The Texas Board of Education imposed tighter rules Friday on the citizen review panels that scrutinize proposed textbooks, potentially softening fights over evolution, religion's role in U.S. history and other ideological matters that have long seeped into what students learn in school.
Tension over the issue has been building for years in the country's second most populous state, where the textbook market is so large that changes can affect the industry nationwide. Critics complain that a few activists with religious or political objections have too much power to shape what the state's more than 5 million public school students are taught.
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"It won't eliminate politics, but it will make it where it's a more informed process," said Thomas Ratliff, a Republican board member who pushed for the changes, which he said "force us to find qualified people, leave them alone, and let them do their jobs."
The new rules were unanimously approved.
An outspoken conservative on the board, David Bradley, said he did his best to insert language mitigating what was approved. But he said "liberals are really trying to make it difficult for Christians and conservatives to have a voice in public education."
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The catalyst for revamping the citizen review panels came last summer, when ardent evolution skeptics — including a nutritionist and a chemical engineer — caused a tumultuous fight by challenging a proposed biology textbook that they claimed contained too much information on natural selection, Charles Darwin's theory on how life on earth evolved.
Friday's changes will take effect before the board tackles the potentially thorny adoption of new social studies textbooks later this year.
Ratliff refused to predict whether the changes would avoid the raucous culture war debates that thrust the board into the national spotlight in the past. But he said the education board has come a long way.
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