public education in texas, doomed

Texas' new potential chair of the Board of Education will make you long for the good old days of anti-evolution dentist Don McLeroy.

Public school teacher creating lesson plans according to Cynthia Dunbar. Illustration by Coke Navarro

Only a month ago there seemed to be a glimmer of hope for science education in Texas as a fundamentalist who thought he was on a mission from God to inject theology into the school curriculum was stripped of his title as Chairman of the State Board of Education. But apparently, deciding that trying to dismantle the state’s public education is a good idea, Governor Rick Perry has his eye on Cynthia Dunbar as the new SBOE chair, a woman who seems to be a living stereotype of a right wing ideologue. She even wrote a book in which she declares that only people who interpret the Bible the way she does are fit to govern and flashes her hatred of public education, comparing sending kids to public schools to throwing them into the maws of demons.

Is it just me or does anyone else think that maybe, just maybe, someone who loathes education and invokes her religion for a free pass to do whatever she wants is not the best person in charge of the curriculums for all of the state’s schools? Even worse, she’s encouraging the other barking mad zealots on the board. In a quick interview with the Houston Chronicle, one such loon, David Bradley, bragged that her appointment would be a cause angst against for “the same members of the pagan left that rejected Don McLeroy because he was a man of faith, The pagan left? Are you serious? And this is a board member deciding what kids will learn in a public school? He sounds more like a guy on a street corner wearing a sandwich board about the the end of days and shouting at those who pass by to repent.

Just to set the record straight, McLeroy was rejected because he was a crank with utter contempt for anyone who didn’t agree with his personal ideology and because he was the leader of other cranks who decided that it was their moral duty to dismantle public education and rebuild it to adhere to their narrow little worldview in which science, logic and reason are despised on a primal level. There are plenty of people who have faith in the supernatural but would much rather see every zealot gone from the board. If you read my discussion with Dan Quinn from the Texas Freedom Network, one of the very few organizations actually defending education from these crazed cranks, you may recall his point that we have intelligence for a reason and instead of blind obedience to dogmas, we should be using all that brain power and encouraging kids to do the same.

It never ceases to amaze me how hardcore, right wing ideologues have such a vested interest in securing a spot in an institution they hate and spend years trying to wreck it. And the funny thing is that they’re paid in our money to do it. From lawmakers who insist that the government is always the cause of any problem, to angry proselytizers who have absolutely no intention of listening to anything but the voices in their heads, they all get to wreck the very things we rely on in our daily life at our expense. If you live in Texas and wonder where your money’s going, part of it ends up in the bank account of a woman who homeschooled her kids because she was convinced that public schools are evil incarnate, yet sits on a board which has the power to dumb down the entire state’s schooling to her extremely low and willfully ignorant standards…