October 6, 2014 - 23:10
Hey all, hope everyone is working on readings for tomorrow and papers for Friday and such.
So the reading for class tomorrow really struck home with me because I took that TAKS test* back in 11th grade. Granted I was in AP US history so my class didn't necessarily adhere to the TEKS teaching point curriculum because we were too busy dealing with the cirriculum suggested by ETS, but regardless we still had to take the test. Well I found a list of social studies TEKS for high school on the Texas Education Association website from 2012 and it's just very interesting to see what Heilig et. al. discussed actually in writing.
I find it very troubling that I as an individual never noticed the omission of so many POC and the downplaying if not outright exclusion of historical events involving race. Whether this is due to my own privilege or my being ensconced in AP education, I'm not sure, but I can't say I'm all that surprised. This is the same state that for their actual textbooks tried to minimize the "role of Thomas Jefferson among the founding fathers, questions the separation of church and state, and claims that the U.S. government was infiltrated by Communists during the Cold War" (Bimbaum 2010). Side note, those changes also would have come the year I was set to take the social studies TAKS. I just really wonder how eliminating these parts of history have impacted students of color taking the TAKS test after all our discussions about the importance of finding relevance and personal connection in educational subject matter and how this is considerably harder for minority students since most education in America is rather ethnocentric. I'm also thinking a lot about my own access-I had previously attended private school and by 11th grade was at probably one of the best funded public high schoolsin that state (excluding Highland Park, of course) so I could take advantage of the AP program that many other students in the state probably did not or could not. I also went to a predominantly white high school where such a monoracial cirriculum would have gone (and probably did go) largely unnoticed. Now I'm just really wishing I had paid closer attention to what the TAKS test covered, or rather, what it didn't.
Oh and here's the TEA website's page listing the TEKS for different subjects.
*the state changed its standardized tests from the TAKS to the STAAR beginning in the spring of 2012, just in case anyone was interested/confused as to why there's not much listed about TAKS tests on the site.