The Texas State Board of Education Needs Your Support! - URGENT!

Please call and email your Senators (if you do not know who your state senator is you can look it up here) Ask them to amend HB 4294 on the floor of the Senate so that the State Board of Education will have authority over digitized textbooks, instead of the current language which gives all the power to The Texas Education Agency through the Commissioner of Education.

Senator Shapiro and other committee members stressed during the Senate Education Committee Hearing that it was not their intention for an unelected bureaucracy to have authority over textbooks. A promise was made to amend the bill so that the SBOE would have the authority to remove factual errors, to check for alignment with the curriculum standards, and to make sure that the way the content is presented is cognitively sound. No agency is going to have the time or the passion to go through the digitized textbooks and give them that same scrutiny.

The bill is now headed to the floor for final passage without the amending language. The word "Commissioner" needs to be replaced with the words "State Board of Education". This would be consistent language that is used for all hardcover textbooks.

These are actual quotes from actual textbooks!!:

• "Greenpeace is a mainstream organization" ( then they proceeded to give out their 1-8oo number to school children)
• "Ronald Reagan's policies helped the rich but hurt the poor" 
• "Many children today no longer pledge their allegiance to a particular nation or country, they now pledge their allegiance to the planet that keeps us alive" 

We NEED the State Board of Education to retain the ability to approve text books and digital media to keep this type propaganda out of our schools!  Please call or email your state senator IMMEDIATELY - this bill is scheduled for a vote as early as TODAY, May 23!