Texas school board members dispute news reports

Despite news reports to the contrary, Texas students will be required to learn about Thomas Jefferson and constitutional religious freedom guarantees, say two prominent members of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE).

Additionally, "Nowhere in our social studies curriculum standards is America referred to as a Christian nation," contrary to claims in a March 22 letter to textbook publishers by the liberal Interfaith Alliance, said board chairman Gail Lowe, a Republican from Lampasas, Texas.

In interviews with the Southern Baptist Texan about new social studies standards for Texas public schools, Lowe and Don McLeroy, the immediate past board chairman, said widely circulated news reports contained numerous inaccuracies, including claims that Thomas Jefferson was left out of the standards, that First Amendment religious freedom guarantees were omitted because conservative board members reject the concept of church-state separation, and that religious dogma had crept into the standards.

The board meeting, held March 10-12 in Austin, made national and international news, chiefly because Texas buys or distributes about 48 million textbooks annually, influencing textbook content for other states.

The Guardian newspaper of London claimed on its blog that the board was "rewriting history," an assertion of the Texas Freedom Network, which bills itself a "mainstream voice to counter the religious right."

In the Interfaith Alliance's letter to textbook publishers, the group's leader, C. Weldon Gaddy, wrote that the board's "most egregious vote" was denying separation of religious and government institutions by rejecting a late amendment by Dallas Democrat Mavis Knight that students learn "the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others."

McLeroy said he believed Knight's amendment would paint the founders as neutral toward religion generally.

"They weren't," McLeroy said. "They simply didn't want a state church, a state religion. That's it. To say that we were against protecting the religious freedoms of all the people, that is all spin from the Texas Freedom Network. That's all it is. Because it's not right."

Lowe added: "The First Amendment very clearly prevents Congress from establishing a national church, butit alsopromotes the free exercise of religion. Students need tounderstand that thisis what the founders intended. It is inaccurateto say the Founding Fathers were neutral about religion; most werestrong proponents of religiousfaith but did not believe in anational church controlled by the federalgovernment."

The new standards require, among other things, that students "trace the development of religious freedom in the United States" and "analyze the impact of the first amendment guarantees of religious freedom on the American way of life." Additionally, students must "identify and define unalienable rights" and "identify the freedoms and rights guaranteed by each amendment in the Bill of Rights."

The board's actions became fodder in the Texas gubernatorial campaign with Bill White, a leading Democratic candidate for governor, claiming on March 17: "Last week the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), led by Rick Perry's appointee, voted to remove Thomas Jefferson from social studies textbook standards. That's right. Thomas Jefferson... was deleted from a list of historical figures who inspired political change."

Jefferson was removed from a list of leading Enlightenment thinkers in world history curricula, but he is included numerous times in U.S. government and American history, according to copies of the standards obtained by the TEXAN. As of March 22, the Texas Education Agency had yet to post the standards online for public viewing.

Lowe said, "The only historical figure mentioned more times than Thomas Jefferson in our curriculum standards is George Washington. There is no way students in Texas will avoid learning of his contributions to our country."

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