Members of the Tennessee House Government Operations Committee are scheduled to discuss and debate two bills this week that address legislative approval of school textbooks.
Tennessee Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) sponsors one bill, HB 2666. If enacted into law, members of the State Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission would have to provide a copy of the commission’s proposed textbook and instructional materials list to legislators.
Another bill, HB 2108, would require that all math, science, and social studies textbooks and instructional materials conform to state academic standards. The bill would also prohibit the State Board of Education from granting waivers for textbooks or instructional materials that do not align with state academic standards. Representative Debra Moody (R-Covington) is sponsoring that bill.
In 2019, a Murfreesboro resident told The Tennessee Star that she found several examples of a left-wing ideological bias in the textbooks that school officials hand out to Tennessee’s public school students.
This woman, Jackie Archer also said the textbooks she’s examined seem to glorify Islam at the expense of other religions.
Archer, at the time, was affiliated with Tennessee Rising, as well as Tennessee Textbook Advocates. Archer said both groups look for bias in public school textbooks.
Last year, Knox County Schools (KCS) approved a dual enrollment course from East Tennessee State University (ETSU) that has historically taught Critical Race Theory (CRT). The KCS board of education approved the course offering, “SOWK 1030: Cultural Diversity,” as part of a larger list of ETSU dual enrollment courses.
The course is characterized as a pre-professional social work curriculum focused on social justice topics such as “diversity within diversity,” referring to intersectionality – a concept coined by preeminent CRT scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Members of the Tennessee General Assembly last year passed a bill effectively banning CRT from K-12 education.
Three days before this year’s federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, former presidential candidate Ben Carson told a packed audience in Williamson County that CRT defies the teachings of the late civil rights activist.
Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star and The Georgia Star News. Follow Chris on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and GETTR. Email tips to [email protected].
A message to our supposedly pro-freedom Republican legislators: if you really support individual liberty as a fundamental U.S. right, then quit trying to micro-manage our schools’ curricula. That job is for teachers, not for legislators who have no academic background in the subjects they wish to tackle. Moreover, your attempts to micro-manage our educational institutions might cause them to lose their accreditation, which could get you into trouble with tax-payer voters if your meddling destroys the value of their childrens’ diplomas when these graduates start looking for jobs or college/graduate school. Remember what happened to Eugene Talmadge in Georgia during 1942 when he attempted to pull the same stunt that you Republicans are trying to pull now! It will serve you all right!
California beckons, sir.
Or perhaps Illinois.
Well, I have to wonder if the legislature will have the collective spine to put more effective controls in place. The current provision for waivers is a big loophole in current law.