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Everyone I talk to has an opinion on this. But few have read the standards or understand the process.

The Texas State Board of Texas is an elected board and hires experts to determine the curriculum. They then modify the experts' recommendations and then publish a final set of basic standards.

Rather than a handful of professors determining the standards, you have an elected board of citizens, hired experts, and the textbook writers working on this. You may end up with a hodge-podge, but it is a lot more inclusive than just a handful of professors. These courses are survey courses anyway.

Here is a list of draft standards for US History 1877 to present.

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/teks/social/USHistory073109.pdf

Reading through this, I really don't see the controversy. For example, they dropped Patton in order to spend more time on blacks in the military - ie Ben Davis and the Tuskegee Airmen.

Here is the list of all standards documents.

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/teks/socialstudiesTEKS.html

Or "Lies My Teacher Told Me."

I had one teacher who would bring copies of newspapers from the period were were studying. We would read the text book, then read the various nations' major newspapers before and after the event. The newspapers in 1914 Europe were a great example. So were those from 1939. He also brought diarists' excerpts. We read the high level summary in the textbook then looked at source material.

The last two weeks of the class, he brought in two historical essays on the same topic. They were diametrically opposed. One essay was pretty glossy and well-documented and looked pretty fab. He broke us into two groups and we had to go look up the citations. The fab essay was totally fabricated. The other essay was totally right on its cites. We then had to go out and find independent sources for the assertions in each essay. Turns out, the fabricated essay was right after all.

They dropped FDR to add Billy Graham, too.

The links you provided are to the 2009 revisions. The new standards (which are the ones generating the uproar) are the 2011 revisions, and I can't find them online anywhere - but I don't have any particular reason to think that the media is reporting the changes any more inaccurately than the media reports anything else.

Austin,

This is a fair statement. I have followed the press coverage and have not considered really looking at the documentation so in the next few days I will spend some time looking through it and form my opinion from there.

Anyone else who wants to look at the information here is a link to the updated documentation. As of now, it was last updated 6/25/2010.

http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index2.aspx?id=3643

OMG "work" on a 3rd grade level spelling list. Geez, just when you think it can't get any worse LOL