AUSTIN — This is what can happen when you ignore experts, don't fully know your history, and are responsible for approving textbooks for Texas schoolchildren, according to critics worried about the State Board of Education:

You might delete someone recognized by Ladies' Home Journal as one of the 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century — citing her membership in a socialist organization.

You could ban a popular children's author from textbooks because his name is the same as a professor who wrote favorably about Marxism.

You might even vote to teach youngsters that U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy's 1950s crusade to smear suspected Communists was vindicated by later research on Soviet spying.

The State Board of Education will meet again this week before taking final action in May on new social studies curriculum standards that will influence history and government textbooks for 4.7 million public school students.

In January, board members ignored the recommendation of experts it appointed to help draft the new social studies standards when it rejected Dolores Huerta as required reading for third-graders. Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers of America with César Chávez and is a former regent for the University of California System. Seven schools are named after her, including Dolores Huerta Elementary School in Fort Worth.

Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, R-Dallas, encouraged colleagues to yank Huerta because “she was a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America Party” and, therefore, did not “exemplify good citizenship” like Helen Keller.

Helen Keller joined a socialist party in 1909 and advocated for socialism the rest of her life.

Without discussion, the board voted 7-4 to remove Huerta.

“This goes to the fundamental issue. The board is not made up of educators, let alone historians,” said Julio Noboa, a history professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, who was one of the board's socials studies experts offering recommendations. “It really makes them look stupid.”

Miller spokeswoman Alexis DeLee said the veteran Dallas board member “thought the story of a child (Keller) who overcame tremendous hardship through the help of her teacher would resonate with small children, especially children with disabilities.”

“She was not referring to (Keller's) political views as an adult,” DeLee said. “She did not know she grew up to become a socialist.”

DeLee noted Huerta remains in the high school history curriculum.

Huerta is now president of the non-profit Dolores Huerta Foundation, which works on issues important to low-income communities.

“I don't know what this silliness is all about,” Huerta said of the board's action. “Probably the real reason is not because I'm a member of the Socialist Democrats of America organization but the fact that I am a registered and voting Democrat. And I've also been an advocate for farmworkers.”

She said her work is what's important — not herself.

The board tentatively decided to add W.E.B. DuBois, who co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to the reading list for elementary school students.

“I was just stunned that I never knew who this man was. He is a true, great American,” board member Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, told his colleagues.

DuBois spent his final years in Ghana, having broken with the NAACP. He joined the Communist Party and pronounced capitalism “doomed to self-destruction.”

Some of the board's votes were embarrassing, McLeroy acknowledged. But, he said, the process can catch mistakes before final action in May.

“Those things will be corrected,” McLeroy said, adding he believes Huerta belongs in the curriculum — along with DuBois, whose communist beliefs did not undermine his status as “an influential leader in helping establish civil rights.”

McLeroy also influenced the board to change a section on McCarthyism so students learn “the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.” In a memo to curriculum writers last fall, McLeroy said McCarthy “was basically vindicated” by the archival documentation.

McCarthy was right about some of the bigger issues, but “virtually none of the people that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Soviet agents turn up” in the new research, Venona scholar and Emory University history professor Harvey Klehr has said.

“The new information from Russian and American archives does not vindicate McCarthy. He remains a demagogue,” Klehr has said.

Some of the 100-plus board appointees say the process is frustrating.

Judy Brodigan, immediate past president of the Texas Council for the Social Studies, said she pushed to have Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale removed from the first-grade curriculum as inappropriate for that age.

“How do you talk about someone who is hung for being a patriot to a 6-year-old? They can't write, so they draw pictures of a man hanging from a noose,” she said.

The experts moved Hale to the fifth grade, but state board members returned him to first grade.

Pat Hardy, R-Fort Worth, encouraged the board to pull Bill Martin Jr. out of the standards.

The board apparently confused the author of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?” with a different Bill Martin who wrote about “Ethical Marxism.”

It's a process that relies only sporadically on expertise, said Keith Erekson, director of the University of Texas at El Paso Center for History Teaching & Learning.

“Experienced review committees, invited experts and the public provide their feedback early in the process before the State Board of Education closes the door in order to do what they want to do,” Erekson said. “That would be like hiring top-rate engineers to design a car only to rush it off the assembly line without inspecting the final accelerator pedal.”