Textbooks are so expensive to produce that publishers typically prepare only one version of each textbook and sell it to all school districts. Because the textbook market in Texas has been so big for so long, publishers have courted this lucrative market for years. To penetrate this market, textbook publishers tailor their books for approval by the Texas Board of Education. The board can approve or disapprove any textbook it wants, and its ruling is final. Books that do not meet the Texas standards are not allowed to be used in Texas schools. As a result, Texas has a disproportionate influence over the content of textbooks published, not just in Texas, but in every state.
Apparently that's not good enough for the Board of Education. Now the conservatives who dominate the Board are trying to dictate the specific content of those textbooks. See "Texas Conservatives Seek Deeper Stamp on Texts" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/us/politics/11texas.html?hp)
The conservatives on the board claim that their actions are necessary to counter the left-leaning biases of textbooks. They may be right that textbook writers live on the left side. But textbook writers are not required to follow officially mandated standards. The Texas School Board seems intent on using its governmental authority to impose its own politically correct orthodoxy on every school child throughout the state and, by extension, elsewhere. This is censorship exercised by government. I expect this will end up in the court system before you can say “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
This should trouble everyone, regardless of their political orientation. When the government of the former Soviet Union imposed its version of the truth on public discussion, and when governments in countries like Iran and North Korea do it today, we rightly call it "brainwashing." Just because it is Texas doing it this time doesn’t change the fact that it is just plain wrong. Government censorship is offensive everywhere. The board has made a lie out of its public responsibility and given its nemeses on the left ample prospects for visibility and fund-raising.
On the very same day as it ran that article, the New York Times also published a letter from another Texan, Dick Armey, who wrote to extol the virtues of the Tea Party movement (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/opinion/l11brooks.html?ref=opinion). It is ironic that Armey praises the Tea Party for its roots “in the American traditions of individual freedom and constitutional limits on government power.” I am waiting for Dick Armey to take the Texas Board of Education to task for the constitutional limits it has failed to observe. I’m holding my nose, but I’m not holding my breath.
