Texas Board Adopts Scores Of New Textbooks

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

Texas schoolchildren will learn about African involvement in slavery, the contributions Hispanics made throughout state history, and a religiously correct time frame of glacial movement when newly adopted history and social studies textbooks hit classrooms next school year.

They will not, however, encounter some original textbook passages that emphasized positive aspects of Islam and Communism, or those that presented the problems of global warming and acid rain as undisputed fact.

As has been a long-standing tradition in the Lone Star State, the selection of history and social studies textbooks, which will be used in classrooms for the next seven years, fueled a vigorous debate over content details large and small. ( "History Repeats Itself in Texas for Textbook-Review Process," Aug. 7, 2002.) And in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 15 adoption by the state board of education, publishers anxious to tap the nearly $250 million the state has earmarked for texts in the subjects made hundreds of changes. Alterations came after board members, interest groups, and citizens highlighted what they saw...