Friday, May 01, 2009

HB 710 to the House Floor on Saturday

I just heard that State Rep. Patrick Rose’s HB 710 “relating to placing the State Board of Education under periodic review by the Sunset Advisory Commission” is coming to the House floor tomorrow.

This bill needs to pass.

We have all witnessed how dysfunctional our State Board of Education has become because of a right wing evangelical bent in some board members that caused it to spend an incredible amount of time and money examining the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolutionary theories. A creationist ploy to bring religion into public schools through the back door. This bill, HB 710, seeks to fix this by setting up a sunset review process for the State Board of Education.

Mark Twain said it best:

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

From the Texas Freedom Network:

“The Sunset review process would give the Legislature the opportunity to decide, after the commission’s recommendation, whether to make any changes to the state board’s authority. If during this session lawmakers don’t strip the board of its authority over curriculum and textbooks, for example, they could do so when the board comes up for Sunset review.”

Now lots of state school boards have this responsibility and authority to adopt textbooks for use within their state. But when the Board abuses that authority by attempting to introduce religious dogma in the curriculum, driving how textbooks up for adoption are written, then that authority needs to be revoked.

HB 710 needs to be passed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder if we could get our local superintendent and board reviewed? ;-]

Anonymous said...

Many small school school boards {in my part of the state}are the people that never left town to go to college. They are much less educated than the teachers.
With two college degrees it's tough know your fate is in the hands of people that never left Smalltown long enough to take any college classes.
Then we have right wing creationists on the State Board of Education. It's tough out there.