. David, it's very nice to meet you. We were talking to Pete about this yesterday. This is part of a master plan that a lot of people don't have any idea has been going on for decades.

DAVID GOODWIN (AUTHOR): Right.

DOOCY: Regarding education in the country.

GOODWIN: Yes. Well, you know, that's when I was doing the research, some of the research through the original book, which The New Republic in the early part of the 20th century. I thought I would find a lot about labor unions and a lot about minimum wage, a lot about, you know, the things that we know that the progressives were talking about at the time. But education was in every issue. And I was wondering, why.

DOOCY: Right. And Pete who would –who drew up this master plan?

HEGSETH: Well, there were a lot of – there wasn't one master architect, John Dewey's the father of the progressive educational system.

DOOCY: But they were like-minded.

HEGSETH: Very like-minded. Almost all atheists. Almost all socialists. Eventually, almost all Marxists.And they had a plan to capture the minds of our youngest kids. And we're not talking about the lunacy of higher education. This is K through 12. They knew the affections of young people. Elementary school students would shape the way they view America, their faith, for the rest of their life. And so they set it out on a course. They didn't know exactly where it would lead, Steve. All of these architects of progressives, but they knew where it wouldn't lead: Not toward Biblical wisdom, not toward appreciation for our founding documents.And people say to David I all the time, How do I not know this history?

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: 100-year history. You know why? Because the progressives write the history. They write the textbooks.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: So, David and I had to dig underneath everything that's hidden to find out the real story of how they captured K through 12.

DOOCY: You know, and David, we've known for a long time that America's colleges, for the most part. are way to the left, very progressive. But I don't think a lot of people realized until the last decade or so when they started looking in America'stextbooks,how far to the left aome are trying to drag K through 12.

GOODWIN: Well, they've had the advantage. When you have the college system, you control the instruments of education all the way down to the kindergarten. Right. Because you train the teachers, you train the administrators, you train the curriculum providers. You're the ones doing the accreditation, the college – at the college level. All of that flows right from the, you know, kind of nodes of control that the progressives had.

DOOCY: And, you know Pete, so many parents got a good look at what their kids were doing during COVID-19. Your first chapter is our COVID 1619 moment.

HEGSETH: It's exactly right. You're at home looking at your kid's curriculum through your laptop, and suddenly there's a new founding date on their screen, 1619 or they're talking about gender pronouns for seven or eight-year-olds.[note no eg]  So we start with the problem, and the first step to any recovery is understanding the depth of your problem. And we outline that. But the best part of the book, in our opinion is those five chapters at the end that are about the solution. AndDavid runs the Association of Classical Christian Schools.

DOOCY: Right.

HEGSETH: Classical Christian Dot Org. There are hundreds of wonderful brick-and-mortar schools across the country that are the exact opposite of what our government schools provide right now. There are online options, there arehomeschoolcurriculum options. The insurgency to take our classroom back has begun, and that's the preferred form of ideological warfare of the weak against the small. You do not have to default to progressive public schools, because otherwise, you're going to war with an educational complex that has 40 hours a week to capture your kid's mind. And that's why we call it a battle. It really is for parents and grandparents.

CRT

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/madness-oklahoma-bill-would-empower-parents-to-remove-books-from-school-libraries/

textbook

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/republican-pushes-resolution-to-make-the-bible-texas-official-state-book/

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The same cannot be said of the kinds of institutions DeVos wants to bankroll.

They educate kids behind closed doors with little to no transparency for the public about how their money is being spent. But word seeps out of the cracks in the system.

We’ve seen the textbooks they use to teach. Their graduates have returned to the public square to tell us about the instruction they received.

The American Christian Education (ACE) group provides fundamentalist school curriculum to thousands of religious schools throughout the country. Included in this curriculum is the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.

In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know—all the greatest Trump campaign hits!

We should not be funding the spread of such ignorance.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/betsy-devos-right-wing-school-indoctrination-program-betrays-a-fundamental-misunderstanding-of-the-differences-between-public-and-private-schools/

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/08/photos-evangelical-curricula-louisiana-tax-dollars/

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Thanks to a new law privatizing public education in Louisiana, Bible-based curriculum can now indoctrinate young, pliant minds with the good news of the Lord—all on the state taxpayers’ dime.

Under Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher program, considered the most sweeping in the country, Louisiana is poised to spend tens of millions of dollars to help poor and middle-class students from the state’s notoriously terrible public schools receive a private education. While the governor’s plan sounds great in the glittery parlance of the state’s PR machine, the program is rife with accountability problems that actually haven’t been solved by the new standards the Louisiana Department of Education adopted two weeks ago.

For one, of the 119 (mostly Christian) participating schools, Zack Kopplin, a gutsy college sophomore who’s taken to Change.org to stonewall the program, has identified at least 19 that teach or champion creationist nonscience and will rake in nearly $4 million in public funding from the initial round of voucher designations.

Read about Bobby Jindal’s exorcism problem.

Many of these schools, Kopplin notes, rely on Pensacola-based A Beka Book curriculum or Bob Jones University Press textbooks to teach their pupils Bible-based “facts,” such as the existence of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster and all sorts of pseudoscience that researcher Rachel Tabachnick and writer Thomas Vinciguerra have thankfully pored over so the rest of world doesn’t have to.

Here are some of my favorite lessons:

  1. Dinosaurs and humans probably hung out: “Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years.”—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

Much like Whoopi and Teddy in the cinematic classic Theodore Rex. Screenshot: YouTubeMuch like tough cop Katie Coltrane and Teddy the T-rex in the direct-to-video hit Theodore Rex Screenshot: YouTube

  1. Dragons were totally real: “[Is] it possible that a fire-breathing animal really existed? Today some scientists are saying yes. They have found large chambers in certain dinosaur skulls…The large skull chambers could have contained special chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire and smoke.”—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007

3. “God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ.”—America: Land That I Love, Teacher ed., A Beka Book, 1994

  1. Africa needs religion: “Africa is a continent with many needs. It is still in need of the gospel…Only about ten percent of Africans can read and write. In some areas the mission schools have been shut down by Communists who have taken over the government.”—Old World History and Geography in Christian Perspective, 3rd ed., A Beka Book, 2004

The literacy rate in Africa is "only about 10 percent"--give or take a few dozen percentage points. residentevil_stars2001/FlickrThe literacy rate in Africa is “only about 10 percent”…give or take a few dozen percentage points. residentevil_stars2001/Flickr

  1. Slave masters were nice guys: “A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.”—United States History for Christian Schools, 2nd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 1991

Slaves and their masters: BFF 4lyfe!  Edward Williams Clay/Library of CongressDoesn’t everyone look happy?! Edward Williams Clay/Library of Congress

6. The KKK was A-OK: “[The Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”—United States History for Christian Schools, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2001

Just your friendly neighborhood Imperial Wizard! Unknown/Library of CongressJust your friendly neighborhood Imperial Wizard Unknown/Library of Congress

  1. The Great Depression wasn’t as bad as the liberals made it sound: “Perhaps the best known work of propaganda to come from the Depression was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath…Other forms of propaganda included rumors of mortgage foreclosures, mass evictions, and hunger riots and exaggerated statistics representing the number of unemployed and homeless people in America.”—United States History: Heritage of Freedom, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1996

Definitely Photoshopped.  U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/WikipediaDefinitely Photoshopped. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikipedia

  1. SCOTUS enslaved fetuses: “Ignoring 3,500 years of Judeo-Christian civilization, religion, morality, and law, the Burger Court held that an unborn child was not a living person but rather the “property” of the mother (much like slaves were considered property in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford).”—American Government in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1997
  1. The Red Scare isn’t over yet: “It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism.”— American Government in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1997

Meanwhile, God sneezes glitter snot in the form of Capitalism. Catechetical Guild/Wikipedia Catechetical Guild/Wikipedia

  1. Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson were a couple of hacks: “[Mark] Twain’s outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless…Twain’s skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel.”—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001

“Several of [Emily Dickinson’s] poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.”—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001

And her grammar was just despicable! Ugh! Todd-Bingham picture collection, 1837-1966 (inclusive)/ Manuscripts & Archives, Yale UniversityTo say nothing of her poetry’s Syntax and Punctuation—how odious it is.Todd-Bingham picture collection, 1837-1966 (inclusive)/ Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University

  1. Abstract algebra is too dang complicated: “Unlike the ‘modern math’ theorists, who believe that mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute…A Beka Book provides attractive, legible, and workable traditional mathematics texts that are not burdened with modern theories such as set theory.”—ABeka.com

Maths is hard! Screenshot: MittRomney.comMATHS: Y U SO HARD? Screenshot: MittRomney.com

  1. Gay people “have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”—Teacher’s Resource Guide to Current Events for Christian Schools, 1998-1999, Bob Jones University Press, 1998
  1. “Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world’s richest nations.”—Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1999

Plotting world destruction, BRB.  Lynn Freeny, Department of Energy/FlickrPlotting economic apocalypse, BRB Lynn Freeny, Department of Energy/Flickr

  1. Globalization is a precursor to rapture: “But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God’s Word. The Anti-christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell.”—Economics: Work and Prosperity in Christian Perspective, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1999

He'll probably be in cahoots with the global environmentalists. Luca Signorelli/WikipediaSwapping insider-trading secrets is the devil’s favorite pastime. Luca Signorelli/Wikipedia

Whew! Seems extreme. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised. Gov. Jindal, you remember, once tried to perform an exorcism on a college gal pal.

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https://www.alternet.org/texas-board-education-hillary-clinton

According to a report in the Dallas Morning News, the Texas State Board of Education on Friday issued a preliminary vote to sharply cut back the social studies curriculum in the state.

One major change is the elimination of required teaching about Hillary Clinton:

As part of an effort to "streamline" the social studies curriculum in Texas, the State Board of Education voted on Friday to change what students in every grade are required to learn in the classroom. They approved the removal of several historical figures, including Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller.

Hillary Clinton has been a significant figure in recent U.S. history even before she became the first woman nominated for president by a major political party. She was also highly instrumental in both domestic legislation and foreign affairs as a First Lady, senator, and secretary of State, advancing the cause of equal rights on the world stage and shaping policy on everything from health care, to family leave, to violence against women, to the cleanup of New York City after the 9/11 attacks.

For their part, the Texas Board of Education asserts that they are simply following the advice of the workgroup, which ranked Clinton and other deleted historical figures against a rubric to determine whether they are "essential" to learning about history, as part of an effort to ensure kids do not have to memorize too many names and dates.

Curiously, however, this rubric gave perfect scores to local members of the Texas Legislature.

Additionally, the board is refusing to make several other changes to the curriculum recommended by experts for elimination, including the deletion of references to "Judeo-Christian values," and the alleged influence of Moses on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Also recommended for deletion but still kept in by the board: references to the "heroism" of defenders of the Alamo, which is problematic because those men were fighting, in part, for the right to practice slavery.

Decisions made by the Texas Board of Education often spill over into the rest of the country, because textbook manufacturers have historically geared their material toward the requirements of the state's market — although thisinfluence has declined somewhat in recent years. Nonetheless, the board's changes to school material are often closely followed by educators nationwide, including multiple battles in the past few years over how to teach evolution.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-revisions-after-textbook-refers-to-african-slaves-as-workers.html

Coby Burren, 15, a freshman at a suburban high school south of here, was reading the textbook in his geography class last week when a map of the United States caught his attention. On Page 126, a caption in a section about immigration referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as “workers” rather than slaves.

He reached for his cellphone and sent a photograph of the caption to his mother, Roni Dean-Burren, along with a text message: “we was real hard workers, wasn’t we.”

Their outrage over the textbook’s handling of the nation’s history of African-American slavery — another page referred to Europeans coming to America as “indentured servants” but did not describe Africans the same way — touched off a social-media storm that led the book’s publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, to vow to change the wording and the school’s teachers to use other materials in the class.

“It talked about the U.S.A. being a country of immigration, but mentioning the slave trade in terms of immigration was just off,” said Ms. Dean-Burren, who is black. “It’s that nuance of language. This is what erasure looks like.”

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Introductory College Textbooks Shortchange Climate Science

Despite a widespread scientific consensus that it is taking place, K-12 education about climate change has been a surprisingly contentious issue in the U.S.

National Center for Science Education deputy director Glenn Branch told Business Insider in 2017 that it, along with evolution, was one of the topics that "arouse[d] the most discontent and controversy" when it came to determining state science standards.

But less attention has been paid to climate education at the university level, until now.

In a paper published Sunday in Environment Communications, Arizona State University (ASU) graduate student Rachel Yoho scanned through 1500 pages of undergraduate introductory science textbooks and found that less than four percent of them focused on climate change, global warming, related environmental problems or renewable energy, an Arizona State University press release published in ScienceDaily reported.

Less than two percent of the pages focused on just climate change, she found.

"It's a difficult balance in an introductory course," Yoho said in the press release. "There's so much information to cover in a short time. However, our students are facing these issues inside and outside of the classrooms. Our communities feel the impacts of our energy decisions and climate."

The textbooks selected for the study were the current editions of the primary 16 biology, chemistry and physics textbooks published from 2013 to 2015. Yoho and her co-author, ASU Biodesign Center for Environmental Biotechnology director Bruce Rittmann, did notice variations between the three disciplines in terms of what climate or energy related topics they did cover.

Biology textbooks spent the most page space discussing climate change and its impacts, but that discussion still only took up less than two percent of those pages. They spent the least amount of page space on renewable energy.

Physics and chemistry textbooks, on the other hand, included more information about renewable energy, alternative fuels and other clean transportation technologies.

Nuclear energy was discussed separately from other alternative sources on less than one percent of the pages and was painted in a negative light.

Further, none of the topics they searched for were likely to have units devoted to them, and the climate- and energy-related content was usually not a factor in why certain textbooks were selected.

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http://www.wildcat.arizona.edu/article/2017/12/n-koch-in-tucson

Fo*rbes Magazine* ranks David and Charles Koch each as one of the country’s top ten richest people. Their business, Koch Industries, is the second largest private company in the US. The family's net worth was $82 billion in 2016. 

Combined, the brothers and their affiliated organizations have donated tens of millions of dollars to universities across the nation, funding research centers and educational programs, including at the University of Arizona.

The Koch's have been accused of attempting to drive policy in higher education, and through it public opinion, to the political right through their university donations and public school programs.

Book brings scrutiny

Investigative reporter Jane Mayer of *The New Yorker* released a book in 2016 called "Dark Money," furthering these allegations with much more detail.

Mayer offered the example of Topeka's public schools. The district, strapped for cash, allowed the Koch's to step in, and they offered their version of American History and Economics.

RELATED:**Expert panel addresses free speech and expression at university**

"Among other things, Franklin Roosevelt didn’t alleviate the Depression, minimum wage laws and public assistance hurt the poor, lower pay for women was not discriminatory, and the government, rather than business, caused the 2008 recession," Mayer writes.

The accusations against the Koch's are nothing new; public media has been reporting on them for over a decade. Mayer's book, however, renewed scrutiny on academic institutions associated with the brothers.

At the UA, donations from Charles Koch helped fund the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. Better known as the "Freedom Center," it was established in 2008 by UA Philosophy Professor David Schmidtz, and initially funded by Randy Kendrick.

Schmidtz and Kendrick met by chance, and, as Schmidtz puts it ,“that’s a pretty long story, but bottom line is she (Kendrick) saved my life.”

Kendrick’s motivation for funding the center was described as absolutely not political. Randy is wife to Ken Kendrick, owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks. She was part of a Koch-led donor network that donated almost $900 million on the 2016 election cycle.

She left the network after it refused to attack Trump, according to British newspaper *The Guardian*.

In 2010, Schmidtz secured more private funding for the center, allowing him to hire four core faculty members. Of these donations, $1.8 million came from Charles Koch.

The center, its funding, the associated new department of Political Economy and Moral Science and a high-school course, have all raised concerns within the UA and greater Tucson community. A campus group of UA faculty, Koch of Campus, has formed in resistance.

TUSD controversy

Recently, the spotlight has fallen on the Freedom Center for its involvement with a high-school course. Conceived as part of the Freedom Center’s outreach efforts, the class, known as Ethics, Economy and Entrepreneurship, is described by Michael McKenna, the Freedom Center’s director, as a project of Schmidtz’s.

The course is offered for UA credit at high-schools across Tucson Unified School Distirct. Half way through its second academic year, the TUSD governing board realized the course was never actually approved.

The course received initial approval but failed to continue along the approval process.The class, as well as its text book, co-authored by Schmitdz, has been accused of being unbalanced.

David Gibbs, a UA History professor, told the *Arizona Daily Star*, “the course presents a skewed version of economics that ignores concepts that don’t fit in neatly with free-market ideals.” He described the textbook as pure propaganda.

“There’s a worry that the indirect incentive is to introduce to high-school students ideas friendly to either libertarian or right-wing political causes through this high-school course,” said McKenna.

Though he personally thinks the course leans a certain direction, he said many people are overreacting to the content. Schmidtz echoed that sentiment.

“We’ve got people going and saying there’s an ideological problem; TUSD doesn’t see an ideological problem. And they shouldn’t, there isn’t one,” Schmidtz said.

He said the course is not on American History but on citizenship, and the high-schools understand that. The course was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Tension in the community

The Freedom Center itself has been accused of perpetuating a libertarian, right-wing ideology. These accusations are based in large part of the sources of funding the center has received, as well as the political views of several of its key faculty.

The donation from Charles Koch in 2010 has raised the most eyebrows. The donation is no secret. “I am associated with the Koch brothers, I have raised money from them,” Schmidtz said.

Schmidtz continued to say that, no, it was not just for the one donation in 2010, but he declined to comment further.

McKenna empathized with people’s fear that the center had an agenda, based on the reading of "Dark Money."

“To the extent that what’s claimed in that book is legitimate, its really offensive and its really scary,” McKenna said. “If you read that book and you believe what’s going on in that book, then it’s easy to see what’s happened in the freedom center through the lends of that book.”

McKenna, Schmidtz, and a third core faculty member, Daniel Russell, all deny the presence of an agenda within the Freedom Center however, especially one dictated by the political and economic views of the Koch brothers.

They referred to it as both comical and naïve to believe philosophers as well established as themselves could be bought.

“Somebody who needed a job in philosophy so badly that they would agree to let someone tell them what to write and what not to write, would not be a good enough philosopher to hire here,” Russell said.

Part of the center’s criticism has been their perceived lack of transparency. McKenna, Schmidtz, and Russell all claimed they have never been contacted by either members of Koch Off Campus, or media outlets currently publishing related stories.

“We’re getting more attention now, as of this semester,” Russell said, “and the thing that’s a bit disheartening about this is how little information people really have.”

Schmidtz said he would share the donor list with the *Daily Wildcat*.As of Dec. 13, neither the Daily Wildcat or the reporter of this story have received a comprehensive donor list.

The Freedom Center: defined

The Freedom Center is a research unit housed in the college of Social and Behavioral Science; its core faculty are all tenured in the Philosophy department. Their contract with the Freedom Center gives them a lighter course load in order to focus more on research and writing.

Straddling a broad spectrum of topics joint only by their relation to freedom, the center is not an "academic center" as the TUSD high-school course is independent of it.

The center recently created a new department, approved this fall by the Arizona Board of Regents. Called the department of Political Economy and Moral Science, it was funded in large part by a grant from the state legislature, earmarked to be spent for the Freedom Center.

“The department was created because David Schmidtz wanted to create a new department, and there were funds that became available through the state legislature,” McKenna said.

Russell said one of the reasons the new department was created was to be a home for faculty who didn’t fit elsewhere. “It’s going to sound funny,” Russell said, “but as a way of creating a tenure home for people who don’t really fit in any narrow category."

If Adam Smith or Karl Marx were alive today, Russell said he doubted they would receive tenure in any existing department.

It is exactly this that worries some UA members. “Up until now, the people who have been involved were people who were tenured through traditional departments,” said Jeremy Vetter, a history professor at the UA.

“We may agree or disagree with their work, but they were tenured and promoted through a process that is recognizable. This new one seems to be designed to evade disciplinary accountability because it’s a discipline that doesn’t exist, really anywhere else.”

The root of the issues is believed to be the decline in public funding. Cash-strapped universities are more vulnerable to accepting private donations. “Its only common sense that when you take a man’s money, you take his advice. Here the advice is clearly is to slant their work in this sort of free market, far right-wing direction that would suit the ideas of their donors,” Gibbs said.

Further worrying critics is the seemingly special favors from the state legislator in support of the Freedom Center. Even as Arizona has cut it’s funding to public education, the state has allocated $2 million specifically for the center at the UA and a separate $3 million for Arizona State’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

RELATED:**Regents approve UA's proposed $1.1 billion budget**

The Arizona State institute also received over $1 million in grants from the Charles Koch Foundation.

However, there appears to be no evidence that Charles Koch exerts any influence of the Freedom Center itself.

“You’re not allowed to find people guilty in the court of law by association — you actually have to establish facts," Russell said. "And there are no facts of the sort that would lead people to say the things that are being said about us."

Although he has donated to Koch related causes in the past, Schmidtz said that Charles Koch has never called or checked in with the center — but he wouldn’t mind if he did.

“I wouldn’t feel like he was interfering if he did, but he never does,” Schmidtz said.  “He has seemingly complete trust in our ability, our willingness to make good decisions. In my own experience, you can’t get as far from interfering as he has gotten.”

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Teaching Militarism, Not Critical Thinking

The Reynolds LET 1 course description apprises students that they will learn “leadership, follower, and citizenship skills.” JROTC is military training. Instead of teaching toward a just and peaceful world, military training emphasizes dominance and nationalism. In fact, once students enlist in the military, they are no longer guided by the United States Constitution. Rather they are governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The Pentagon contracts with Pearson to write JROTC curriculum, including social studies, health, and leadership textbooks. The local school district has no control over their content. No process exists for regular certified staff to review JROTC materials for appropriateness, accuracy, or conformity to educational standards.

Teachers focused on social justice are critical of the historical perspectives of many mainstream textbooks. But, because the JROTC curriculum is focused on developing leaders for the U.S. military, there is a specific danger to these texts. For example, Lesson 2 of the LET 3 textbook is titled “Ethical Choices, Decisions, and Consequences.” The authors compare and contrast the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. They state that the sole cause of the Vietnam War was containment of communism: “American military personnel began deploying to Vietnam in 1954 to strengthen the country against communist North Vietnam.” The authors cite then-President Johnson’s 1964 statements that North Vietnam attacked a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin as the impetus for the broader war, ignoring overwhelming evidence from declassified documents that there was no such attack.

The narrative continues: “The United States went to war in Iraq as part of its global war on terrorism.” In the same paragraph, the authors introduce Osama bin Laden and explain the creation of al-Qaeda “to dislodge American forces in the Middle East.” The implication is clear—Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were working in cahoots to attack the United States. To further cement this alleged relationship, which did not exist, they quote George W. Bush: “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.” Nowhere in the case study or various historical timelines do the authors indicate that both Hussein and bin Laden were at one time strongly supported by the United States. Describing the arguments for the second Gulf War, the text notes a “lack of indisputable evidence” (as opposed to the presence of manufactured false evidence) that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

In outlining alternatives to these military invasions, the authors identify the only potential consequences as unacceptably negative. In the case of Vietnam, they cite the “domino theory,” which predicted one country after another becoming communist threats to the United States. In the case of Iraq, they quote then-President Bush without additional commentary: “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

Lesson 3 is on “Global Citizenship Choices, Decisions, and Consequences.” The authors discuss intelligence as a tool of U.S. foreign policy: “The CIA focuses mostly on countries it thinks might be unfriendly. . . . Sometimes intelligence agencies have helped overturn the government of a country. . . . For example, the CIA took part in overthrowing the government of Salvador Allende. The United States government thought Allende was not favorable to our national interest. Like defense, diplomacy, foreign aid, and trade measures, intelligence is an important tool of foreign policy.” There is no questioning of the U.S.-led coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, nor is there any discussion of the consequences and implications of the decision.

“The greatest purveyor of violence...”

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http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-eye/article63917982.html

==*moyers

Mary Lou Bruner, a Republican crank in Texas who claimed that a young Barack Obama had worked as a black male prostitute, is on track to become a key vote on the state’s board of education, the group that, as Matt Levin at the Houston Chronicle writes, is, “already drawing intense criticism for textbooks that, among other issues, downplayed slavery and racial segregation.”

That’s important because the school board is such a major buyer of books its decisions affect editorial content in texts all over the country. So remember that Bruner is an eccentric whose Facebook declarations include “School shootings started after the schools started teaching evolution” and “The dinosaurs on the ark may have been babies and not able to reproduce. It might make sense to take the small dinosaurs onto the ark instead of the ones bigger than a bus.”

Huh? Yet Republican elites seem quite satisfied to have a Mary Lou Bruner as the arbiter of what their children read in schools.

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Inside Higher Ed*  reports that the educational publishing company McGraw-Hill is withdrawing and destroying all copies of a textbook after complaints that it contained maps that were anti-Israel.

The book, Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World, had a series of maps that documented the Palestinian loss of land that occurred between 1946 and 2000. A number of Israel supporters criticized the maps, insisting that they're based on anti-Israel propaganda, as in this blog post. The post claims that all land given up by Israel has been given in the "pursuit of peace."[Israel] has offered a great deal more for peace with the Palestinians," reads the post, "The book could have gone into why they continuously reject these peace offers…but it chose not to. The textbook authors have taken a false narrative and are teaching it to students across the nation."

Insider Higher Ed ran a statement from Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for McGraw-Hill Education. "As soon as we learned about the concerns with it, we placed sales of the book on hold and immediately initiated an academic review," said Mathis, "The review determined that the map did not meet our academic standards. We have informed the authors and we are no longer selling the book. All existing inventory will be destroyed. We apologize and will refund payment to anyone who returns the book."