Can the Testifiers Please Take This Outside?
A crazy week at the State Board of Education leads to the adoption of a scaled down, but still bad, required statewide reading list.
In the State Board of Education’s meeting room, slave-owning Thomas Jefferson was an abolitionist. The Clever Teen’s Guide to the Russian Revolution is classical literature. Forcing students to read scriptures from a single religious tradition is religious freedom, and the separation of church and state is a long-exploded myth, like the flat earth or medicinal leeches. And Islam, practiced by approximately 2% of the people in our state, is the greatest threat our civilization has ever known.
This week, the board met to consider two important changes to our public school system: a rightwing required reading list, the first of its kind (read about it here, here, and here), and new Social Studies standards for grades K-12. Both proposals are transparent attempts to establish the value of Christianity for American culture and to denigrate Islam and other faiths. While headlines have focused on the fact that the literary lists will require students to read Bible stories and passages in every grade, that’s not the full extent of the issue—the readings and standards also continually frame Christianity as the motor for Western progress, ignore other religions, and only mention Islam in connection with barbarity and violence.1 And, as I’ve written before, that’s only one (very big) problem with the proposed changes.
The board listened to public comment over both proposals on Monday,2 then debated amendments to the proposals all week before finally voting to adopt both the reading lists and K-8 Social Studies standards on Friday.3
Nearly 500 people signed up to testify on the two proposals, and commenters were roughly evenly split for and against. But throughout the day it became clear that there was a “home” and a “visitor” team, and those who opposed the reading list or the new standards were operating not just on unfamiliar ground, but in an entirely alien universe.
Invited testimony came from three state legislators, all Republicans, all in support of the proposed changes. One, Senator Bob Hall, said, “Islam is not a religion. It is a totalitarian theocracy not unlike totalitarian systems of communism, nazism, and globalism.”
While Democratic Representative Salman Bhojani was limited to two minutes for his testimony on the reading lists, Hall was given as much time as he wanted to speak, and he used a full six minutes to attack Muslims and the Islamic faith. “When they achieve a population majority they will kill, enslave, or tax anyone that does not abandon their previous religion,” Hall continued. He stated that Muslims are compelled to lie to non-Muslims to protect their faith, suggested that Islam sanctions child marriage, and argued that mistreatment of women is inherent to the religion.
After about five minutes of this, a young Muslim woman behind me finally lost it. “Lies,” she said out loud.
The board’s chair, Aaron Kinsey banged the gavel and threatened to have her removed.
It wasn’t the only contentious moment of the day. Earlier, book-banning pastor Rick Scarborough used his comments to publicly misgender another testifier. In the ensuing verbal confrontation, Vice Chair Pam Little pleaded, “Can the testifiers please take this outside?”
Not long after that, outside the boardroom, police had to step in after a woman who spent the morning talking to strangers about Jesus allegedly swatted a phone out of the hands of a sixteen-year-old student, there to testify against the reading lists. As the woman acted like a victim of the teenaged girl, a man who had earlier been removed from the hearing room for refusing to put away his Confederate flag tutted, “There are demons all around this building.”
Testimony lasted from 8:00 a.m. until near midnight, and there were no official breaks longer than a few minutes, so board members wandered in and out of the room, chatting with supporters and stopping for interviews with news outlets. At one press event in the early afternoon, board member Julie Pickren—who earlier in the month called opponents of the proposals “a taxpayer-funded axis of evil”—stood next to far-right operative Frank Gaffney, who argued that “a totalitarian trifecta” of Communists, Sharia supremacists, and “global elites” are seeking to take over the world. “And what they always start with,” said Gaffney, “is the kids.”
“If they can indoctrinate them,” Gaffney continued, “they will inevitably win. This is what is playing out here.”
I thought about framing the day as expertise versus emotion, because it was common to see an English teacher arguing from her experience that the texts in a given grade failed to cover state-mandated standards, a historian pointing out that the proposed social studies standards leave out key elements of American or world history, a Rabbi observing that passages from Hebrew scriptures on the list were poorly translated and could foster anti-Semitism—all followed by a pastor praying for the defeat of the demonic forces threatening American patriotism and the innocence of our children.
But that doesn’t really capture the environment in the room, because the meeting room of the SBOE operates as a bizarro world where real expertise is perfidy and dumb confidence is taken as intelligence.
Arguments from sanity, reality, and experience weren’t just contested last week; they were laughed off as crazy talk. The supporters of the proposals had their own experts and their own reference texts. Several testifiers told board members to read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel; one passed out copies of Raymond Ibrahim’s Sword and Scimitar. And pseudo-historian David Barton served as a sort of absent dean of the proceedings—one testifier gave his book to member Staci Childs in an attempt to “educate” her, and his ally Rick Green helped kick off the day by suggesting that Islam encourages child rape.
The Texas State Board of Education consists of ten Republicans and five Democrats, but all fifteen members don’t participate equally in the questioning of commenters. The Democrats ask questions judiciously, sometimes trying to draw out the absurdities in commenters’ testimony, sometimes asking for elaboration or explanation. But apart from that, they’re powerless. The moderate Republicans—Pam Little, Keven Ellis, Evelyn Brooks, Will Hickman—actually have the most power, but don’t ask many questions or make their presence felt much during public comment.
Instead, in the boardroom, it’s the Julie Pickren and Brandon Hall show. They come down hard on commenters who dissent from the boardroom’s bizarro orthodoxy. “Where in the Constitution is the phrase separation of church and state?” asked Hall of numerous speakers. Pickren operates almost entirely via ad hominem, looking for any personal attack she can levy in order to ignore arguments she doesn’t want to hear. After a group of teachers from Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts presented research showing that the reading lists for grades K-5 failed to cover state-mandated standards, Pickren used a portion of her question time to grill them about keynote speakers at an annual conference.
On Monday, Pickren wore a bright red dress, black- and white-checked cowboy boots, and a felt cowboy hat.4 She and Hall had called for supporters to flood the building, and Christian Nationalist phone company Patriot Mobile chartered buses to the Barbara Jordan Building from other parts of Texas. They got their spectacle and reveled in the attention it brought them.
Fortunately, the spectacle wasn’t everything. TCTELA’s research did convince moderate Republicans to offer amendments removing some texts on the K-5 lists. And while extremists demanded that Republican members reject all Democrat amendments, that didn’t happen, and Hall and Pickren were often outvoted—mitigating some of the damage they sought to do.5 And I can’t emphasize this enough: cutting down the length of the lists from the initial proposal in January was a real victory.
Still, the changes adopted last week will harm Texas students. Earlier, I wrote that if the reading list were to pass, “it will be held up nationwide as joke.” That is already happening.
What’s next?
It’s pretty simple: If we Texans don’t want to lose our public schools, we need to vote for a change. More on that in an upcoming post.
One standard, for example, requires students to “explain early Islam in terms of the Prophet Mohammed’s brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the institutionalization of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.”
I tracked some of the day’s more extraordinary moments in this thread.
The board delayed their vote on some high school social studies courses until their next meeting.
As my friend Leila Green Little pointed out, real Texans wear straw cowboy hats, not felt, in the summer. Pickren’s Texas bona fides are an inch deep.
One amendment offered by conservative Tom Maynard and supported by Hall and Pickren, for example, would have required teachers to post on school websites before the school year any texts used to supplement the required readings. It would have been yet another attempt to micromanage Texas schools. The amendment failed.
If you're not already, you should write a book about all of this, Frank. Briefly -- do you see potential ground for lawsuits in any of the new standards?
I was in the overflow room on Monday and while the TX Rangers and SBOE members maintained some level of decorum in the main meeting room, that was not the case in the overflow room. Conservative attendees openly applauded and made positive comments supporting speakers defaming Islam, in the presence of several audience members who were wearing hijabs. There were some positive moments though: the Muslim testifiers kept their composure and represented their viewpoints well. I thanked many of them individually for coming. Also, repeated efforts by Julie Pickren to insert “Gulf of America” in the SS TEKS were voted down. She even wanted to add that to a standard about EL PASO, which of course is nowhere near the Gulf! And Staci Childs succeeded in preventing them from removing Ruby Bridges from a first grade standard. Her emotional defense—Ruby Bridges was IN first grade!—was compelling. She’s one who does her homework, keeps her cool, and makes her points with sharp intellect. Unfortunately the SS standards as a whole are still an unteachable, ideological mess. The reading list is not as bad as it was originally thanks to TCTELA. Thank you for being there and for your reporting Frank!