Nowadays, standards known as TEKS dictate what every Texas student needs to learn. The State Board of Education is in charge of approving these standards. So, when a creationist dentist gained control of the board, those standards started to reflect his beliefs – for better or worse.
Nowadays, standards known as TEKS dictate what every Texas student needs to learn. The State Board of Education is in charge of approving these standards. So, when a creationist dentist gained control of the board, those standards started to reflect his beliefs – for better or worse.
Teaching Texas is a new audio documentary from Wonder Media Network that uncovers the surprising history behind America’s latest culture war.
WMN on Twitter: @wmnmedia
Grace Lynch on Twitter: @gracelynch08
Teaching Texas
Chapter 4: What Sleeping Rocks Dream Of
Transcript
GRACE:
It’s a hot day in late June. We’re in Bryan, Texas, a city right in the middle of the triangle that’s formed by Houston, Dallas, and Austin. And my producer Sara and I are watching a man named Don McLeroy unfold a huge piece of paper.
Don McLeroy:
Okay. This is a chart- used to be good at, okay. Biochemical pathways from Roche.
Grace:
Wow. Can you-
Don McLeroy:
Okay, it's 27 square feet.
Grace:
Okay.
Don McLeroy:
Okay. Do you see how fine that is? You still have to get up super close to read it.
Grace:
Mm-hmm
Don McLeroy:
Okay. For instance, if you go to this little section here
[fades out, Don continues to speak quietly underneath Grace]
GRACE:
Don McLeroy is a dentist by trade. He was also a member of the Texas State Board of Education, from 1998 until 2011. Which is why we ended up in his dental office, listening to him explain one of his favorite topics – the flaws in the theory of evolution.
Don McLeroy:
[fades back up] But you can see how 27 square feet of these biochemical pathways. And guess how many explanations you can get from an evolutionist on how it happened. Oh, you don't get that one.
GRACE:
Don is a tornado of a person. He tends to talk in one long, run-on sentence. He teaches fourth grade Sunday school, and it shows. He has a distinctly elementary school teacher vibe. Like, he would ask us questions, and then immediately feed us the answer.
Don McLeroy:
Guess how many explanations they have?
Sara:
How many?
Don McLeroy:
…to explain evolution, how that happens? Zero! There must be thousands and thousands and thousands complex- they have no evidence!
GRACE:
Don is also a young-earth creationist - he believes that earth was created by God, our planet is about 6,000 years old, and that at one point, people and dinosaurs lived on the earth together.
As you might be able to tell, Don has spent decades of his life trying to convince people that the theory of evolution is wrong.
In fact, right across from where we were sitting, there was a framed photo of Don and Stephen Colbert. Don’s work on the State Board of Education was so polarizing that it was the subject of a documentary that caught Stephen Colbert’s attention. And in 2012, Don was featured on the Colbert Report. That’s how I found out about him.
Colbert:
Please welcome Don McLeroy!
Don McLeroy:
The atheists has the biggest problem. They have to make something come from nothing.
Colbert:
I agree. Something cannot come from nothing.
Don McLeroy:
I teach my fourth grade Sunday school class: when Johnathan Edwards described nothing as what a sleeping rock dreams of. Now can you imagine writing a book about what a sleeping rock dreams of? So they have a problem, the atheist has a problem. The evolutionists already stated they have a problem.
Colbert:
I know what a sleeping rock dreams of. Hot lava on lava action.
Don McLeroy:
Yeah!
GRACE:
Don was actually holding a rock while talking to Colbert. He still has that very same rock. He showed it to us when we visited him.
Don McLeroy:
So I'll tell you what I do with my fourth grade class. I take the same rock. I got permission from Stephen Colbert, and I took this rock. This has been on the Colbert report, national TV. I took that rock and I said, this is what I teach my fourth graders. I said, I teach them that nothing is what a sleeping rock dreams up. Okay, here’s how [fade out]
GRACE:
Don McLeroy teaches his Sunday school class about the problems with evolution. Which he has every right to do. But, while he was on the school board, he introduced his beliefs about science -- and almost every other subject taught in public schools -- into the Texas curriculum. And thus, into textbooks everywhere.
From Wonder Media Network, I’m Grace Lynch, and this is Teaching Texas, episode four.
This week: how a creationist dentist led a conservative majority on the State Board of Education to transform the Texas curriculum.
Even though Don McLeroy’s day job was dentistry, politics and education were a priority for him. He told us that when his kids were little, he would put them to bed, and then stay up late reading political philosophy. All of that reading and thinking led him to the belief that education was incredibly important. So he decided to run for school board.
Don McLeroy:
So I want y'all to look at this. I pulled this out just this morning when I first ran for school board. What's the date?
Grace:
Wow. 1997.
Don McLeroy:
1997. I got elected to the, my local school board. This was the- now flip it over.
Grace:
This is a photo of you and your family.
Don McLeroy:
Yes, yes. [fade out]
GRACE:
Two years after Don joined his local school board, he was elected to the State Board of Education. He became one of the 15 people setting education policy for students all across Texas. The first issue he set out to address was the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills — also known as the TEKS.
Don McLeroy:
You gotta know the history of the TEKS. You gotta know the history.
GRACE:
The TEKS are the standards that dictate what every student needs to know by the time they finish each subject in their grade level. But that’s not where the impact of the TEKS ends. Every year, students in Texas are given standardized tests designed to measure how well they know these standards.
That means that the TEKS affect every part of the educational system in Texas. They impact teachers, who have to teach to the TEKS. They influence school districts, which are evaluated based on standardized testing results. And, like I explained in the last episode, they matter to textbook publishers, who have to write to the TEKS to make sure their textbooks are approved for use in Texas. The same textbooks that are being sold all across the country.
In other words — the TEKS are very important.
When Don joined the state board, he thought the TEKS were bad. They didn’t build on each other. The standards for seventh graders were almost identical to the standards for eighth graders.
Don McLeroy:
It was awful. You should have a bunch of new standards each time that should build. That's what this Jean Shaw talks about. Who was the lady that, uh [fade out]
GRACE:
Don didn’t like the TEKS. If he was the only one who felt that way, it might not have
mattered. But lucky for Don, the conservative backlash to textbooks was in full swing right when he ran for state board.
Dan Quinn:
Opponents of the textbooks ran a pretty awful campaign to defeat as many of the Democrats as they could in the following election.
GRACE:
That’s Dan Quinn again — our fount of knowledge about obscure Texas School Board politics. He told us about the campaign that these conservatives ran to make it onto the board.
Dan Quinn:
And so you would find flyers, uh, on cars or sent to you in the mail that were just political pornography, really. I mean, one of them was a photograph of a Black man and a white man, both shirtless, uh, holding hands. And, uh, the caption was something like, you know, “this is what that Democrat on the state board wants to teach your kids.” Um, it wasn't lost on many people by the way that it was a Black man and a white man. So there was some racism involved in this, as well as the homophobia that was involved in it. Uh, but it was effective. Those Democrats lost and Republicans took control of the board and social conservatives began their rise.
GRACE:
By the time Don was elected to the board, he was joining a sizable block of conservative politicians. And I mean incredibly conservative. Dan Quinn told me some of these members were suspicious of the entire concept of public education.
Dan Quinn:
One of them in 2008 published a book in which she called public education a tool of perversion and said that parents who send their kids to public schools were throwing their kids into the flames of hell. This was somebody on the State Board of Education managing our public schools throughout the state.
GRACE:
To make any changes in the TEKS, the board had to agree through a majority vote. That meant if Don could get eight out of 15 members of the board to add something — anything — to the TEKS, it would go in.
Dan Quinn:
You know, on a personal level, Don is actually a, comes across as a very kind man. Uh, he doesn't come across as a angry fire breather. Um, but when he is on the board he comes across as a very rigid ideologue, um, for the things that he believes in. I mean, there's no compromise. And he is the cause of a lot of the problems that we see in standards and in textbooks today in Texas. He was a big impetus behind passing a lot of that.
GRACE:
Don got the most national attention for changing the way evolution was taught in Texas, which he did by revising the science TEKS. But he had a hand in changing a lot of other TEKS. Each revision he made led to real changes to how students learned that subject in school. And he was really proud of that fact.
Don McLeroy:
I'll now tell you my greatest achievement on the state board education.
Grace:
I would love to hear it.
Don McLeroy:
You wanna hear my greatest achievement? It wasn't in the science, which was pretty good. Wasn't in the history, which I think was really good. It was in English.
GRACE:
The year was 2007. At this point, Don had been on the board of education for just under ten years. He had just been appointed chair by then-Governor Rick Perry. And the board was working on adopting new English standards.
Don McLeroy:
Huge battle, huge battle. You had this English teacher coalition with all the English teachers These are the ones that love to get into the, into the fray. There's, there's two groups of teacher. This is the one that, uh, thought they had- knew everything there was about English standards. And so they had their, their way.
GRACE:
Those English teachers drafted a version of the English TEKS that they wanted to pass. Which is exactly how you might imagine it would happen. The teachers are the ones with experience and pedagogical background. They really seem like the folks who should have a strong say in this situation.
However Don did not like their way.
There was one line in particular that he wanted gone: “compare themes in similar texts.” So Don wrote a replacement.
Don McLeroy:
Identify moral lessons as themes in well known, fable stories, legends, and myths.
GRACE:
Don’s standard passes. It was one line: “Identify moral lessons as themes in well known fables, stories, legends and myths.” Thirteen words. But that line meant that textbook publishers had to add new stories to their books.
Don McLeroy:
So one of the greatest things that happened after that was, uh, a year or so later, we get the textbooks written on the standards. And this publisher came by my office right here. And guess what he tells me. He says, “I want you to look at the stories we got in.”
GRACE:
The new textbooks had stories like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Cinderella. That was the publisher’s interpretation of what Don meant when he said “well-known stories.”
And then, in the classroom, teachers were expected to help their students identify the moral lessons in each of these stories.
Don McLeroy:
I mean, if you're gonna learn to read, read something that's got a moral lesson, says themes, you know, moral lesson.
GRACE:
Instead of kids learning how to analyze literature by comparing and contrasting stories, the focus became learning “moral lessons” from stories that Don thought were important. Just like the Gablers, Don believed that the classroom was a place for kids to learn morals.
And by changing just twelve words in the English TEKS through a simple majority vote, Don imposed that belief on classrooms across the state.
This process of letting board members get the final say means that they can add things to the TEKS that just aren’t accurate. So by the time the TEKS actually make their way to teachers across Texas, things can get confusing.
Sherrie Matula:
Well, I was having to teach the curriculum and I was finding all kinds of weird things in the curriculum.
GRACE:
That’s Sherrie Matula. She was a Texas educator for 40 years. Sherrie sometimes found teaching to the TEKS to be difficult. Often, the standards contained blatant inaccuracies.
Sherrie Matula:
The one that sticks out the most is continually calling the native, native-born indigenous as Indians, and they still have it in the curriculum now in fourth grade, fifth grade, seventh grade and eighth grade. They still are calling them Indians. And of course they're testing them that way. I’m just like [fade out]
GRACE:
Sherrie taught her class using the more accurate terms: native-born or Indigenous. But on the day that her students would have to take the standardized tests, Sherrie had to tell them:
Sherrie Matula:
There are a number of things that you're going to encounter that you will be tested on that are incorrect.
GRACE:
From Don’s perspective, his TEKS revisions were really improving the lives of the kids in these classrooms. Like the English TEKS. Don thought it was incredible that kids got the opportunity to learn these “well known” stories, like Goldie Locks and the Three Bears or Rumplestiltskin.
Don McLeroy:
That's what all the children in Texas were exposed to ‘cause we got that standard in that says well known. Isn't that exciting? I found that super exciting that these kids are getting- what do I want these kids to be challenged? And, and also,
Grace:
Can I, can I ask you a question about this though? You say, well known is the exciting part here, but I, my question is well known by whom?
Don McLeroy:
Well society, us, we all grew up with it, everybody. Everybody knows what well known- you can't find anybody in my generation that didn't get to read these. We read these to our children and now these children would- the disadvantaged kids would never have seen these stories likely, except for they were in their textbooks. I mean, if you’re going to learn to read, read something … [fade out]
GRACE:
I loved Don’s answer to that question. He’d clearly never considered that there wasn’t a straightforward answer to the question. Because for him, it is obvious. “Us!” “Society!” He means, well known to him. And people like him. White, middle class baby boomers and their children. People who aren’t like the “disadvantaged kids” Don is trying to help.
When Don talks about these “disadvantaged kids,” I think he’s talking about kids of color. He’s worried that these kids might not know the stories he grew up with, but he’s not considering that these kids might have a completely different set of stories that they consider well-known. And that those stories are just as valuable.
During the two hours we spent with him, Don talked a lot about “disadvantaged kids.” As a dentist, he worked with a lot of kids who were on Medicaid. That’s a big reason he decided to get into education — to help those kids.
When he talked to us, a big idea he kept coming back to was this concept of imago dei. That’s Latin for “image of god.”
It’s a Christian belief that everyone on this planet is created in the image of God. To Don, that means that every single kid is special and unique, and important. Even — and especially — the disadvantaged kids that he was trying to help by changing the TEKS standards.
The concept of imago dei was so foundational to his beliefs that he put it on his campaign manifesto when he ran for school board. And of course he read it aloud for us:
Don McLeroy:
Bryan is a great town with fine people and outstanding potential. I pledge to work together with the families and schools of Bryan toward the goal of having children who will be successful in life. I will serve on the basis of the following fundamental beliefs. Each- first one, first bullet:each child is special being created in the image of God and has the right to be treated fairly and to be challenged with high expectations of academic success.
GRACE:
Imago dei also informs Don’s belief in creationism. Every child is special and unique because they are divinely created, in the creator's image. God had to create everything. Otherwise, we’d all just be nothing more than cells put together in a random formation.
Don McLeroy:
I, I ask patients all the time. I still ask patients this all the time. I say, “do you think you're just a collection of molecules? And we like to enjoy having a conversation?” And nobody says, yes, that's what they think. I said, well then why do we teach it to our, our children? That they're just, you know, it's, it's frankly wrong. You think about all this 14th amendment and liberty that everybody's supposed to have. Right. Well, why don't we have the liberty to teach our children? We don't think it's right, but we don't. But anyway, that that's beside the point.
GRACE:
So, just like with the English TEKS, when it came time to revise the science standards, Don didn’t hesitate to change them to suit what he thought was right.
For decades, evangelical Christians in Texas were on a crusade to water down how evolution was taught. And Dan Quinn had been watching them closely.
Dan Quinn:
In the late eighties, Texas began to move towards standard space education like everybody else in the country. And, uh, the issue came up of how those standards would address evolution and the compromise they landed on was students would learn about the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories. Of course, the only theory they really were caring about was evolution. Well when that passed creationist groups around the country latched onto that. That became kind of the way to go in and undermine the teaching of evolution. So if a textbook came up for adoption and they didn't include the so-called weaknesses of evolution as defined by creationists, then their textbook had to be rejected, they argued.
GRACE:
Students having to learn the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution became a huge problem. It meant that in Texas, teachers were required to teach the “weaknesses” in evolutionary theory, leaving space for discussions about non-science-based intelligent design.
Dan Quinn:
It sort of communicated to them that, oh, there's weaknesses behind this scientific theory for which there's an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence. And that was the big thing that they wanted in there, but over time it occurred to us, really, that the big thing was getting that strengths and weaknesses language out.
GRACE:
The “us” that Dan Quinn is referring to are the people at the Texas Freedom Network, or TFN. TFN was the same organization that mounted a campaign against Neal Frey’s work. At the time, Dan was TFN’s spokesperson. He helped them launch a campaign to remove the phrase “strengths and weaknesses” from the science TEKS — a direct challenge to the state board's conservative members.
Dan Quinn:
The things they want to advocate for are creationism dressed up in the lab coat, um, that, you know, there was this intelligent something — we're not saying it's God, this intelligent something — poofed it all into existence. Uh, and you know, there's evidence for that. Well, there is no evidence for that because that's faith. There's nothing wrong with faith. But you don't teach faith in a science classroom. You teach science in a science classroom, and that they didn't like.
GRACE:
Even though evolution is technically a theory, it’s the best — and only — theory scientists have for how we got here. So teaching kids in a science class that evolution has weaknesses on par with its strengths is just not great science education.
TFN knew this. They started sending out press releases about the extremism in the board to get the word out. They met with Democrats and Republicans on the board, and built a bipartisan coalition to take a stand against the language
But around the same time TFN was doing all this work, Don got sent a book in the mail.
Don McLeroy:
What evolution is by Ernst Mayr. See how wide and thick it is?
Grace:
Mm-hmm
Don McLeroy:
See what it’s … somebody sent me this … [fade out]
GRACE:
The person who sent Don the book was a regular attendee at state board meetings. And he had gone through and meticulously underlined and highlighted it, pointing out all the flaws — Gabler style.
The fact that someone had taken so much time to question evolution really struck Don.
Don McLeroy:
And then I'm at a meeting in early December. And I take this book with me and, uh, we're at a one of those other education meetings you get to go to. And there's Gail Lowe and Barbara Cargill.
GRACE:
Fellow board members and two of Don’s best friends.
Don McLeroy:
And we were sitting on looking and I said, I got this book from this guy. I hadn't met him at the time I met him when he came to the board meetings, I said, and I said, “look at this.” I said, “he went through this much effort because he knew evolution. Wasn't true. He knew it wasn't true.” And I know it's not true. I can tell you that right now. I'm convinced. Okay. I guess I can't absolutely prove it, but I'm as, as skeptic as you can get, okay. Anyway. But what, what's so intriguing, I said, “I, I gotta make a standard.” And a lot of it is talking about stasis [fade out]
GRACE:
Despite Don’s best efforts, the Texas Freedom Network convinced enough moderate conservatives to vote against him. Here’s Dan Quinn:
Dan Quinn:
We built a coalition of Democrats and non-religious right, conservative Republicans on the board who realized that this was a problem. and it was a very close vote, but we did succeed in finally striking by one, by a single vote, the strengths and weaknesses language in the standards. And that was in 2009. Don wasn't happy with all of that.
GRACE:
Students were no longer required to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of evolution. So Don and his fellow conservatives were faced with a new challenge: how do you get students to learn about the supposed flaws in evolution, if there's no standard telling them to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of evolution?
Don came up with a solution, with help from a fellow conservative board member named Cynthia Dunbar. Remember earlier, when Dan was talking about the board member who said public education was a tool of perversion? Yeah, that was Cynthia Dunbar.
Here was the first science standard that Don and Cynthia put up for approval:
Don McLeroy:
Analyze and evaluate. This is the evolution section. Scientific explanations concerning sudden appearance, stasis, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record. Three main patterns in the fossil record.
GRACE:
If you’re not steeped in creationist thinking, you probably don’t know what he’s talking about.
Stasis, sudden appearance, and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record are three supposed weaknesses in evolution. They’re all scientifically problematic, but as an example: with stasis, creationists claim that since there are creatures today that have not noticeably changed from their ancient ancestors in the fossil record, evolution must not be happening.
So instead of having students identify the weakness of evolutionary theory, Don has them analyze and evaluate stasis, which is a specific weakness he identified.
There’s nothing wrong with analyzing and evaluating per se. But having students analyze and evaluate specific creationist talking points, means they were wading deeper into the weeds of creationist thinking. It wasn’t as broadly damaging as the “strengths and weaknesses” language, but it wasn’t great.
Still, the standard passed.
Don McLeroy:
The people were stunned it passed. I made my little eloquent speech to get it, and everybody was shocked. Okay.So, uh, so I'd said accomplished. I was so thrilled.
GRACE:
So in the end, even though TFN fought really hard for changes in the standards, the final science TEKS were more of a compromise between TFN and the board's conservative contingent.
Dan still considers getting that strengths and weaknesses language out of the standards a huge win. And beyond that, TFN did something else: they succeeded in alerting the general public to what Don was doing on the State Board of Education.
Dan Quinn:
I think most people realized they were pretty fringe beliefs. I mean, even Republicans in his district had begun to realize, “Hmm, this guy's kind of a little bit out there.” I mean, he had his own website where he- it was a strange thing. He seemed to promote the, this heliocentric theory, but while he was on the board he didn't have to be particularly persuasive to the general public. He only to be persuasive to the religious right members and one extra Republican on the board and he could win. And he won a lot.
GRACE:
Soon after the science standards fight, the State Board of Education caught the attention of the Texas State Legislature. State senators on both sides of the aisle were taken aback by how extreme the board had gotten. So they blocked Don from getting re-nominated as chair.
Don didn’t let that stop him. He turned to the next battle: social studies.
TFN hired independent experts to review the social studies standards that Don and the State Board passed. One of the experts they hired was David Brockman — the scholar of Christian nationalism you heard from last episode.
David Brockman:
So it was a real eye opener for me when I looked at the social studies standards because I, I found them to be, um, heavily out of balance, heavily emphasizing Christianity over other religions, and basically providing a kind of one-sidedly positive account of Christianity.
GRACE:
Unsurprisingly, the same board that wanted kids to learn that a Christian God created the earth in science class also wanted kids to have a positive view of Christianity in social studies class.
For example, they decided that they wanted to include Moses as one of the people who influenced America’s founding documents. The idea was Moses wrote the 10 Commandments, and the 10 Commandments are reflected in the founding documents.
David Brockman:
That's how Moses gets in there. It's part of the Christian nationalist narrative that the constitution, the founding documents basically, are based on the Bible. And that's what the founders intended and we've drifted away from that. We've drifted away from, from the Bible, and we need to get back to that original intent.
GRACE:
There is no evidence that Moses had any influence on the founding documents. In fact, America’s founders were fairly explicit that the American government, and the American constitution, were not tied to any organized religion. But, of course, that didn’t matter to the board.
And unlike the science battle, it was really hard to beat Don on social studies.
Dan Quinn:
But man, when it came to social studies, it was death of a thousand cuts. I mean, they just, it was one thing after another that they managed to get through.
GRACE:
When it came to science, people on the board were willing to accept that they weren’t experts. That wasn’t the case for American history.
Dan Quinn:
Everybody thinks that what they know about American history is- that's factual. But a lot of what we learn outside of schools is kind of myth making in some ways, uh, it becomes easily politicized. Um, it's used to promote a particular agenda. Um, and I think when it came to the social studies standards, the Republicans that we worked with that voted with us on science reverted to form as Republicans. And it really didn't make any difference how many scholars, how many historians that we brought before the state board to testify that, you know, Moses really wasn't a major influence on the constitution.
GRACE:
Experts and scholars did try to fight back. But getting through to the board members was almost impossible. During one state board meeting, a scholar got up and told Pat Hardy, a conservative on the board, “you can’t keep this standard about Moses.”
Dan Quinn:
It was a very amiable friendly back and forth, uh, in which the scholar was saying, really, you need to look at this. I don't know how teachers would teach this concept. It's nothing that scholars have looked at in the past. There's no scholarship to look at here. There's no way to, to show parts of the constitution that somehow derived from Moses. I mean, in what ways would you do this? This is really kind of a matter of faith rather than something that’s based in facts. Pat Hardy just finally turned and said, “I understand what you're saying. I just disagree.” And that was it with that. She had, um, made clear her superiority and knowledge on the topic, uh, because by God it was based on what she had learned when she was younger and had learned and believed all over her life. And it didn't really make any difference what the scholars were telling her.
GRACE:
It’s the same logic as forcing students to identify the morals of “well-known” myths. Don wanted kids to learn the myths that he had learned when he was a kid, and in the same way, all the board’s conservatives wanted kids in Texas to learn the myths about American history that they had been taught.
Many of the board's conservative members were steeped in Christian nationalist thought. That meant that they believed that America’s founding was divinely inspired.
So to them, all stories about American history should always be grounded in one basic premise — that God had a hand in creating America. Believing that God had a hand in creating everything — humans, the earth, America — is what underpins all of Don’s ideas.
When we talked to Don, he referenced the first line of the Declaration of Independence as proof that we’re a Christian nation. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Don McLeroy:
The secular people, secular people want to argue that we're a secular state. Yes. I'll agree that yeah. There's no religious test or anything like that. We're a secular, secular state, but we're not founded on secular principles. The secular says, well, there is no truth. There is no God. And that we just evolved. But our constitution, I mean our declaration, the founding document, the one that got the clock started, the clock started ticking in our country asserted there's truth that were created. And there's a creator. Those were biblical principles.
GRACE:
Don thinks secularists believe in nothing. Or, what a sleeping rock dreams of. And I think his desire to push back against all of that “nothing” is what animated a lot of the changes he made to the Texas TEKS.
For what it’s worth, subscribing to secular thought doesn’t mean you have to believe in nothing. There are foundational truths — like equality, justice, and tolerance — that you can aspire to without having to believe in God.
Don didn’t see it that way. He continued changing the TEKS to reflect what he believed in until 2010, when he lost his re-election campaign to a more moderate opponent, Thomas Ratliff. Even after he lost, Don kept attending board meetings, this time as a private citizen, getting up to make public comments about the TEKS.
Say what you will about Don, but it’s clear that he genuinely cares about public education, and the people who are involved in shaping it, whether those people are with him or against him.
Don McLeroy:
I, I, I've never burned a bridge with anybody and I'm not about to, okay. I like these guys.
GRACE:
The very same year TFN was eviscerating the Don for his stance on evolution, he sent Dan Quinn, their spokesperson, a Christmas card.
That’s a refreshing attitude for someone involved in politics to hold. And it’s a far cry from the political ethos we typically see today. Right now, it’s not uncommon for school board meetings to feature shouting parents, all demanding that their kids stop learning Critical Race Theory.
Even though these parents aren’t as neighborly or cheerful as Don, their ideologies can be traced right back to the same set of Christian Nationalist beliefs. And things like structural racism are hard to square with the idea of a divinely founded nation.
David Brockman:
It's undeniable that, that slavery and racism were, were bound up with, with the, the founding. And I think that Christian nationalism doesn't often come up explicitly in the CRT debate. I think that part the revulsion on the part of, um, anti-CRT people to these ideas is that it, in a way it undermines the idea of a divine founding.
GRACE:
Critical Race Theory teaches that the institution of slavery was a fundamental part of America’s founding. That is antithetical to Christian nationalist thought. To them, enslavement was a personal sin, a few bad apples in the divine bushel.
Naming slavery as a crucial component in our country’s origin story makes America itself a sinful nation. And if you’re a Christian nationalist, and someone tells you that the nation you believe is divinely founded is actually a nation built on sin, you might just find yourself at a school board meeting, fighting to keep your beliefs alive.
Tiffany Justice:
We were told many, many times by the K12 cartel that, uh, CRT wasn't being taught in schools. Um, in fact, we have found that it is being taught in schools. They told us it's a graduate level course. It is a graduate level course, and we believe that it belongs just there in graduate school.
GRACE:
Next week on Teaching Texas: how the CRT debate became the new frontier of the education wars.
Teaching Texas is created by me, Grace Lynch. It’s produced by myself and Adesuwa Agbonile. Our editor is Lindsey Kratochwill. Production assistance by Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer. Original theme music by Chelsea Daniel.