Last year, we took a look at some of the proposed changes members of the Texas School Board had requested be made to textbooks used in the state’s schools. Because Texas has such a huge school system serving nearly 5 million schoolchildren, many of the textbook changes that get made in Texas end up making their way into school books across the country. Over 100 amendments were debated — many of which had a very clear conservative political agenda.
Later this week we’ll be hitting the books again with our guest, activist Zack Kopplin. The Louisiana native became alarmed when he realized that a law that passed the state legislature was making it easier to teach creationism in public schools. Kopplin wrote a research paper on the law when he was just 14 years old. He assumed someone else would take on the law. No one did. So Kopplin started a campaign to repeal the law. He worked with Sir Harry Kroto, a British chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, to write a letter opposing the law that was signed by 78 Nobel laureates. He’s also drafted three bills, two of which have been introduced in the Louisiana state legislature.
To help you prep for the show, we recommend The Revisionaries, a documentary that appeared earlier this year on PBS’s Independent Lens. It tells the story of what happened in Texas in 2010. You can watch the entire film at the PBS website through midnight tonight.
