Texas Public Education Reform
Republican State Leaders Attempt to Change the Character of Texas Public Schools
Republican Governor Rick Perry, Republicans in the Texas Legislature, and
Republicans on the State Board of Education are currently attempting to completely reform
the character of Texas public education in far-reaching ways. Teacher qualifications have
already been weakened so that new teachers are no longer required to have the usual Education School
pedagogical training. School financing will be significantly changed, perhaps in ways that
inhibit communities from raising property taxes to adequately support their local schools,
and some districts may not be as well funded as in the past. Most ominously, Republicans hope
to create a program of vouchers for religious and private schools, and hope to add virtual charter schools
to support home schooling at state expense. These new state-funded vouchers and virtual schools would
not be subject to the same curriculum and instructional requirements as the public schools. The
ultimate goal here, of course, is to transfer money from public to sectarian schools to weaken the
public schools, thus making it even more difficult for them to achieve their valuable mission of a
secular liberal education (liberal in the classical sense, of course, meaning liberty,
not the sense the Republicans use it, which is a gratuitous slur).
Since religious schools and home schools almost all intentionally use curricula that distort
modern science in favor of non-scientific religious beliefs such as creationism, intelligent design,
flood geology, and a young Earth, some of these proposals will greatly damage reliable
science education in Texas. If some of the attempted reforms pass, many thousands of Texas
students--who now receive an adequate if not exemplary science education--would find
themselves subject to inferior faith-based pseudoscientific instruction in their new sectarian
and virtual charter schools. This would be a major step backward for Texas science and Texas
business, both of which depend on employees who must possess the technical and critical thinking skills
that accurate and reliable science instruction provides.
Of course, science is not the only subject that will perverted by a new publicly-financed
religious education system. Just about every academic subject will be corrupted and damaged. Health
education will be abstinence only; students will be kept deliberately ignorant of contraception,
abortion, birth control, bodily sexual knowledge, and other vital topics. Information about STDs
and pregnancy will be used only to scare students, not educate them. History will be censored and
distorted to promote American exceptionalism and dominionism, an ultra-patriotic and America-always-right
attitude that requires that the United States dominate every other country in thw world. Economics
and politics will naturally be devoted to championing laissez faire capitalism, industrialism, and
commerce. Classes will ignore and disparage socialism, labor unions, and government regulation. Finally,
every day will start with the Pledge of Allegiance with the the phrase "under God," followed by
a moment of silence in which students are encouraged to pray.
In short, education in the new Texas publicly-funded religious schools and classrooms will be very similar to
the education in current Texas publicly-funded public schools, just without the hypocrisy and denial. And it
will include, of course, constant attention to prayer, God, Jesus, miracles, and other sectarian concerns that,
for the moment, are prohibited in public schools.
Resources
A new resource, the Bush
Administration Torture Memo Scandal, is now available. This resource is included
because it reveals the mendacity and cruelty of the 4Rs (Radical Republican Religious Right) who
currently are in charge of both Texas and the United States. Texas is a microcosm of the United States,
with the executive branch and both houses of the legislature of each controlled by the 4Rs. Religious
Right public officials in Texas look at the Bush administration, observe with awe what it has been able
to get away with using specious and mendacious marketing methods, and try to emulate it.
The results have been devastating for both Texas and America. Contrary
to their pretensions, these radicals are not conservatives: they want to destroy valuable and traditional
American values and institutions, not conserve them. The 4R Bush administration wants to destroy
public education, ruin social security, impugn the value of science, and has contempt for the rights and
lives of ordinary humans. Bush's enthusiasm for torture and killing goes hand in hand with his contempt
for science, democracy, civil rights, and civil liberties. He and his followers justified torture with
the same lies, distortions, and illogical arguments that they use to promote religious school vouchers,
abstinence-only sex education, an exploitative and counter-productive energy policy, flawed environmental
policies, ruinous tax cuts, giveaways to giant drug, insurance, brokerage, and real estate companies, and many other
outrages that hurt most Americans. I see no difference between using lies and illogical reasoning to
justify torture in Iraq or to diminish science in the United States: the same ignorant anti-intellectualism, specious
reasoning, and callous expediency allow both to be pursued. We scientists are against the failure in
critical thinking that allows both--that's where we must focus our attention. Both are fruits of the
same evil tree of ignorance and contempt for reason and evidence.
James Leininger, Paymaster of the Radical
Republican Religious Right (4Rs*) in Texas, is the major figure in the Republican
effort to change the character of Texas public schools in a direction that increases the exposure
of students to religious instruction, pseudoscience (creationism, intelligent design, flood
geology), misguided and counterproductive abstinence-only human sexuality education, and
a sectarian worldview that does not realistically prepare them for the modern world. Leiniger is one of the
major Republican proponents of religious school vouchers and for under-funding public schools and
teachers so as to weaken the public education system and make it more easily replaced by private religious schools.
Dr. Shirley Neeley, Texas Commissioner of Education,
will be an essential ally of Republican Governor Rick Perry is his attempt to change the character
of Texas public schools in ways that benefit the Radical Republican Religious Right. Without her
cooperation or complicity, the 4Rs will fail. Will she resist the attempt of the 4Rs to
destroy Texas public education, or will she cooperate in its destruction?
* The category of 4Rs--the Radical Republican Religious Right--requires some discussion and
qualification. We readily exclude many individuals from this category. Not all Republicans
are members of the religious right; many, perhaps most, Republicans can be described as traditional or business
Republicans: Paleorepublicans who are pro-business, fiscally conservative, and possessing mainstream views
with regard to social policies. They are socially-conservative and traditional, needless to say, but not
authoritarian, coercive, and religiously-motivated. Libertarian Republicans are well known: they are
extremely pro-business, but indistinguishable from liberals with regard to social policies; most libertarians,
in fact, are secularists and non-believers, naturalists rather than supernaturalists, and completely tolerant of
gays, abortion, evolution, and other right-wing social evils. Neoconservative Republicans have many negative
characteristics, the most mendacious being their exploitation of the voting power of Paleorepublicans,
Libertarian Republicans, and Radical Religious Right Republicans to gain political power for their own
extreme ends, which do exactly coincide with the political goals of the others. Neoconservatives are few
in number but most are intellectuals; they have a history of socialist, Trotskyist politics that they
jettisoned in favor of an extreme anti-communism and much-greater political acceptance by the wealthy
and powerful, gaining much political power of their own in the process.
We also exclude Democrats who are often religious, socially conservative, and
even creationists, because when in power they have almost never tried to force their extreme views on others
by explicitly using the direct power of the state (although they certainly encouraged such things and
didn't stop others from doing them). Right now, in Texas, religious and
socially-conservative Democrats are powerless and therefore blameless for the recent unprecedented
attempt by state officials--all Republicans--to change the character of public education, government,
and society.
The 4Rs are inspired and motivated by their extreme religious views; they are ideologues
who reject reason and evidence in favor of their faith-based beliefs. They have no scruples about forcing their
outrageous views and morals on other people using the power of government. They apparently believe that such
power is their due because they have been politically victorious. They are both radicals and
reactionaries: today, progressive ideas, freedoms, and liberties have become so popular, widespread,
and embedded in society that those who wish to return to socially-restrictive, authoritarian, puritanical,
patriarchal, and scientifically-backward beliefs (reactionaries) must resort to using politically-coercive,
mendacious, duplicitous, autocratic methods that are contemptuous of institutions, learning, reason, and
evidence (radical).
The 4Rs are definitely not conservative, using their own definition of that word: conservatives
preserve what is most valuable, ethical, honorable, and noble of the past. To the contrary, the
radical-reactionary 4Rs are willing to abandon treasured institutions such as the public education system, universities,
libraries, museums, public support of the arts, and destroy natural resources, biodiversity, landscapes,
the national park system, and ignore basic human needs such as justice, freedom from disease and hunger,
the right to vote and protest, the right not to have one's labor exploited, and other basic Constitutional
rights such as access to an attorney, habeas corpus, search and seizure, etc. Indeed, the 4Rs work against
all of these ideals and institutions that we now possess after decades of progressive political leadership
and hard-won social activism.
The 4Rs are not conservatives, not moderate, certainly not liberal or
progressive; they are radical-reactionaries whose belief system is shaped by extreme religious views
that propel them to act in irrational, counterproductive, grotesque ways, to destroy socially-valuable, functioning
institutions, to promote willful ignorance among both themselves and their children, to publicly reject
reliable scientific knowledge and adopt weird and bizarre pseudoscientific beliefs, to openly deny reality
and hold fast instead to phantasms of faith-based magic, to promote excessive consumption, human fecundity,
and material greed as worthy goals of a person's life, and to contemptuously ignore the traditions and
courtesies of our political system and indulge instead in character assassination, baiting and humiliation of
opponents, condemning others by guilt by association, and engaging in venality, deception, duplicity, and hypocrisy
in furtherance of their political goals. These are the characteristics of the most extreme public officials
in Texas today, of those who lead this state and represent us in the national government. They are all
radical-reactionary members of the Radical Republican Religious Right.
Last updated: 2005/02/11
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