I’ve been trying to stay out of this

Yes, it’s about the Texas State Board of Education and the Texas K-12 education standards. Again. I’ve tried to limit my comments to stuff related to science, particularly biology, because that’s what I feel competent to make comments about.

As a faculty member at a university that has about 85% Hispanic students, however, I feel obligated to highlight this bit from a New York Times article yesterday. It concerns the ongoing review of the state’s social studies standards.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

Ms. Berlanga is the representative for the area that includes my institution, by the way.

There’s much more of interest in the Times piece.