The wave of book bans sweeping the US, typically reserved for works of fiction deemed controversial, has hit textbooks used in public schools, marking the next step in Republicans’ war on education.
The board of trustees for the Cypress Fairbanks independent school district in Houston voted 6-1 earlier this month to redact certain chapters in science textbooks, including those about vaccines, human growth, diversity, and climate change.
Blasingame, who has served on the board since 2021, did not give a specific explanation for the decision, but said the subjects go beyond what the state requires to teach and creates “a perception that humans are bad”.
Education experts say the move could have far-reaching consequences, prompting similar decisions to omit information in other subjects, and public school districts across the country.
“To ban entire chapters of textbooks and withhold that information from students is not only unconstitutional, but it is taking away their access to real-life ideas that exist in this world,” said Laney Hawes, co-founder of the group.
Kasey Meehan of PEN America, the national non-profit organization committed to free expression, said school board members – who are often publicly elected and do not necessarily have an education background – are increasingly having an outsized influence on the instruction being delivered to students.
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I suppose it's a good thing nobody really reads the textbook. /s
This truly sucks, because it's cutting off a valid source of information, but given how prevalent the issue is on the internet and how kids have access at a younger age than these ghouls ever did, it's like trying to stop a river with a single stick.
Not every kid has equal access to internet or technology at home which is why keeping resources in schools is really important.
Personally I found that being responsible for a textbook for a whole semester helped me as well because I knew I had to take care of it, not lose it, and return it in good condition at the end of the semester which helped me grow more personally responsible.
A good point. It's why I will always be a proponent of books and libraries. Everyone deserves access to the wealth of information we've discovered as a species.
I grew up in New York City. We heard a lot about Unions in our history classes, because most of our parents [and all the teachers] were in a Union. Figured that was the norm for the whole country, because what kid really thinks about how text books are chosen?
Recently heard from another poster that their books siad that Unions were useful in the past, but were bad now because they interfered with the global economy.
There might've been a sort of "Golden period" where Union membership dropped off and benefits and working conditions were still good, but the longer you go without protections the more ground you lose. The global economy statement is also laughable. Are teleconferenced teachers from China taking the American teachers jerbs?
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A California city has agreed to pay $900,000 to a man who was subjected to a 17-hour police interrogation in which officers pressured him to falsely confess to murdering his father, who was alive.
A judge said the questioning appeared to be “unconstitutional psychological torture”, and the city agreed to settle Perez’s lawsuit for $898,000, his lawyer announced this week.
The extraordinary case of a coerced false confession has sparked widespread outrage, with footage showing Perez in extreme emotional and physical distress, including as officers brought his dog in and said the animal would need to be put down due to “depression” from witnessing a murder that had not actually occurred.
Officer Joanna Piña, who took the call, reported Perez Jr’s demeanor as “suspicious”, claiming he seemed “distracted and unconcerned with his father’s disappearance”.
Perez Jr sat for hours of initial questioning while officers obtained additional search warrants allowing them to access devices they had seized.
During the interrogation, Perez Jr started pulling out his hair, hitting himself and tearing off his shirt, nearly falling to the floor, at which point the officers laughed at him and told him he was stressing his dog, the judge summarized.
One of those cases that really should unite literally everyone behind police reform, but will sadly be lost among the noise of all the other horrible shit going on.
I am also struck by what this movement says about the state of universities. It reveals a deep rift between students and administrations. The latter have grown hugely over the past decades and become massive bureaucracies, also generating their own corporate interests. The voices of students and faculty have been gradually marginalised in the process, making productive dialogue often difficult.
Yet we must also be vigilant about the academic culture: when we say that universities must be a “safe space”, this is not only true in terms of physical and emotional integrity (which are paramount) but also in terms of intellectual integrity: a university is a space in which one can be, and should be, safely challenged, rather than confirmed in their convictions.
I’ve been saying for a while that western civilisation, whether you’re a fan or not, has been dying in the universities and that this will leak out to the rest of the culture. The corporatisation, commodification and production-line-ification have been rampant from the educational to the research aspects of the institutions … all without dismantling the underlying feudal structures which are quite good at corrupting higher values in the name of succeeding at the KPI games of the commodification etc.
Unfortunately it’s a boiling frog situation and many academics idealise detatchment from the real world however problematic their institution is. That the for-profit journal system could be built entirely around academics’ labour simply by offering “prestige credits” is astonishing for an allegedly intelligent demographic but tells you all you need to know about how corrupted by libertarian values and behaviours a bunch of clever people trying to attain prestige by proving how clever they are … can get.
The academics I know are all pretty miserable these days. They can see that it's a corrupt, exploitative system and they feel powerless to change it. They spend their time writing grant applications and chasing money, then pumping out papers they know are fairly trivial, but they have to write them to keep the funding coming in. Some of the scientific disciplines are in a slow state of crisis due to a serious loss of confidence in the credibility or value of much of the research. And the younger ones know they'll never get tenure and are on a shit career track potentially forever. But even the ones with tenure seem pretty unhappy, working for these organizations that relentlessly seek money and superficial prestige.
This is so far from what academia ought to be about, and from the enthusiasms that brought these people into it in the first place. I got out 20 years ago because I found this stuff repellent then. It's worse now. it's sad that our society can't provide a place for smart and enthusiastic people to do honest research without all this corrupting quasi-commercial (or sometimes simply commercial) influence.
And it's why I bring up the journal system in every one of these conversations. That happened right under academics' noses and they all bought into it. They were manipulated and fell right into it without caring or even thinking about the wider implications let alone having the culture to act on any issues. Like the Boomer generation and the climate, previous generations of academics let the rest of us down and we've not got a tertiary education system in real trouble but also tied up in so many parts of the broader social institutions that it's gonna be hard to undo. I'm no lover of tech-bro "disruptions", but tertiary education and high level research is actually an area where the (western) world could to with a good dose of that.
Adding to Anaya’s shock, the physician informed her that to stop the infection she needed immediate abortion care, but because of Texas laws, she would have to “keep getting sicker” until the doctor could “prove” to the hospital that her life was on the line.
Anaya’s story underscores the immense struggle Texas patients with high-risk pregnancies – who have lived under strict abortion bans longer than other US residents – have faced for more than two years.
Kate Cox, a Texas woman denied an emergency abortion for her non-viable pregnancy whose separate case attracted national attention, only reinforced the need for clarity.
Instead, we are being forced to continue to carry this huge burden of balancing our job to care for patients with complications against the threat of prosecution and life in jail – it’s an incredibly tough situation to put doctors in.”
However, the TMB’s proposal has disappointed reproductive rights advocates, including plaintiffs in the Zurawski case, who hoped the board would offer a specific list of conditions covered by the law.
In fact, many of the doctors, lawyers and experts who testified during the board’s May meeting worried that the new rules would actually create more obstacles to patient care, as they would force additional reporting requirements on physicians.
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