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Texas Narrowly Rejects Allowing Academics To Fact-Check Public School Textbooks (csmonitor.com)
jriding writes with news that in a 8-7 vote the Texas State Board of Education rejected a plan to create a group of state university professors to fact-check textbooks approved for the state's 5.2 million public-school students. The CS Monitor reports: "The Board of Education approves textbooks in the nation's second-largest state and stood by its vetting process — despite a Houston-area mother recently complaining that a world geography book used by her son's ninth grade class referred to African slaves as 'workers.' The publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, apologized and moved to make immediate edits."
1. This isn't a school problem. It is a school board problem.
2. Where I live, the public schools are better than many of the private alternatives. I know at least 3 children (including my next door neighbor's child) who left public schools for affordable private alternatives and returned 3 or 4 years later. These children ended up way behind the students who stayed in public schools.
If you can afford the top tier private schools, your child will do fine. But, most families cannot afford the equivalent of college tuition for 12 years.
Its not simple.
The 'facts' are not always truth, and the reviewers have their own bias. Here is a great example, the War of 1812. In the US they teach how England was the belligerent and that it was a war between the US and England, defending the US from England. In Canada, they teach that the US was the aggressor. In other parts of the world they teach that the US sided with Napoleon and include the war as part of the Napoleonic wars. Which is truth?
Oh, I don't know ... because worker seems to imply they had some choice in this instead of being property. Tell you what, we could subject you to the same things as the slaves were, and you could tell us your thoughts on the difference.
This isn't about being PC, this is about pretending people who think that saying "well, it wasn't that bad" aren't morons.
"Workers" aren't chained up, brought thousands of miles, bought and sold, killed or maimed at will.
You simply can't talk about slavery and try claim you're being "PC" by referring to them as "workers" instead of what they really were. At that point you're just saying stupid shit like "well, slavery was a matter of historical perspective, and if you were a landowner these were valuable employees". This is literally whitewashing history to gloss over the details and downplay what actually happened.
That's not PC. That's fully intellectually dishonest, and re-casting slavery to pretend it wasn't that bad. This is fully revisionist history and dishonesty so a bunch of white folks can pretend like it was all a big misunderstanding ... and I say this as a pasty white guy.
Essentially Texas has said their education is no longer about facts, which means who knows what kind of crap will creep into textbooks.
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Arguably, it depends on context:
If I said "Class, the 'Triangular Trade' is the term used to describe the trade route by which Caribbean sugar was shipped to the northern colonies, where it was turned into rum, and the rum shipped to west Africa, where it was traded for workers, who were needed to produce sugar in the Caribbean." it is hard to say, with a straight face, that I am being anything close to accurate: Yes, slaves do work, and people who work are workers, so quoth Merriam Webster; but it's clear that I'm omitting a rather important little detail about the whole arrangement; in a way that can only be described as cravenly dishonest.
If I said: "So, this pie chart shows a breakdown of workers, by occupation, in South Carolina in 1850." I would still be combining enslaved and free laborers into the same pool; but the objective of my lesson would be 'how is the workforce structured?' which makes my elision of 'how is the workforce motivated?' less a lie-by-omission; though it would be a better lesson if I also showed "breakdown of slaves, by occupation, in South Carolina in 1850", and "free labor, by occupation" for comparison.
That's the thing with natural language; many words are 'synonyms' in that at least one definition of word A is more or less the same as one definition of word B; but almost all words have enough distinct nuances to them that you can't get anything like transitivity or well-behaved equivalence relations without brutalizing the meaning of a text(which is kind of an amusing party game: start with a sentence and see who can most entertainingly distort it, exclusively by replacing words with ones that are allegedly 'synonyms'; but not helpful for information transfer).
What I don't know, offhand, is the context used in this particular textbook.
She's a Texas governor Abbot's crony who's in charge of Board of Education. Keep in mind she isn't qualified to run any education system and doesn't believe in it. She homeschooled her own children and sent them to private schools.
So Obama isn't qualified to lead because he sends his kids to private school?
Whah, hail no!!! We don' want none o' them smarty pants egghead perfessers and braniacs messing' with our beloved holy sacred bullshit stories, or where will it end?
Purty soon lil' Johnny and Janey won't be believin' that this here Earth is flat an' was given to us personally by Jebus Christ hisself!!
And the so-called "slaves", they wuzn't slaves, they wuz "involuntary happy helpers" who got free food and shelter!
Not only that, but mah ancestors hunted dinosaurs with a flintlock way back when, it sez so in mah Holy Book, Not that OTHER filthy dirty lyin' FAKE "holy book" that those differnt' lookin' peeple read from, 'cuz they's all goin' ta' HAIL when they die, yes siree, mah pappy done tol' me so.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Is it me or are do others here think the next 20 years in the US is going to be an extremely rough ride? In less than 10 years we will have to deal with kids who grew up with these textbooks in our college system. In another 10 years they will start to become our "leaders". in 40 years they will be in the Senate and House making even worse informed decisions than the morons currently there.
It's simple when you have that privilege available to you.
You're yet another person who is selfish or who can't imagine anything outside of his/her own life.
In his subjectively honest autobiography "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Richard Feynman devotes a chapter (Judging Books by Their Covers) to this and related issues in textbooks. The truth of the matter is the books go mostly un-reviewed. Sure, they hire teams of committees to review them, but more likely than not, nobody on any committee so much as opens them up, much less fact-checks them. They are however lavished with free dinners, vacations, and other graf. The book deals are worth millions, after all.
He recounts when he was on such a committee and was unable to get a criticism in edgewise.
Now, add some religion, politics and general bureaucratic incompetence to that and what you end up with is an all but worthless textbook and a keen hope for a teacher that can teach around it.
Meh. My kids are grown and gone. I wish them luck.
A worker is a person who does work. What do you think slaves did in the fields - play charades? Sing? No, they did work. Hard work. You're the one inventing that workers have to be paid. If you work for a week and your boss is an asshole and doesn't pay you, does that mean you're a slave? No. Is an intern who does work for free considered a slave? No.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"making even worse informed decisions than the morons currently there."
I doubt it. Thats a pretty high hurdle.
or at least I did. My economics course in High School was a propaganda platform for capitalism. There was no discussion of other competing systems, even in a bad light. Nor was there any criticism of capitalism whatsoever. Looking back it's more than a little disturbing. I was very clearly being indoctrinated into a certain way of thinking. We can argue whether it was the right or wrong way to think, but it's still indoctrination, and I was still being encouraged to accept something on 100% faith in what was supposed to be a place of learning...
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He pointed out taking the dollars with the child to pay for an alternative school, something many places do ready.
This is fought tooth and nail by big teacher union big government types to like to spout memes like hey you selfish jerk with privilege...! >:-(
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This is what your parents said.
So ... er... your example of a "controversial" issue is one about which no scientific controversy whatsoever exist ?
The only *controversy* is between science and fossil fuel companies and is about as legitimate as the one that used to exist between science and tobacco sellers and between science and lead sellers. In fact - we have physical proof now that the fossil fuel companies don't even doubt AGW themselves ! They say they do in public, but internally they trust it so absolutely that they based their schedules for arctic drilling on when ice melt would make it most profitable !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The actual wording of the textbook reads:
While that alone may technically be accurate, it's a great mischaracterization of the situation. It's even more egregious because the section of the book it's in is under "Patterns of Immigration". It's not really immigration when it's a forced migration to a place you're not even recognized as a full human let alone any chance, at that time, of being a citizen.
Having no personal experience in choosing textbooks (just buying many of the assigned texts in college - not much choice there), my view on the process is heavily influenced by Richard Feynmann's recounting the time he served on the California Curriculum Commission in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann. For those who haven't read it before, here's his chapter on Judging Books by Their Covers.
Stupidity knows no limits.
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Judging from the current activities on Campus today, in 20 years there will no longer be any Higher Education. Just indoctrination camps where people are sent to learn their place.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
But it's also clear and un-ambiguous from the actual wording that they are referring slaves.
I can't see how anyone could read it and not know that the 'workers' are slaves.
Slaves don't.
If you can't tell the difference, then please submit your resume to me today, I'm Hiring
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I know at least 3 children (including my next door neighbor's child) who left public schools for affordable private alternatives and returned 3 or 4 years later. These children ended up way behind the students who stayed in public schools.
The reality is that there are a few really good private schools that most middle-class families can't afford (unless your child is exceptional, can demonstrate it on paper, and would be considered an asset to the school to offset the rich-but-dumb kids), and a whole lot of "schools" that will take your money but offer very little. They won't even kick out losers, which is really the best reason private schools exist.
Texas public schools are terrible, but the text books aren't even the worst part. Saddest, Texas public schools aren't even close to the worst they're pretty good by red state standards.
That's Antarctic sea ice - other end of the world. And the increase is only 1/3 the area of the ice lost in the Arctic. And note that's *area*, not *volume*. Old sea ice tends to get very thick over the decades, young sea ice, not so much. And I would guess that the increase in Antarctic sea ice is related to the ongoing melting of the continental ice sheet - as fresh water flows out to sea the surface water is becoming much less salty and thus freezes at warmer temperatures. (fresh water floats on salt water, and salt lowers the freezing point - that's why they salt roads to remove ice,).
Nobody claims that global warming will be uniform, in fact it's expected that some areas will get colder as weather patterns change. As will transient cold spells such as the polar vortex related freezes we've been having lately.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
A problem with your approach is that a parent can only employ your so-called solution for his or her own kids. He or she can't also send someone else's kids to a private school. Yet, these other kids are also to be a part of society's future and, potentially, shaping it in a significant way. So, the better approach is to address situations such as this textbook one in Texas so that the majority of kids learn what's right and real and not just the few that, purely by chance, were born into a situation that supported the attending of a private school.
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Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
Right, there's a global conspiracy to create a hoax about something that any high school student can verify with a prism and thermometer (or any college student with access to a proper spectrometer). And FYI it's carbon dioxide that has a strong infrared absorption line. Different molecular compounds have different optical characteristics. Consider that both coal and diamond are pure carbon, but their difference in molecular structure gives them radically different properties.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You might as well be explaining this to my cat for all the good it will do. At some point, you just have to accept that at this point, climate change denial is simply a religion.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You might ask a slave that question. I'm sure he'd happily clarify the distinction.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You have to realize how politicized and religiously bent the texas government is. Any vetting group would be made up of specifically hand-picked individuals who would meet certain religious and political views. It would be about as academic as the Westboro Baptist Church.
It's disingenuous to call a slave a 'worker' because it intentionally leaves out important context. The fact that they were slaves instead of free men is an important thing to understand in a history book.
And it would be disingenuous if it was intentional and there was no mention of slaves elsewhere. The fact that the "offending" sentence already used the word slave once in the sentence shows that they weren't trying to hide the fact that they were slaves.
A few more way to write it would be:
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of men, women, and children from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of people from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of them from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
Are these all offensive too because they fail to use the word slave a second time?
Sure, they could have picked one of these other sentences which might have been better but don't assume the author was being disingenuous and trying to imply something when most likely the word selected was done haphazardly with very little intentional thought.
But if you want it to be the most factual and truthful, how about this one:
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of african natives captured and sold primarily by their native country men and rival tribes from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
It's immigration (and emigration) whenever a group of people migrate from one region to another, regardless of what the reason is or how they're treated.
It's a little bit of a tricky word territory because it would be inaccurate to call them "immigrants". That word is usually used in modern English to refer to non-forced migration, so could make the reader draw inaccurate conclusions.
It is, though, completely reasonable to put the event under a discussion of "Patterns of Immigration", because that is clearly referring to large-scale movements of people with important sociological and historical impacts. Historically, many major human migrations have been the result of slavery, exile, genocide, and other such unpleasant and rather non-voluntary reasons. They're still called migrations.
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And with the Charter schools it becomes a vicious cycle.
1. Charter school takes public school money.
2. Charter school only takes in "good" students (e.g. not kids with low grades or with difficulties that would require extra assistance).
3. Students with "difficulties" are left in the public schools who have less money to help them.
4. Charter schools get better test scores than public schools. (Since they get to pick and choose not only what students they take but what test results they publish.)
5. Businesses that run charter schools profit and donate money to politicians.
6. Politicians call for more charter schools and to close public schools.
7. Repeat 1 - 6.
Unfortunately, we're seeing this in action in NY and it's not pretty.
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Oh, I don't know ... because worker seems to imply they had some choice in this instead of being property.
Slave labor is still labor. They're still workers, and they still need to get paid. The difference is we pay them what we want, not what they want; sometimes we don't pay them enough, and they starve, and it's expensive.
That's something a lot of people miss: there's all kinds of novels written in worlds where they reference some backwards nation or evil corporation using slave labor and thus having infinite resources because it's free. Problem is you have to feed your slaves or they die; you have to give them medical care or they don't produce as good a rate of return; and somebody has to make that shit. Slaves are farming food? That's great. You can take, say, 90% of it, and the other 10% is their pay because they need to not die or you'll need to spend 60 times their monthly budget on a new slave to replace them. Think about how useless an 8 year old is as a worker; do you want to sink all that slave labor into building a new slave, 8 or 10 or 14 years before it's even useful? Maybe you can get a better deal paying sailors for 10 months of their time sailing to another country, abducting people, and sailing back with their catch.
Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe... if you lived long enough to be slave labor. Getting abducted from your home, dragged packed like sardines in the ship, more than half your comrades dying of disease and malnutrition, poked, prodded, sold, screamed at... if you made it, what you got was a shitty life akin to poverty in prison. People imagine slave masters constantly beating slaves while smiling wickedly with demon fangs poking out of their mouths; in reality, the actual labor wasn't too bad, just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
What it was was inefficient, expensive, and nationally embarrassing. It was so embarrassing we instituted a compromise in the Union whereby half of all states would be slave states for some 50 years, after which the Federal Government was allowed to legislate slavery away. Then we got in a war with ourselves about the whole thing. The end of slavery was put on the horizon, and then we took it by force when we got there because that's what we agreed on.
People want to write revisionist history. Some folks want to downplay the facts; others want to play them up until we're looking back on gloating, horned demons. The truth is somewhere in the middle--but not right in the middle, like the "fair and balanced" advocates want you to believe. Averaging the wrong views doesn't get you the right view; it's usually off-center.
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This is just one more indication of the sorry state of education in our country. Why should we present accurate, fair, and objective material to our students? It seems to me that this is an effort to protect the teaching of creationism, something that has no scientific grounding and is pure religious mythology.
But it's also clear and un-ambiguous from the actual wording that they are referring slaves.
I can't see how anyone could read it and not know that the 'workers' are slaves.
It's clear and unambiguous to an adult, who already knows about slavery and the slave trade. If you're a child, learning about it in school, you don't already know those things. You might wonder what portion of those workers were slaves, or why it was called the slave trade if it was just a migration of workers.
you just have to accept that at this point, climate change denial is simply a religion.
Says the Pope!
Just another day in Paradise
I'd be interested to know who actually chose to use the word "worker." Was it the author or the editor and what is their ideological proclivity?
I'd be interested in knowing if they referred to them only as workers, or if they were first referred to as slaves, because slaves are workers and it's only disingenuous to use that word someplace in your copy if you don't first point out that they are in slavery. Sometimes a job is done by both slaves and employed workers, and both of those classes of people are workers. Of course, this being Texas, it was probably wholly inappropriate, but I'd still like to see the offending copy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, while technically correct, there's a slight difference between "someone else is paying for it" and "everyone chipping in a bit" to pay for something everyone profits from but would be too expensive otherwise.
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Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe... if you lived long enough to be slave labor. Getting abducted from your home, dragged packed like sardines in the ship, more than half your comrades dying of disease and malnutrition, poked, prodded, sold, screamed at... if you made it, what you got was a shitty life akin to poverty in prison. People imagine slave masters constantly beating slaves while smiling wickedly with demon fangs poking out of their mouths; in reality, the actual labor wasn't too bad, just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
The thing about slavery in the US is that people hear it and think of massive plantations utilizing scores of slave labor in horrible conditions, when the reality was much different. Slaves were an expensive investment akin to machinery today. The majority of slaveholders only owned at most a handful of slaves (if that much) and treated them fairly decently. Beating a slave regularly has as much logic as a modern farmer taking a sledgehammer to his tractor because it broke down. Now, was it a horrible system that deprived people of their free will and humanity? Absolutely. Did things like arbitrary beatings and rapes occur? No doubt. But they weren't widespread, and a lot of poor white farmers lived in conditions not too dissimilar than slaves did. About the only differences between poor whites and the slaves was that the whites were still allowed to own property and participate in politics.
I'm sure someone will miscontrue what I said and claim that I said slavery wasn't bad, which it was. But I will admit that I am one of those people that believes the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, but that slavery was simply a symptom of larger underlying factors that caused the war. So that probably makes me a racist in some people's eyes.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Actually capitalism comes out really badly in many sectors when looked at from an economics point of view. Particularly natural monopolies (eg: utilities), or where there is no real competition (eg: emergency heath services).
That's all true, but they weren't exactly lauded kings. They were treated like slaves, and people have to take that out to absurd conclusions: the occasional beating, the rape, the right to just kill them for looking at you wrong, it all translates to evil men satisfying their sadistic bloodlust at all hours of the day.
It's really the kind of mistake fiction writers frequently make: the bad guy doesn't have motivations; he's just evil. He stomps on children and kicks puppies so he can gloat about how deliciously evil he is. Even Holt Fasner and Vladimir Harkonen weren't like that; Fasner only cared about himself, and Vladimir *was* a sadistic ass, but neither of them were evil just to be evil. Even Vladimir Harkonen believed what he did was creating progress, bringing order to a universe fraught with the weak and the unstructured, an untamed wilderness that needed to be paved over and modernized into a giant industrial machine where men labored for more progress; his sadism was a personality quirk, not a big red sign to show that he was evil embodied.
To give slave owners motivations is to make them human; and to make them human is to admit you have the same motivations. Slaves would be useful, and the fruit of slave labor would be desirable; and you reject slavery because it's wrong, and so you try to strangle off that recognition that it would be useful. Most people can't fathom the act of taking the correct course because the things you'd like are simply morally wrong; you're only a good person if you find those things undesirable and have no interest at all. If you simply turn away from the temptation and stand fast to what you believe is right, you're just a black-hearted devil dressed up like a white knight.
Nobody wants to admit that Adolf Hitler was the logical conclusion of every-day human thinking.
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There are indeed two massive errors in that sentence. First, the total number of slaves brought to the entire US from Africa was about 388000, and less than half a million if you count other points of origin, like the Carribean, not "millions". Second, most of those slaves weren't brought to the "southern United States" because they didn't exist yet, they were brought to British colonies that happen to be where the southern United States is located today.
It was European colonialism that forced more than 10 million Africans into slavery, and only a few percent of those slaves ended up in the territory of the US, most of them before the US even existed.
I'd be interested to know who actually chose to use the word "worker." Was it the author or the editor and what is their ideological proclivity?
Hard to say, but given that the word 'slaves' was already used previously in the sentence, best practice in English writing is not to use the word again, but to use another similar word.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Actually there is - pretty much every major climate shift has been accompanied by large extinction events. Just because the regional climate is becoming more hospitable to some life, doesn't mean the existing life isn't dying off, or that the new life it's becoming more conductive to can get there right away.
Sure, the tropics may eventually extend to the poles, but tropical vegetation can only spread by so many yards per year, and in the mean time the existing vegetation is dying off. The effect is even more pronounced for relatively isolated ecosystems such as high mountains. The plants and animals that call them home generally aren't well suited to crossing plains, so as their ecosystem warms they die off, without the ability to move to more polar latitudes. Similarly the low-altitude Amazon Rainforest ecosystem is unlikely to be able to traverse the mountainous chokepoints of Central America - the organisms simply aren't evolved for mountainous living or high altitudes. Some plants will make the leap it in migratory bird droppings, but whether they can survive without the supporting ecosystem they evolved for is an open question.
As for the speed of climate change, yes it IS much faster than anything mankind has experience in thousands of years. At least on a large scale - you can't honestly compare small high-speed changes with large changes that require ecosystems to move thousands of miles to adapt. And if you're comparing the climate adaptability of migratory hunter-gatherers to that of an industrialized society, then perhaps you need to check your assumptions.
And where deserts are concerned, yes, if rainfall increases immediately they should benefit. But you need vegetation, especially trees, immediately upwind to make that a safe assumption - otherwise the increased heat will tend to kill off the borderline vegetation, while the moisture simply passes overhead until it does encounter enough organic volatiles to trigger cloud formation (this is actually a major issue in southern India, where large-scale deforestation has resulted in increasing desertification of the downwind coasts. Meanwhile man-made ecological reserves within the dead zone have led to much increased rainfall downwind.)
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This is what your parents said.
To be fair, we then ended up with Bush. So they weren't entirely wrong......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Number one, there is a controversy. I know you think only famous cosmologists, mechanical engineers who used to host science shows for kids, and the fossil fuel companies count. But there are actual CLIMATE SCIENTISTS who have doubts, not to mention a large potion of the public.
Second, unless you're a fan of damnatio memorae, controversies should be mentioned even if they were wrong. You know, like aether theories, eugenics, phrenology, bloodletting...
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Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe....just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
That sounds bad
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You don't have to go that far to find "actual slaves". You can find quite a few right there in the state of Texas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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FWIW "In April [2005], the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a religious watchdog group, claimed that there have been numerous incidents of religious bias and official promotion of fundamentalist Christianity at the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Col." http://www.monitor.net/monitor... "A 2010 survey found 41 percent of non-Christian cadets faced unwanted proselytizing, even as the religious majority felt that their freedom of speech was being infringed upon." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... "I am on staff at USAFA and will talk about Jesus Christ my Lord and savior to everyone that I work with.” http://www.jta.org/2013/11/21/...
"2. Charter school only takes in "good" students (e.g. not kids with low grades or with difficulties that would require extra assistance)."
Not in my area. There's a lottery.
"3. Students with "difficulties" are left in the public schools who have less money to help them."
The problem with the public schools is they don't remove the "difficult" students any more and put them in a separate location where focus can be put on them while the "non difficult" students can be taught more successfully and cheaper.
"4. Charter schools get better test scores than public schools. (Since they get to pick and choose not only what students they take but what test results they publish.)"
See my response to 2. Also, most parents to opt to put their children in charter schools is because they are actively involved with their children's scholastic achievements and actively involved in helping their child succeed. The problem is that THEIR children suffer because of parents who treat public schools as "day care" that gives them 2 or sometimes 3 meals a day -- even when school is closed over summer in some locations. I think they have higher scores more because of the parents than "picking and choosing".
How about we allow public schools to kick out problem kids and force them in to a few schools set aside for the trouble makers? For the amount of money we've dropped in to public schools in the last 30 years we could go to 50-60 kids per class in the regular schools and probably 1-on-1 at the schools for "bad kids".
That's true; but the point was more toward the extreme views people hold: they know something is bad, so it must be as bad as they can possibly imagine. Rational decisions work best when you hold a realistic world view.
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