Texas has instituted an historic education effort to rescue its students from lackluster learning. “Lackluster” may be a euphemism, hiding the frightening reality that the majority of Texas K-12 students are not reading at grade-level. In response, Texas approved the Open Education Resources (OER) project, which will provide free, online, high-quality instructional materials to Texas public schools. Which schools? Any that want the materials. The program is entirely optional.
The paragraph above sounds like a good-news story. And it is. But you wouldn’t know that from reading the mischaracterizations of the OER initiative, such as this: “the Texas American Federation of Teachers (AFT) cited a report from the Texas Freedom Network in its warning that the ‘materials overemphasize Christianity while giving little coverage to other religions or belief systems’ and that its ‘references to Christianity and its influence and impact whitewash and distort historical truth.’”
In a like vein, The 74 published an article with this breathless title: “Exclusive: Texas Seeks to Inject Bible Stories into Elementary School Reading Program.” It quotes SMU’s Mark Chancey, who opines, “Sometimes the legitimate reason of cultural literacy is used as a smokescreen to hide religious and ideological agendas.”
Heard any evidence against the content of the OER curriculum yet? Neither have I. In fact, I can’t help but think that these broadsides are being fired by folks too busy to take the time to read the proposed curriculum—all of which is and has been available free, online, for inspection.
I served on the Advisory Board to TEA on the OER. After spending months reviewing the K-5 materials, I’m saddened by the inaccurate reportage.
Let me set the record straight.
The OER curriculum currently under consideration draws most heavily from E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum. You might remember Hirsch as the author of “Cultural Literacy.” The point of his book is the point of the OER curriculum, namely, that learning not only how to read but also how to understand what you’re reading requires more than merely “decoding” words—it requires above all knowledge of the cultural and historical context in which the words were written. This is the reason for the inclusion of Biblical references and stories in the curriculum—you cannot hope to understand the world we live in if you’re ignorant of the Biblical stories and sayings that play a great role in framing our world and understanding our history.
Let me give an example: The proposed OER unit on Roman history has eight pages that specifically cover the life of Jesus from his birth to crucifixion, along with minor mentions in other pages. But the entire unit on Roman history spans over three-hundred pages! Far from “injecting the Bible,” teaching students about Jesus Christ is, instead, indispensable to understanding the unit under study, Roman history.
Or can you give me an accurate history of Rome without mentioning Christianity or its founder? If so, let me see it.
Credit goes to The 74 for including a contrarian view of the matter. It cites Robert Jackson of the Institute for Classical Education at Florida’s Flagler College: “They’re going to need to have some biblical literacy, if only to interpret John Milton, or Dante or Shakespeare.”
Think about the phrases and concepts we all use, whether we are Christian or not, in everyday speech and writing: a Good Samaritan, forbidden fruit, Prodigal Son, David versus Goliath, to mention a few. The point of including Biblical references in the curriculum is that you cannot understand your own culture without them, whether you are Christian or not, or even profess no religion.
The OER is not proselytizing, not preaching, and not engaging in a hidden agenda—that’s why the entire curriculum, including all lesson plans, student activities, vocabulary lists, etc., are freely available to anyone who wants to click on the curriculum on their laptop. The new curriculum is also entirely optional for teachers and schools.
But the best news of all, and proof of the OER concept, comes from initial surveys in the Lubbock and Temple Independent School districts. Lubbock saw a 21 percent increase in the number of African-Americans who now read at grade-level, along with a 19 percent increase for Hispanics—in the first year! Temple, a majority low-income and Hispanic district, saw a 13 percent increase in students now reading at grade level, also in the first year. Why isn’t this at least one of the headlines? Do the OER’s critics think it insignificant? And, if so, why?
Finally, consider the fact that Texas (rightly) requires study of both the Declaration of Independence and the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King’s “Letter” is rife with Biblical references, and the Declaration derives our rights and liberties from the “laws of Nature and Nature’s God.”
To be sure, Zeph Capo, Texas AFT’s president, was quick to confess that “It is impossible to teach history without understanding the impact of religion on historical figures such as Martin Luther or Martin Luther King, Jr., for that matter. There is something wrong, though, with using ‘classical education’ as a cover for the creep of Christian Nationalist philosophy into our classrooms.”
Again, we hear vague suspicion of, this time, “creep[ing]. . . Christian Nationalist philosophy.” The evidence for this? You won’t find it in the OER materials.
Nor can the AFT’s statement giving its “blessing” to teaching King’s “Letter” extricate it from its self-inflicted logical conundrum. Why? Consider the content of King’s “Letter”—King draws a parallel between his plight and that of the Apostle Paul, who “left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world.” King responds to charges that he is an “extremist” by asking, “Was not Jesus an extremist for love?”
King refers to the Bible story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who refused to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar. He mentions the early Christians, for whom death was preferable rather than “bow[ing] before the gods of the Roman Empire.”
King quotes the Hebrew prophet, Amos, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” He also refers to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”
On the basis of the argument espoused by the critics of Texas’ OER curriculum, King’s letter likewise “injects the Bible.” Accordingly, the OER’s critics are driven by the (il)logic of their position to ban both MLK’s Birmingham letter and the Declaration of Independence from Texas public K-12 schools.
And this shows the bad reasoning, as well as the intolerance, of the OER’s critics.