When he first heard that Texas might adopt a textbook for Mexican American studies in public schools, it pleased State Board of Education Secretary Ruben Cortez Jr, who has been instrumental in trying to get such studies included as course electives. But that smile came before he had seen the book.
Then he did and was appalled. He concluded that the proposed textbook is more polemic than academic. “It is an utter shame we must deal with racially offensive academic work,” the Brownsville Democrat said Tuesday at a news conference where he announced the results of an ad hoc committee of eight mostly university educators he brought together to review the book, which he labeled a “manifesto.” Adopting it as a text for use in Texas schools, he asserts, would be a “disaster” and cannot be “salvaged” with a few tweaks.
The review group’s 54-page report details what the authors say are 141 instances of factual errors, assertions of opinion as fact, errors of omission and misinterpretation. Cortez said the textbook is "dripping with racism and intolerance" and “offers one thing: hate. Hate toward Mexican-Americans.”
The committee concluded that the textbook fails to “meet basic standards and guiding principles in the history profession as outlined by the American Historical Association’s Guidelines for the Preparation, Evaluation, and Selection of History Textbooks (1997), and Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct (updated 2011).” It also falls short of the standards laid out in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for the Special Topic in Social Studies, the committee says.
Cortez and other Latino educators and some students are calling for the textbook to be rejected when the board meets next Tuesday.
Nicole Cobler reports:
Trinidad Gonzales, a history professor at South Texas College [who served on the ad hoc committee], said it was difficult to even mark errors because entire passages were factually inaccurate and made up of “a web of racist assertions.”
“It was very difficult to get through it because of the significant errors that kept popping up,” he said. He cited passages in the textbook he claimed to be "anti-Catholic" because it paints a picture of loyalty only to the Pope. The report compared the textbook to a book by Samuel P. Huntington, which claims that Mexican immigration, culture and religion is a threat to the country.
Texas has a long history of controversy over the political and cultural assertions found in textbooks adopted for public schools. That situation has worsened over the past couple of decades as conservatives have come to dominate the 15-member board of education. They have pushed curricula and textbooks that promote right-wing views on a range of topics, including climate change, evolution, how the United States came to be, and religion.