[RSCT] Wash. Monthly Jan./Feb. 2010: Revisionaries: How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks

[Rick Kisséll]

Revisionaries: How a group of Texas conservatives is rewriting your kids’ textbooks

by Mariah Blake
Washington Monthly
Jan./Feb. 2010

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle
mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near
Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October,
he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on
its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary
biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled
high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water
in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the
book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points,
and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled
in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the
pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory.
“I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on
the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This
bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may
argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger
in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on
Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I
see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat
Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from
communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because
he lowered taxes.”

 Views like these are relatively common in
East Texas, a region that prides itself on being the buckle of the
Bible Belt. But McLeroy is no ordinary citizen. The jovial creationist
sits on the Texas State Board of Education, where he is one of the
leaders of an activist bloc that holds enormous sway over the body’s
decisions. As the state goes through the once-in-a-decade process of
rewriting the standards for its textbooks, the faction is using its
clout to infuse them with ultraconservative ideals. Among other things,
they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial
into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights
movement. 

 Battles over textbooks are nothing new,
especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over
everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before
has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of
the state’s standards. And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in
Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas
is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few
biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than
leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers
that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in
sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the
reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft
their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As
one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it
takes to get on the Texas list.” 

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced
to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s
largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that
California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means
that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to
shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to
come. 

Up until the 1950s, textbooks painted American history as a steady
string of triumphs, but the upheavals of the 1960s shook up old
hierarchies, and beginning in the latter part of the decade, textbook
publishers scrambled to rewrite their books to make more space for
women and minorities. They also began delving more deeply into thorny
issues, like slavery and American interventionism. As they did, a new
image of America began to take shape that was not only more varied, but
also far gloomier than the old one. Author Frances FitzGerald has
called this chain of events “the most dramatic rewriting of history
ever to take place.”

This shift spurred a fierce backlash from
social conservatives, and some began hunting for ways to fight back. In
the 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler, a homemaker and an oil-company clerk,
discovered that Texas had a little-known citizen-review process that
allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content. From their kitchen
table in the tiny town of Hawkins, the couple launched a crusade to
purge textbooks of what they saw as a liberal, secular, pro-evolution
bias. When textbook adoptions rolled around, the Gablers would descend
on school board meetings with long lists of proposed changes—at one
point their aggregate “scroll of shame” was fifty-four feet long. They
also began stirring up other social conservatives, and eventually came
to wield breathtaking influence. By the 1980s, the board was demanding
that publishers make hundreds of the Gablers’ changes each cycle. These
ranged from rewriting entire passages to simple fixes, such as pulling
the New Deal from a timeline of significant historical events (the
Gablers thought it smacked of socialism) and describing the Reagan
administration’s 1983 military intervention in Grenada as a “rescue”
rather than an “invasion.” 

To avoid tangling with the Gablers and other
citizen activists, many publishers started self-censoring or allowing
the couple to weigh in on textbooks in advance. In 1984, the liberal
advocacy group People for the American Way analyzed new biology
textbooks presented for adoption in Texas and found that, even before
the school board weighed in, three made no mention of evolution. At
least two of them were later adopted in other states. This was not
unusual: while publishers occasionally produced Texas editions, in most
cases changes made to accommodate the state appeared in textbooks
around the country—a fact that remains true to this day. 

The Texas legislature finally intervened in
1995, after a particularly heated skirmish over health textbooks—among
other things, the board demanded that publishers pull illustrations of
techniques for breast self-examination and swap a photo of a
briefcase-toting woman for one of a mother baking a cake. The adoption
process was overhauled so that instead of being able to rewrite books
willy-nilly, the school board worked with the Texas Education Agency,
the state’s department of education, to develop a set of standards. Any
book that conformed and got the facts right had to be accepted, which
diluted the influence of citizen activists. 

Around this time, social conservatives decided
to target seats on the school board itself. In 1994 the Texas
Republican Party, which had just been taken over by the religious
right, enlisted Robert Offutt, a conservative board member who was
instrumental in overhauling the health textbooks, to recruit
like-minded candidates to run against the board’s moderate incumbents.
At the same time, conservative donors began pouring tens of thousands
of dollars into local school board races. Among them were Wal-Mart heir
John Walton and James Leininger, a hospital-bed tycoon whose largess
has been instrumental in allowing religious conservatives to take
charge of the machinery of Texas politics. Conservative groups, like
the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum, also jumped into the fray
and began mobilizing voters. 

Part of the newcomers’ strategy was bringing
bare-knuckle politics into what had been low-key local races. In the
run-up to the 1994 election, Leininger’s political action committee,
Texans for Governmental Integrity, sent out glossy flyers suggesting
that one Democratic incumbent—a retired Methodist schoolteacher and
grandmother of five—was a pawn of the “radical homosexual lobby” who
wanted to push steroids and alcohol on children and advocated in-class
demonstrations on “how to masturbate and how to get an abortion!” The
histrionics worked, and the group quickly picked off a handful of
Democrats. The emboldened bloc then set its sights on Republicans who
refused to vote in lockstep. “Either you’d hippity-hop, or they would
throw whatever they could at you,” says Cynthia A. Thornton, a
conservative Republican and former board member, who refers to the bloc
as “the radicals.” 

It took more than a decade of fits and starts,
but the strategy eventually paid off. After the 2006 election,
Republicans claimed ten of fifteen board seats. Seven were held by the
ultra-conservatives, and one by a close ally, giving them an effective
majority. Among the new cadre were some fiery ideologues; in her
self-published book, Cynthia Dunbar of Richmond rails against public
education, which she dubs “tyrannical” and a “tool of perversion,” and
says sending kids to public school is like “throwing them into the
enemy’s flames.” (More recently, she has accused Barack Obama of being
a terrorist sympathizer and suggested he wants America to be attacked
so he can declare martial law.) Then in 2007 Governor Rick Perry
appointed Don McLeroy, a suburban dentist and longstanding bloc member,
as board chairman. This passing of the gavel gave the faction
unprecedented power just as the board was gearing up for the
once-in-a-decade process of rewriting standards for every subject. 

McLeroy has flexed his muscle particularly brazenly in the struggle
over social studies standards. When the process began last January, the
Texas Education Agency assembled a team to tackle each grade. In the
case of eleventh-grade U.S. history, the group was made up of classroom
teachers and history professors—that is, until McLeroy added a man
named Bill Ames. Ames—a volunteer with the ultra- conservative Eagle
Forum and Minuteman militia member who occasionally publishes angry
screeds accusing “illegal immigrant aliens” of infesting America with
diseases or blasting the “environmentalist agenda to destroy
America”—pushed to infuse the standards with his right-wing views and
even managed to add a line requiring books to give space to
conservative icons, “such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the
Moral Majority,” without any liberal counterweight. But for the most
part, the teachers on the team refused to go along. So Ames put in a
call to McLeroy, who demanded to see draft standards for every grade
and then handed them over to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a
conservative think tank founded by his benefactor, James Leininger. The
group combed through the papers and compiled a list of seemingly
damning omissions. Among other things, its analysts claimed that the
writing teams had stripped out key historical figures like George
Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Pat Hardy, a Republican board member
who has sat in on some of the writing-team meetings, insists this isn’t
true. “No one was trying to remove George Washington!” she says. “That
group took very preliminary, unfinished documents and drew all kinds of
wrongheaded conclusions.”

Nevertheless, the allegations drummed up
public outrage, and in April the board voted to stop the writing teams’
work and bring in a panel of experts to guide the process going
forward—“expert,” in this case, meaning any person on whom two board
members could agree. In keeping with the makeup of the board, three of
the six people appointed were right-wing ideologues, among them Peter
Marshall, a Massachusetts-based preacher who has argued that California
wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were God’s punishment for tolerating
gays, and David Barton, former vice chairman of the Texas Republican
Party. Both men are self-styled historians with no relevant academic
training—Barton’s only credential is a bachelor’s degree in religious
education from Oral Roberts University—who argue that the wall of
separation between church and state is a myth. 

When the duo testified before the board in
September, Barton, a lanky man with a silver pompadour, brought along
several glass display cases stuffed with rare documents that illustrate
America’s Christian heritage, among them a battered leather Bible that
was printed by the Congress of the Confederation in 1782, a scrap of
yellowing paper with a biblical poem scrawled by John Quincy Adams, and
a stack of rusty printing plates for McGuffey Readers, popular
late-1800s school books with a strong Christian bent. When he took to
the podium that afternoon, Barton flashed a PowerPoint slide showing
thick metal chains. “I really like the analogy of a chain—that we have
all these chains that run through American history,” he explained in
his rapid-fire twang. But, he added, in the draft social studies
standards, the governmental history chain was riddled with gaps. “We
don’t mention 1638, the first written constitution in America … the
predecessor to the U.S. Constitution,” he noted as a hot pink “1638”
popped up on the screen. By this he meant the Fundamental Orders of
Connecticut, which called for a government based on the “Rule of the
Word of God.” Barton proceeded to rattle off roughly a dozen other
documents that pointed up the theocratic leaning of early American
society, as the years appeared in orange or pink along the length of
the chain. 

Barton’s goal is to pack textbooks with early
American documents that blend government and religion, and paint them
as building blocks of our Constitution. In so doing, he aims to blur
the fact that the Constitution itself cements a wall of separation
between church and state. But his agenda does not stop there. He and
the other conservative experts also want to scrub U.S. history of its
inconvenient blemishes—if they get their way, textbooks will paint
slavery as a relic of British colonialism that America struggled to
cast off from day one and refer to our economic system as “ethical
capitalism.” They also aim to redeem Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy,
a project McLeroy endorses. As he put it in a memo to one of the
writing teams, “Read the latest on McCarthy—He was basically
vindicated.” On the global front, Barton and company want
textbooks to play up clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where
Muslims were the aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing
battle between the West and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for
instance, that the Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy
that pitted America against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were
the “original war against Islamic Terrorism.” What’s more, the group
aims to give history a pro-Republican slant—the most obvious example
being their push to swap the term “democratic” for “republican” when
describing our system of government. Barton, who was hired by the GOP
to do outreach to black churches in the run-up to the 2004 election,
has argued elsewhere that African Americans owe their civil rights
almost entirely to Republicans and that, given the “atrocious”
treatment blacks have gotten at the hands of Democrats, “it might be
much more appropriate that … demands for reparations were made to the
Democrat Party rather than to the federal government.” He is trying to
shoehorn this view into textbooks, partly by shifting the focus of
black history away from the civil rights era to the post-Reconstruction
period, when blacks were friendlier with Republicans. 

Barton and Peter Marshall initially tried to
purge the standards of key figures of the civil rights era, such as
César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall, though they were forced to back
down amid a deafening public uproar. They have since resorted to a more
subtle tack; while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr.
deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn’t be given
credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, “Only
majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional
society.” Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by
whites—in his view, mostly white Republican men. 

While the writing teams have so far made only
modest concessions to the ideologue experts, the board has final say
over the documents’ contents, and the ultraconservative bloc has made
it clear that it wants its experts’ views to get prominent play—a
situation the real experts find deeply unsettling. While in Texas, I
paid a visit to James Kracht, a soft-spoken professor with a halo of
fine white hair, who is a dean at Texas A&M University’s school of
education. Kracht oversaw the writing of Texas’s social studies
standards in the 1990s and is among the experts tapped by the board’s
moderates this time around. I asked him how he thought the process was
going. “I have to be careful what I say,” he replied, looking vaguely
sheepish. “But when the door is closed and I’m by myself, I yell and
scream and pound on the wall.” 

There has already been plenty of screaming and wall pounding in the
battles over standards for other subjects. In late 2007, the English
language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum
planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more
than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light
on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and
critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,”
grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree,
who often acts as the faction’s enforcer. At the bloc’s urging, the
board threw out the teams’ work and hired an outside consultant to
craft new standards from scratch, but the faction still wasn’t
satisfied; when the new drafts came in, one adherent dismissed them as
“unreadable” and “mangled.” In the end, they took matters into their
own hands. The night before the final vote in May 2008, two members of
the bloc, Gail Lowe and Barbara Cargill, met secretly and cobbled
together yet another version. The documents were then slipped under
their allies’ hotel-room doors, and the bloc forced through a vote the
following morning before the other board members even had a chance to
read them. Bradley argued that the whole ordeal was necessary because
the writing teams had clung to their own ideas rather than deferring to
the board. “I don’t think this will happen again, because they got
spanked,” he added. 

A similar scenario played out during the
battle over science standards, which reached a crescendo in early 2009.
Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change
exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring
students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of
global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of
climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any
reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion
years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of
creation. 

McLeroy and company had also hoped to require
science textbooks to address the “strengths and weaknesses” of
scientific theories, including evolution. Scientists see the phrase,
which was first slipped into Texas curriculum standards in the 1980s,
as a back door for bringing creationism into science class. But as soon
as news broke that the board was considering reviving it, letters began
pouring in from scientists around the country, and science professors
began turning out en masse to school board hearings. During public
testimony, one biologist arrived at the podium in a Victorian-era gown,
complete with a flouncy pink bustle, to remind her audience that in the
1800s religious fundamentalists rejected the germ theory of disease; it
has since gained near-universal acceptance. All this fuss made the
bloc’s allies skittish, and when the matter finally went to the floor
last March, it failed by a single vote. 

But the struggle did not end there. McLeroy
piped up and chided his fellow board members, saying, “Somebody’s gotta
stand up to [these] experts!” He and his allies then turned around and
put forward a string of amendments that had much the same effect as the
“strengths and weaknesses” language. Among other things, they require
students to evaluate various explanations for gaps in the fossil record
and weigh whether natural selection alone can account for the
complexity of cells. This mirrors the core arguments of the intelligent
design movement: that life is too complex to be the result of unguided
evolution, and that the fossil evidence for evolution between species
is flimsy. The amendments passed by a wide margin, something McLeroy
counts as a coup. 
“Whoo-eey!” he told me. “We won the Grand Slam, and
the Super Bowl, and the World Cup! Our science standards are light
years ahead of any other state when it comes to challenging evolution!”
Scientists are not so enthusiastic. My last night in Texas, I met David
Hillis, a MacArthur Award–winning evolutionary biologist who advised
the board on the science standards, at a soul-food restaurant in
Austin. “Clearly, some board members just wanted something they could
point to so they could reject science books that don’t give a nod to
creationism,” he said, stabbing his okra with a fork. “If they are able
to use those standards to reject science textbooks, they have won and
science has lost.” 

Even in deeply conservative Texas, the bloc’s breathtaking  hubris—coupled with allegations of vote swapping (see “Money and Power on the  Texas State Board of Education”)—have
spurred a backlash. In May, the Texas state legislature refused to
confirm McLeroy as board chair (Governor Perry replaced him with
another bloc member), and, for the first time since he took office in
1998, he is facing a primary fight. His challenger, Thomas Ratliff, a
lobbyist and legislative consultant whose father was the state’s
lieutenant governor, argues that under McLeroy’s leadership the board
has become a “liability” to the Republican Party. Two other members of
the ultraconservative bloc are also mired in heated primary battles. 

But to date few bloc members have been ousted
in primaries, and even if moderates manage to peel off a few seats, by
that time it will probably be too late. In mid-January, the board will
meet to hammer out the last details of the standards for social
studies, the only remaining subject, and the final vote will be held in
March, around the same time the first primary ballots are counted. This
means that no matter what happens at the ballot box, the next
generation of textbooks will likely bear the fingerprints of the
board’s ultraconservatives—which is just fine with McLeroy. “Remember
Superman?” he asked me, as we sat sipping ice water in his dining room.
“The never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way?
Well, that fight is still going on. There are people out there who want
to replace truth with political correctness. Instead of the American
way they want multiculturalism. We plan to fight back—and, when it
comes to textbooks, we have the power to do it. Sometimes it boggles my
mind the kind of power we have.” 




















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