Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

AUSTIN — Biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen F. Austin? Not fit reading material for children in the early grades.

César Chávez? Not worthy of his role-model status.

Christianity? Emphasize its importance.

Such suggestions are part of efforts to rewrite history books for the state's schoolchildren, producing some expert recommendations that are sure to inflame Texans, no matter their political leanings.

The State Board of Education expects to start discussing new social studies curriculum standards this week, with members of the public getting their first opportunity to speak up this fall and a final board vote coming next spring.

The new curriculum and textbooks are scheduled to reach classrooms in fall 2013.

The process is a long one with lasting impact: reshaping the social studies curriculum, including history, for 4.7 million children at Texas public schools.

“This is something that every parent would want to be paying attention to. This will determine whether or not the kids get the education needed to succeed in college and jobs in the future,” said Dan Quinn of the Austin-based Texas Freedom Network. “If we are going to politicize our kids' education, that will put our kids behind other kids when they're competing for college and good-paying jobs on down the road.”

Curriculum standards are updated about every 10 years. The last social studies standards for Texas students were adopted in 1997.

According to a preliminary draft of the proposed standards, biographies of Washington, Lincoln and Austin have been removed from the early grades, said Brooke Terry of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

The early draft, which is likely to change multiple times in the coming months, also removes Independence Day, Veterans Day and anthems and mottos for both Texas and the United States in a section on holidays, customs and celebrations, she said, adding that the Liberty Bell has been removed from a section on patriotic symbols.

The Austin-based Texas Public Policy Foundation is a free-market group concerned that “anything dealing with the private sector in a positive light was being removed,” Terry said. “Anything about the importance of work and personal responsibility was being removed, and you see this bias towards ‘the government's going to fix everything.'”

The State Board of Education has appointed six experts to review existing social studies standards. They also will influence the new curriculum.

Two of them have recommended that migrant farm labor union leader César Chávez, who died in 1993, be removed as an example of a significant role model for “active participation in the democratic process.”

“Chávez is hardly the kind of role model that ought to be held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation,” said Peter Marshall, head of Marshall Ministries and a Presbyterian minister and author who lives in Cape Cod, Mass.

Another expert reviewer, David Barton, said: “César Chávez may be a choice representing diversity, but he certainly lacks the stature, impact and overall contributions of so many others; and his open affiliation with Saul Alinsky's movements certainly makes dubious that he is praiseworthy, to be heralded to students as someone ‘who modeled active participation in the democratic process.'”

Alinsky influenced the Texas Industrial Areas Foundation, a number of church-based groups that help give low-income Texans a voice and a role in democracy. Those groups include COPS/Metro Alliance in San Antonio.

The country's founding principles include participation in democracy, particularly for groups that otherwise would be left out, said Paul Martinez, COPS/Metro Alliance co-chairman.

“We respect the work that César Chávez was able to accomplish in organizing farm workers to obtain fair wages and decent working conditions,” Martinez said. “Though we understand that he had faults, so did many other people we hold up as models for our children. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves; Andrew Jackson engaged in duels. We haven't heard protests about including these people in our social studies text books.”

One of the reviewers also suggested the late Thurgood Marshall be removed from history books on grounds that he's not an appropriate example as a historical figure of influence.

Thurgood Marshall was the NAACP lawyer who won the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme court school segregation case that led to the integration of public schools. He later became the first African American U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Peter Marshall also recommends that Texas schoolchildren get a better understanding of the motivational role the Bible and the Christian faith played in the settling of the original colonies.

He provided multiple examples of early Americans parlaying their Biblical views into the communities and governments they established — beginning with the Pilgrims who risked their lives in coming to America.

“In light of the overwhelming historical evidence of the influence of the Christian faith in the founding of America, it is simply not up to acceptable academic standards that throughout the social studies (curriculum standards) I could only find one reference to the role of religion in America's past,” Marshall said in his review.

On his Web site, Marshall says his “life and ministry is dedicated to helping to restore America to its Bible-based foundations through preaching, teaching and writing on America's Christian heritage and on Christian discipleship and revival.”

Religion certainly influenced this country's origin, said Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, which promotes what it calls “a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the radical right.”

The organization objects to suggestions, Quinn said, “that the founders intended for our government and our laws to be based on a fundamentalist Christian interpretation of the Bible.”

The 15-member State Board of Education includes seven members who are considered social conservatives.

“We have a board filled with people who think anyone who disagrees with them, including fellow Republicans, is a radical leftist who hates Christians,” Quinn said. “The board has appointed completely unqualified political activists who are creating blacklists of people who they want censored and stricken from our kids' history books.”

Disagreeing, board member Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, said his seat as vice chairman of the committee on instruction, makes him “an eyewitness to the radical agenda of the so-called Texas Freedom Network.”

Mercer fears the group “wants to once again attempt to steal the textbook process away from our 24 million Texans and indoctrinate students with their politically revised version of American history.”

The board updates social studies and history standards for school textbooks every 10 years to account for new historical events, such as the election of the country's first black president.

“Instead, (the Texas Freedom Network) and their left-leaning experts are determined to begin with a blank sheet of paper and totally rewrite American history,” Mercer said. “I asked why the ‘expert' version of major national holidays to be studied by first-graders failed to include Veterans Day and Independence Day. The response was ‘that was covered in kindergarten.'”