Yahoo! News: Education News

Texas textbook vote highlights disputes over US history – and how to teach it
True Defectives: The Men Who Sterilized Carrie Buck
College students on Peninsula hold vigil for fallen in Paris attacks

Texas textbook vote highlights disputes over US history – and how to teach it

Posted: 20 Nov 2015 11:57 AM PST

Texas education officials nixed a proposal to let university experts check state textbooks for factual errors – reviving a long-simmering dispute over ideological bias in how history and science are taught in public schools. Some Texas conservatives applauded the state Board of Education's 8 to 7 decision Wednesday to stand by its current process, which relies on citizen panels to vet textbooks. Others, however, say the vote's results are another example of how the nation's increasingly polarized ideologies are affecting school curricula. "This debate is almost entirely driven by ideology, as history is inherently political," writes Brad Cartwright, director of the University of Texas at El Paso Center for History Teaching & Learning, in an e-mail.

True Defectives: The Men Who Sterilized Carrie Buck

Posted: 20 Nov 2015 12:00 AM PST

Buck v. Bell, the 1927 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court approved of sterilizing "imbeciles," is even worse than you think.