Another battle in the GOP war against teachers?
indypendent
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/15/austin-texas-protest-cuts_n_835503.html
Coming soon to a classroom near you: History textbooks that stress the “Christian origins” of the United States, play up the historical importance of figures like Phyllis Schlafly and Newt Gingrich, and examine the “unintended consequences” of the civil-rights movements and Title IX. The brouhaha over Texas’s efforts to pass these new conservative history standards—which are expected to be finalized later this spring—could have national repercussions. That’s because Texas is “a huge market leader in the school-textbook industry,” says the Associated Press. “The enormous print run for Texas textbooks leaves most districts in other states adopting the same course materials, so that the Texas School Board effectively spells out requirements for 80 percent of the nation’s textbook market.”
Filed under Public Education, Radical Rightwing groups, Religion, Republicans, Wingnuts!
The president will seek to change the way schools are judged as successes or failures and will eliminate the law’s 2014 deadline for bringing every single American student to academic proficiency. Sources say he’ll seek to replace the law’s binary pass-fail accountability system with one that divides schools into more nuanced categories, and that he’d replace the 2014 deadline, which Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called a “utopian goal,” with the goal of having all students leave high school “college or career ready.”
Read it at The New York Times
Filed under Public Education