The school board of the Cypress-Fairbanks district (Cy-Fair) in Texas voted to delete chapters they didn’t like from textbooks in science. Science teachers in the district were taken aback.
Cy-Fair is located in the Houston suburbs and is one of the largest districts in the state.
Elizabeth Sander of The Houston Chronicle wrote:
The former science coordinator at Cypress-Fairbanks ISD was “appalled” as she watched the conservative stronghold on the school board vote to remove 13 chapters from science, health and education textbooks last month, scrapping in just minutes countless hours of work done by both state and local textbook review committees.
“Chapters are not independent entities. They’re put in an order purposefully, and they build off of prior knowledge, and they reference information in prior areas,” said Debra Hill, who has 40 years of experience in science education. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to take off the chapter on adding and subtracting, and we’ll just skip ahead to multiplication.’”
The material that was deleted will be covered by state tests.
One Cy Falls High School teacher, who served on the review committee for the earth systems course materials, has filed a grievance with the board that will be discussed at Thursday’s board workshop, according to information shared on social media by Trustee Julie Hinaman, the lone opposing vote on removing the chapters. Critics question whether students will get all the information the state intends — and will test for — in a last-minute effort to replace the materials.
The earth science textbook had three entire chapters removed, titled, “Earth Systems and Cycles,” “Mineral and Energy Resources” and “Climate and Climate Change.”
Other content removed from the textbooks included chapters on cultural diversity, vaccines, COVID-19 and climate change. Courses impacted include education, health science, biology and environmental science.
Cy-Fair ISD’s Chief Academic Officer Linda Macias assured board members when they made the vote in May that it would be possible for their curriculum staff to make these changes, even as the staff has been slashed in budget cuts for the 2024-2025 school year.
But Hill isn’t so sure it will actually be possible for Cy-Fair teachers to teach the required Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills next year, she said.
Creating a new curriculum is hard enough, and the district must also provide students with materials that pertain to every single science TEK, she said. Cy-Fair’s curriculum staff and other educators may be responsible for creating their own textbook pages to replace the ones that were deleted, a process that could take countless hours outside of instruction that could drive teachers from the profession altogether, she said.
Plus, Hill hasn’t seen any clarity on who would approve the new instructional materials. The board could theoretically reject new chapters created by the district if it included too much of the type of climate change material that the deleted textbook chapters covered, Hill worried.
“If you want to drive teachers out of education, this is what you should do to them,” she said. “I am just very afraid that students are not going to get access to accurate, TEKS-aligned content.”
Last month, the school board voted to eliminate discussions of vaccines and other topics, while cutting the budget and eliminating 600 positions.
More than a dozen chapters including content on vaccines, cultural diversity, climate change, depopulation and other topics deemed controversial by conservative Cypress-Fairbanks ISD trustees will be removed from textbooks in the state’s third largest school system for the 2024-2025 school year.
Trustees voted 6-1 late Monday to omit the material, after an hourslong discussion about a $138 million budget deficit that is forcing the district to eliminate 600 positions, including 42 curriculum coaches, dozens of librarians and 278 teaching positions.
What were the school board members thinking? Did they think if you don’t teach about climate change, it doesn’t exist?
Who will remove the chapters? Will the publisher? Will teachers cut them out of the textbooks? Will they paste the pages together?
A big thank-you to Trustee Julie Hinaman, who believes in education, not censorship or indoctrination.
Insanity … to the MAX.
The clueless members of the GOP act like toddlers that stick their fingers in their ears and scream, “I don’t hear you.” Denial of reality will not change reality. In order to address changes in climate we must accept it. Wild fires, super storms, and extreme heat are a global problem that BIg Oil would like to ignore because they do not want to dip into their profits to address it. If anything can save us from ourselves, it is accepting the new normal of destructive climate change and using our best scientific minds to help us deal with it.
The teacher that filed a grievance with the Board of Education will probably be asked to resign or retire by the Principal and/or Superintendent. Can’t have intelligent people talking against decisions made by the BoE.
Exactly.
Not a lawyer, just asking: Could the publisher sue for copyright infringement? Even if they’re not claiming they wrote it, they’re misrepresenting the text in a substantially altered manner the copyright owner didn’t intend. They’re presenting an incompetently (by virtue of the glaring omissions) written text that could damage the publisher’s & authors’ reputations.
Far more outrageous premises have been judged to constitute copyright infringement.
Educational publishers have a long, long history of doing whatever Texas and Florida ask of them. If they said, remove Thomas Jefferson, they would remove Thomas Jefferson. If they said, the sun goes around the Earth. They would rewrite their texts to say that the sun goes around the Earth. The polite word for this is meretriciousness. There’s an impolite one that carries the appropriate punch.
I guess I am a little dense. How is it possible for Texas ISD BoE vote to not teach items that are required by the Texas Department of Education part of state wide curriculum? I always believed that school districts HAD to maintain the curriculum required from the state department of education as a minimum. There is absolutely no logic to what that ISD is doing. None!
when I was teaching, Texas was the state that determined by volume of sales what we got in Tennessee.
When I was a baby editor, the company I was working for lost a huge Health adoption in Texas. The committee there was furious that we had referred to lactation in the sentence, “Humans and other mammals lactate.” But what really got their long johns in a wad was the reference to humans as mammals. Equating us with beasts. Not a separate creation. That’s right. In Texas, humans are not mammals. I have no idea what they ARE. Well, I do know what they are. Stupid. Ignorant. Superstitious.
Humans and other non-animals do not have bodily functions. They eat Pop Tarts and Bologna sandwiches. With Kool-Aid.
If Climate Change Is Outlawed,
Only Outlaws Will Have Climate Change.
Hey! It’s Working In Floriduh!
😉
I live in Saint Petersburg, and we are currently experiencing torrential later-afternoon thunderstorms. These have been doing a nasty number on my tomato and pepper plants (though I think I’ve solved the problem now). Here’s what’s happening: the climate change that Repugnicans say doesn’t exist has been heating up the top layer of ocean water. This evaporates, and the water vapor is carried by the prevailing East –> West winds, where it cools and then drops as rain. In places, we have had devasting flooding.
More to come because of Repugnican inaction. Will Trump do anything about this? Well, this is the guy who completely gutted both the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (which Biden restored).
Trump is a living, breathing, one-man (using the term loosely) environmental disaster, or catastrophe.
Was it DeSantis or the legislature or both that banned the term “climate change?” Could we find another term that says the same, like “climate crisis” or “weather disasters” and they can keep banning the words.
If a mote of dust moves in the Flor-uh-duh Capitol, it is because DeSatan has approved or, more likely, called for it publicly or behind closed doors. In May, DeSatan signed a bill that banned the term climate change from state law.
rofl
Don’t worry, Bob. Just keep shopping. CBK
LOL, CBK. Of course. As a patriotic American, I must generate my share of consumer waste.
“What were the school board members thinking? Did they think if you don’t teach about climate change, it doesn’t exist?”
I’ve used the following quote before to explain the insanity of Christian Nationalism (who are Christians in name only). These freaks are throwbacks to the age when the Church was anti science, believed the universe revolved around a flat earth and used the inquisitions, crusades, religious wars, and witch trails to get rid of anyone that didn’t agree with them (including real Christians).
“Stupid is as stupid does.” — Forest Gump
Every vote for Traitor Trump is a vote for a return to that world of ignorance and suffering.
Good news, Lloyd!
I was down in the Ozarks, the Jacks Fork River/Ozark National Scenic Riverways for the last two weeks. In the years since the tRump made his announcement to run for president in 2016 I used to see literally hundreds of Trump/Maga/etc. . . flags and signs on my 4 hour drive down and back. This year? Only one! Seems that many are not proud to be MAGA any more, or perhaps don’t want to support a convicted felon for president. The lack of signage is significant in my mind.
“Critics question whether students will get all the information the state intends — and will test for. . . “Gotta teach to the test, eh!
Such idiots. How dramatically our curricula and pedagogy have devolved because of these tests. Curses upon those who pushed the Common [sic] Core [sic] testing occupation of our schools. (And make no mistake about it, it’s still here; a lot of states have simply given the Common [sic] Core [sic] a state-specific name. Put sewage in a new bottle and it’s still sewage.
Hahaha! That’s the great thing about science. It’s all based on empirical observations, not textbooks. A rule against teaching climate change is, therefore, a rule against the scientific method. I taught a 6th grade science class two years ago. Here’s an example, from my lesson plans, of teaching about climate change without preaching about climate change. You don’t even have to use the words “climate change” during the lesson.
Get some forehead thermometers, some paper, and some pencils. Have the students record the temperatures when pointing the thermometers at asphalt in sunlight, asphalt in shade, moist soil in sunlight, and moist soil in shade. Analyze the data and BOOM! instant proof of urban heat islands and the ability to hypothesize about the causes and effects. It’s not teaching “climate change”. It’s just teaching “science”. As long as you’re not being forced to teach fiction about dinosaurs hanging out with Adam and Eve, you’re good to go, teachers. The Cy-Fair School Board is just huffing and puffing hot air. They. Are. Lame. L-l-l-lame.
Wonderful. And there are many other elementary school science experiments that prove climate change. When people pooh pooh it, they are just demonstrating that they don’t know what a 3rd, 4th, or 5th grader should know.
When Repugnican politicians talk down climate change, reporters and Democratic politicians should say just that. Clearly, you don’t understand third-grade science.
Great assignment, btw.
The Texas state bird should be the ostrich.
On Tue, Jun 18, 2024 at 6:01 AM Diane Ravitch’s blog < comment-reply@wordpress.com> wrote:
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
If you do away with a word, then the thing that it referred to disappears.
So, for example, since we don’t say the “g”-word anymore in Flor-uh-duh, there are no more gays in the state.
They are all in a hot tub with Lindsey Graham in South Carolina.
As I was measuring the air,I saw some change that wasn’t there.It wasn’t there again today;rubes in Cy-Fair had wished it away.
What I don’t get is that deniers are also personally involved with what they are denying . . . like the climate they are leaving to their children, or even like when company officials deny their own research, in one case, about plastic particles in people’s bodies, and then fires the researcher.
But the plastics they manufacture are also in their own and their family’s bodies creating the conditions for all sorts of problems, e.g., cancers–for them. (There was a recent documentary about this on our local PBS station. “We Are All Plastic People Now” 4/21/24 from 2023) CBK
Climate change will delete Texas and Florida no matter what laws either state pass to ignore it. “Florida home insurance rates highest in US, and expected to climb higher. By the numbers: here’s what you should know about Florida homeowners insurance: Florida homeowners pay the most for home insurance, with an average annual rate of $10,996 in 2023. Insurify predicted costs will go up another 7% in 2024 to $11,759″
Politicians lie but insurance rates don’t.
Yup. Soon the state will simply be uninsurable.
Perhaps the legislature can put a tax on bullshit to fund a Socialist state insurance program. Oops, no. Wouldn’t pass. Think of the millions DeSantis and his old boy network would owe.