Opinion

Is movie about Texas school board a horror tale or a comedy?

It feels wrong to laugh so often during a documentary about public education.

But how else does one respond to a scene where the former head of the Texas State Board of Education explains how dinosaurs were able to fit on Noah's Ark? Or the parts where the same guy, Bryan dentist Don McLeroy, quizzes patients about evolution and sings them Bible songs while they sit captive, mouths full of metal tools, in the dentist's chair?

My personal favorite, and the scene McLeroy tells me gets the most laughs at the screenings he's attended, shows him in a board meeting, insisting on replacing a "hip hop" reference in social studies curriculum with "country music." I don't think many of us who grew up on those beloved ballads of cheatin' and drankin' would ever argue their moral superiority over sinning celebrated in other musical genres.

But it's precisely this hilarity and absurdity that makes the documentary, "The Revisionaries," a must-see for anybody who cares about public education and what, exactly, Texas' 5 million public schoolchildren are learning these days.

"It's hilarious and painful at the same time," says Thomas Ratliff, the Mount Pleasant Republican who took McLeroy's seat in the last election. "Anybody that sees it, I think it scares the jeepers out of them. It's a real eye-opener."

The documentary, which follows Texas' 15-member education board through explosive battles over how to teach evolution and rewrite U.S. history in 2009 and 2010, premiers in Houston at Sundance Cinemas on Oct. 12. McLeroy himself will host a matinee on Oct. 13.

The film underscores the influence of the board not just in Texas, but across America, given Texas' role as one of the gatekeepers of the national textbook market.

McLeroy's portrayal

In the film by Scott Thurman, McLeroy is both protagonist and antagonist. We see him as a person, an affable, genuine guy who's polite even to those with whom he disagrees, a Sunday school teacher and young-Earth creationist who doesn't try to hide his admittedly imperfect belief that humans coexisted with dinosaurs but claims he's not trying to inject his beliefs into curriculum.

Then we see the other side: McLeroy, hard-charging leader of the board's Right Wing bloc, general of the classroom culture wars, doing battle with the "godless left wing," injecting politics at every turn with accomplice and fellow board member Cynthia Dunbar, who at one point in the film prays for the Lord to "invade" our schools.

McLeroy and his cohorts stand up to the science and history "experts" because, after all, somebody has to, and to folks at the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based watchdog organization that seeks to counter the religious right agenda.

We see the messy, confusing process entrusted to 15 citizens who themselves often seem confused, overwhelmed, even bored by the debates over science and history. At one point, a board veteran admits, "I've learned I shouldn't vote on things I don't understand." And she's one of the good ones.

When McLeroy loses his chairmanship, he declares it Providence. Free from the bonds of a leadership position requiring the appearance of neutrality, he gleefully sets about pushing a torrent of amendments to history standards aimed at skewing everything from minority contributions to the definition of church and state. He's like a kid testing the limits of a new toy gun.

All that said, the film's even-handed treatment of McLeroy had me both rooting against his campaign to cast doubt on the theory of evolution, for instance, and somehow also sharing in his anguish when he loses his seat on the board to Ratliff, a moderate Republican.

McLeroy told me this week that he finds the film fair. The laughter doesn't bother him, nor the ribbing he took from Stephen Colbert, who mocked McLeroy's philosophy as "reality by majority vote."

At least, McLeroy says, "there was a vote. We voted. It's not decided by some elite bureaucratic experts who are not in touch with people."

The fact that the film doesn't preach or criticize makes it all the more powerful, says Ron Wetherington, a Southern Methodist University anthropology professor who serves as McLeroy's foil in attempts to restore logic and science back into the debate.

"The effect, because it doesn't have an ax to grind, or an agenda to advance, is all the more disturbing," Wetherington said.

Hoping to spur vote

He says he doesn't expect the film to change minds before the election, but hopes it brings out those who wouldn't otherwise vote. The film's Texas premiere just weeks before Election Day is a reminder of what can happen to our grand democratic experiment when we leave the laboratory unsupervised, when we forget the significance that even down-ballot races have on the future of our state. McLeroy, as the documentary reminds us, lost his seat by only 402 votes, with less than 20 percent of the electorate showing up.

This year, because of redistricting, all 15 seats on the State Board of Education are up for grabs. The new board will choose science and social studies textbooks that will be in classrooms for years to come.

lisa.falkenberg@chron.com