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Texas adds Huerta, Winfrey, drops FDR

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Texas’ social studies textbooks may get browner, reports the San Antonio Express-News. A draft of the new curriculum standards adds “Dolores Huerta, Dr. Hector P. Garcia, Sandra Cisneros, Henry B. Gonzalez and Irma Rangel to the list of important Hispanic figures Texas schoolchildren might be discussing in the future.”

Huerta, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America, would join Helen Keller and Clara Barton to show third-graders examples of good citizenship.

Under the proposal, third-graders also would be introduced to Dr. Garcia, a civil rights leader and founder of the American GI Forum who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Reagan.

The late Henry B. Gonzalez of San Antonio could end up in fourth-grade history books as an example “of individuals who modeled active participation in the democratic process.” Gonzalez, who once stood for 22 straight hours on the Texas Senate floor to fight segregation bills, was later a member of the U.S. House for 38 years.

But there isn’t room for everyone. Peter Morrison, a school board member on the grade 5 review panel, “complained that Presidents Eisenhower and Roosevelt were characterized as ‘dead white guys’ during a committee discussion,” reports the Express-News.

On Curriculum Matters, Mary Ann Zehr notes that Franklin D. Roosevelt has been cut  from the list of “significant political and social leaders in the United States,” though he does appear in a section on the Depression.

Henry B. Gonzalez, Thurgood Marshall, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Billy Graham have been added.

. . .  Bill Gates, Sam Walton, and Oprah Winfrey have been added as examples in the U.S. history standards of “American entrepreneurs.”

A majority of Texas students will be Hispanic by 2013, when the new books will come out.


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