The board ignored its duty to the citizens of Texas, who may now have to become the unfortunate financers of lawsuits against school districts when teachers take it too far.
The Texas State Board of Education has “thrown school districts under the bus,” according to the Texas Freedom Network (TFN).
As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Texas legislature passed a law last year promoting Bible classes in the public schools, now the State Board of Education, in a 10-5 vote, approved curriculum guidelines that barely provide any guidance to schools on how to teach these courses.
Board member Barbara Cargill, who voted for the guidelines, told the Dallas Morning News the board felt that “[a] school district has the right to choose their own Bible curriculum because they know their students best.”
That may be so, but do they know the law best?
When Bible-course teachers start proselytizing in their classroom, will they even know they are violating the law? How will they know where to draw the line between an academic interpretation of the Bible and their personal spiritual interpretation?
The board ignored its duty to the citizens of Texas, who may now have to become the unfortunate financers of lawsuits against school districts when teachers take it too far.
Even before this measure became law, some school districts in Texas were already overstepping the church-state boundary lines, according to Dr. Mark Chancey, associate professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
“We have looked through thousands of pages of course materials from Texas Bible classes,” Chancey said in a statement issued by TFN, which is a religious liberty organization made up of more than 28,000 religious and community leaders. “We know for a fact what is already happening in most of them. We know for a fact that most courses promote Christian beliefs over those of other religions. Some classes promote creation science. Some classes denigrate Judaism. Some classes explicitly encourage students to convert to Christianity or to adopt Christian devotional practices. This is all well documented, and the board knows it.”
Already this year, a Texas school district in Odessa, Texas, had to settle a lawsuit over this issue, the Dallas News reported.
Yet the state board didn’t even bother to listen to testimony from students, teachers or parents. Instead, board members responded to right-wing groups such as the Free Market Foundation, who applauded the curriculum decision as “giving Texas an academic advantage.”
This just leads us right back to where we started: courses on the Bible are best left up to religious institutions, and politicians and government agencies should stay out of religious instruction. That’s the clear command of our Constitution, and it’s common sense as well.
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