SchlagerBlog

Today, for a brief moment, I considered making a public comment to the Texas State Board of Education about their proposed social studies curriculum changes, which will presumably be voted on in May. After all, as the owner of a Dallas-based small business that publishes educational materials for history students and teachers, I have a vested interest in these changes for a number of reasons. I care about the history that gets taught to our kids. I care about efforts to politicize teaching standards. And, let’s be blunt: as a CEO engaged in the capitalist free-enterprise pursuit of profit, I have to make sure that our publishing efforts correlate to the social studies standards of a huge state like Texas. That would be true even if we weren’t based in Texas.

However, the urge passed quickly. As I considered posting a public comment to the SBOE, I realized that not only would any such comment be made in vain (the SBOE certainly isn’t going to listen to someone like me on this matter; my company is far too small and inconsequential for me to make a dent in the cacophony surrounding this debate), but more importantly I realized that the battle obscures a larger problem: our public school system–and our society–is failing miserably to adequately equip our students for the future.

Let’s take one example of the proposed amendments to the standards, the one that wants to make sure high school students are able to “describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.” Now, frankly, I think this is a ridiculous addition. While the so-called conservative resurgence is interesting from a political standpoint, I hardly think it’s as important as the committee seems to think. That said, does requiring students to learn about these items do them harm? No, in fact, I don’t. Will learning about the conservative revolution indoctrinate our kids and turn out generations of George W. Bush-loving, National Review-reading patriots? Don’t make me laugh. That may well be the ultimate goal of the committee, but any such effort is doomed to failure in our open, information-overloaded, Internet-era society. Texas students learning under these standards are no more likely to worship at the throne of Phyllis Schafly than they are to swear eternal allegiance to Malcolm X or Mao Zedong.

But more than this, I think the debate obscures the true educational crisis in our society. When the dropout rate is above 30% (well more than 50% in poor, big-city schools in places like Dallas), what difference do a few items in a 42-page list of standards make? By almost every standard, our high schools are being outperformed by those in virtually every other industrialized country. Our system is tied to the past, built to turn out generically educated kids for a 19th-century agricultural society.

I suppose it’s a truism that older generations think standards were tougher when they were growing up, that kids learned more. Still, my own anecdotal evidence leads me to that same conclusion, flawed though it probably is. When we hire entry-level editors just out of college, we often get hundreds of recent graduates applying for a single position. We pick the cream of the crop to interview, and as part of that process we give them a brief exam to test their knowledge of history and current events. The results are always shocking, in a bad way.

Plenty of observers have noted that the hue and cry about Texas history standards influencing the rest of the country because of the state’s pull with textbook publishers is probably overblown. Others have argued that changes in the current era, textbooks are becoming less and less important. I agree with both positions.

Thus, while I lament the stupid political games that the SBOE is playing, I think we’ve taken our eye off the larger picture. We have bigger fish to fry.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 4:11 pm and is filed under History news, Social Sciences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.