Is this generation morally superior to the founding generation?  I’ve been asked the question more than once, during interviews regarding a book that I recently co-authored, Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State. I’ll admit that, the first time I was asked, I was a bit taken aback at the sheer arrogance of the question.

Education Policy Commentator EducationNews.org

Whoa!Not so fast. The Texas State Board of Education is poised to sign off on new English / Language Arts / Reading standards (Grades K-12), but nobody has taken the time to make sure that the standards can be taught in a year's time.In other words, the standards, if approved in their present form, could set up an impossible mandate for Texas teachers and their students to meet.

Where we generally get upon falling into discussion of  public school curriculum is, well, about where we are now:  testy,  snappish, anxious, definitely on the low end  of the good feelings meter.

What a rotten shame.  Still, certain principles matter more than good feelings; among them, the principle that if the public schools  are going to provide the children of Texas a high-cost education (if you doubt it’s high cost check your property tax statement), the schools should do it right.

Doing it right,  contrary to widespread belief, doesn’t mean winning a lot of athletic  championships or having the highest-paid football coach, or air-conditioning the indoor tennis courts.  It doesn’t mean raising student self-esteem another notch or two — say, from vainglorious to thoroughly complacent.  Doing it right means shaping student minds and understandings, and helping to form student character, in ways beneficial not only to the students themselves but to the society of which they are part.

In other words, not doing it right isn’t even an option.

Naturally, the subjective chit-chat about curriculum takes in Those Horrible Religious Right People Who Think the Earth Was Created in Seven Days. Which they don’t, by the way.  I offer that only as an example of  the debasement that always seems to enter the curriculum debate.  Some Texans seem more interested in blackguarding other Texans  than in seeing to it that the public schools sharpen young minds as a whetstone hones knives.

And so we come to the growing furor over what the State Board of  Education is likely to do with the first overhaul of the English and language arts curriculum since 1998.  Among the points of contention: alleged cultural insensitivity, as represented in some people’s minds by the board’s failure to put a Hispanic culture expert on a panel looking at the curriculum.

And that’s just the language arts.  When science comes up this fall, it will be Darwin bar the door.  Writes one citizen on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram blog: “It’s time to vote the ‘flat earth’ conservatives out of office and replace them with Texans who are interested in education, not ideology or religious belief.”   Given the ideological character that Darwinian assertions sometimes achieve,  the foregoing qualifies as a very odd statement.  But oddly typical, if that’s not a contradiction in terms.

SBOE  “conservatives,” as they are generally denominated, want the language arts curriculum to impart some understanding of “the classics.”   As the board’s new president,  Don McLeroy, puts it, “I want the kids to be exposed to  a lot of good literature and a rich vocabulary.  I want to be able to see our kids graduate from high school and not have to take remedial classes to go to college.”   McLeroy hasn’t been pleased with the curriculum proposal on offer.  He’s put on the table the prospect of adopting a language arts curriculum 10 years old, written by former teacher Donna Garner. Jeepers — 10 years!  It’s probably got stuff like Vietnam in it. McLeroy hopes so. Less confident is veteran board member Mary Helen Berlanga, a self-proclaimed foe of standardization in curriculum.  “What you see in black and white, that’s what you’re going to see,” she warns.

Oh. We  want it in Mauve Mocha and Bronze Shimmer, do we? To what end?  “Flexibility”?  Flexibility is in general a very good thing, especially contrasted with, shall we say, rigidity.  On the other hand, given that less than 60 percent of  blacks and Hispanics leave Texas high schools with diploma in hand, a little more certainty in our educational arrangements might not come amiss.  A little more depth as well, as per Dr. McLeroy.  What’s wrong with exposure to “good literature and a  good vocabulary.”  

At  a time  within living memory, everything was right with it.  As for complaints about the lack of Latino counsel in the shaping of curriculum, one might indeed see that lack as politically imprudent on the state board’s part.  Nearly half of all Texas public school students are Hispanic. Yet one has also to ask whether there is some innate Latino interest in not confronting good literature and good vocabulary. In English, the language of  the United States.

Recently, Dr. Arthur Laffer, of “Laffer Curve” fame, spoke to a luncheon crowd of over 300 invitees of Frost Bank.  Disclaiming any partisanship (economically speaking, he liked Bill Clinton’s presidency), this top advisor to President Reagan and, more recently, Governor Schwarzenegger, made the case for what could be the “largest fiscal tax crisis in our country’s history” if either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama is elected president, along with a Congress filled with Democrats. The crisis: The Democrats’ policy of taxing the rich more and the middle and lower classes less.