National debate revives criticism of Texas textbook standards on Civil War

New Texas textbooks, tailored to state standards that downplay the role of slavery in the Civil War and omit mention of Jim Crow laws or the Ku Klux Klan, are drawing criticism again as the nation grapples with its racial history.

By portraying slavery as merely one of several factors pushing Southern states to secede, and by focusing on states’ rights as a primary cause, the standards fail to present a clear and accurate picture of the Civil War, some historians, educators and activists say. Textbooks based on those standards will be used in some of San Antonio’s biggest school districts.

The controversy has flared anew as legislators, educators and others take steps to remove Confederate symbols on public display across the South after nine black worshippers were fatally shot in Charleston, South Carolina. That state’s governor signed a bill Thursday to take down the Confederate flag from its pole on the statehouse grounds. An effort to remove statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and two of his generals at the University of Texas at Austin has gained steam.

The only right that Southern states were fighting for was the right to own slaves, say critics of the textbooks, comparing their portrayal of the Civil War’s causes as a distortion comparable to the way the statues and flags honor a racist heritage.

The State Board of Education adopted the standards in May 2010 on a 9-5 vote after a bitter debate, with Republican board members voting for them, saying they would rectify liberal bias in the way Texas taught history. Democrats voted against the standards.

“There would be those who would say, you know, automatically say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery,” board member Patricia Hardy, R-Fort Worth, said during one meeting. “No. It was states’ rights.”

The standards also don’t require textbooks to include material on Jim Crow laws that perpetuated segregation or on the Ku Klux Klan. But the Texas Education Agency said a review showed that publishers on the list of textbooks the board approved last fall did include those subjects in their books.

Last year, facing renewed criticism about the standards, the board’s chairwoman, Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, said the new materials were “much more fair and balanced than they were before.”

Some districts have chosen to pick books that are off the state’s approved list, taking advantage of a 2011 state law that gave districts more freedom in purchasing books. Most districts still buy books from the list.

Textbooks remain an important resource, but teachers rely on their training and judgment, said Steve Antley, a sixth-grade social studies teacher in Houston Independent School District, the state’s largest. The district is ordering state-approved social studies textbooks from the publishing company Pearson for middle school use but is no longer buying printed textbooks for its high schools, instead using online materials, spokeswoman Holly Huffman said.

“I don’t think there’s really the danger that some agenda can be pushed into (the standards) and that’s somehow going to impact all the kids in Texas,” said Antley, who represents HISD educators as president of the Congress of Houston Teachers. “In the end, teachers are still making decisions about how to teach the course.”

Leslie Price, San Antonio Independent School District spokeswoman, said the district adopted state-approved social studies textbooks for both middle and high school.

Northeast Independent School District also follows the state-approved list of social studies textbooks, spokeswoman Aubrey Chancellor said.

The standards list slavery as one factor among several causes of the Civil War, while historians say it was the driving factor — something Confederate leaders acknowledged before seceding but later tried to revise.

The state emphasizes that students should learn from primary sources — speeches, articles and other materials from the time — but the only two Civil War-related primary sources high school students must read are inaugural addresses by President Abraham Lincoln and Davis, both of whom avoided mentioning slavery for what historians say were differing political reasons. Many other documents, including Texas’ own declaration of secession, cite slavery as the reason for leaving the Union.

“It’s really striking in this context of what the SBOE wanted kids to look at,” said Edward Countryman, a historian at Southern Methodist University whom the Texas Freedom Network, a liberal advocacy group, hired to review the state-approved textbooks. “If these are the only two documents kids read, they’ll say, ‘Well, Lincoln didn’t say anything about it, Davis didn’t say anything about it — well, grandpappy was right, it was about something else.’”

Textbook publishers were “not completely subservient” to the state’s standards, Countryman said, but if they wanted to sell to the huge Texas market, they had to acknowledge them. The books, he says, vary from outright compliance with the standards to “using ways to say, ‘more was going on here.’”