From This Week In Richmond, Senator Ralph Northam offers an in-depth perspective on the issues and challenges facing Virginia.
Category: Education (Page 4 of 4)
Head Start programs across the country eliminated services for 57,000 children in the coming school year to balance budgets diminished by the federal sequester, cutting 1.3 million days from Head Start center calendars and laying off or reducing pay for more than 18,000 employees, according to federal government data scheduled for release Monday.
The cuts also mean the reduction of 1.3 million calendar days at centers across the country. About 18,000 hours will be cut by centers that are dealing with reduced funding by starting days later or ending earlier. Some programs are also eliminating bus services, and children whose parents don’t have reliable transportation may not be able to attend.
Also impacted are Head Start staff—more than 18,000 employees will experience lay offs or reduced pay.
The Texas Taliban — also known as the right-wing majority on the Texas State Board of Education — wants to revise the state’s standards for science textbooks to require the addition of religious pseudoscience when teaching subjects like biology. And this isn’t just bad news for Texas schoolchildren, because the Texas standards will impact the textbooks used by millions of students nationwide.
The Texas State Board of Education recently invited a small group of people to review the biology textbooks that will be used for the next eight years, starting in 2014. But more than half of the reviewers are right-wing religious ideologues,1 some of whom are even skeptics of Darwin’s theory of evolution — considered one of the most reliably established facts in science, and a central tenet of biology.2
The ultimate goal of these sham textbook reviews — and Texas Board of Education curriculum reform — is to enshrine right-wing ideology into Texas textbooks. What’s worse, because of the scale of production of these textbooks, the dictates of the Texas State Board of Education will be included in textbooks used by millions of students in other states.
We can’t let them get away with replacing long-accepted scientific principles with religious pseudoscience and propaganda.3
Tell textbook publishers to stand up to the Texas Taliban and only publish books that are based on sound, peer-reviewed science scholarship.
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1. Dan, “Alarm Bells Are Ringing: Creationists Get Influential Positions in Texas Science Textbook Review.” Texas Freedom Network, July 30, 2013.
2. National Research Council. “Science, Evolution, and Creationism.” Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2008.
3. Gail Collins, “How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us.” The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2012.
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