 "Photo: Megan Peyton")
The Texas State Board of Education will vote today on the final adoption of curriculum requirements for high school elective courses that teach Bible scriptures' impact on the history and literature of Western civilization.
The board's Committee on Instruction passed the curriculum to the full board in a 3-to-1 vote Thursday.
Today's vote will fuel controversy that started between religious-freedom advocacy groups in June 2007 when the Texas Legislature passed a bill allowing school districts to teach the course. State Rep. Scott Hochberg, a Houston Democrat who serves on the Public Education Committee, said the bill was an attempt to provide districts with legal protection if they choose to offer the course.
As outlined in the board's agenda, the voluntary course will discuss biblical content, history and literary style.
Three percent of state school districts offered Bible courses during the 2005-2006 school year, according to a 2006 report from the Texas Freedom Network, a liberal watchdog organization.
The committee drafted the guidelines, called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, that outline course requirements for the elective and in the spring submitted them to Attorney General Greg Abbott for approval. Abbott said on July 9 the course would not violate the First Amendment.
The guidelines require that the course maintains religious neutrality and does not endorse or disfavor any religion.
Educational, political and legal figures have criticized the guidelines as too general and devoid of content and testified before the committee on Thursday to develop more specific course requirements.
Hochberg said he was under the impression that the board would carry out the regular and obligatory process of creating specific guidelines as it does with other courses.
"I'm sure you're familiar that the TEKS that you picked up and placed essentially under a header, [which] said this is a course about biblical literature ... are TEKS that could just as easily be used for a course about anything in social studies," Hochberg said. "You could have it as a course on the history of 'American Idol'; you could have it as a course on the history of the medieval times."
Terri Leo, who chairs the committee, said the committee did not need to create more specific standards, such as those for a mandatory course, since the Bible courses will be taught as electives. Leo and committee member Cynthia Nolan Dunbar said creating more specific standards would put the board on a "slippery slope."
Some committee members implied that if they specify too many course guidelines, it would open the door to lawsuits.
Jonathan Saenz, spokesman for the Free Market Foundation, a conservative nonprofit organization, said the guidelines outlined by the board are sufficient.
"It's important to remember that there's no way to guarantee that anything anyone does in a school will be constitutional," Saenz said. "The other side is almost demanding some assurance and guarantee that nothing will happen that will be unconstitutional, and that's impossible."
Spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network Ryan Valentine said students will suffer if the board passes the curriculum today.
"If they proceed along this path, as we expect them to do, then districts that choose to offer a Bible course are going to be left with the task of coming up with curriculum entirely on their own with no guidance from the state," Valentine said. "And we know that the courses around the state that are already being offered and [whose schools] have had to come up with the curriculum on their own have all sorts of problems."
Valentine said the network discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests that Jewish students who took the courses were being denigrated and that courses were being taught from a biased Protestant and fundamentalist Christian perspective.
"As school districts choose to create these courses and they have no direction from the State Board of Education on how best to do that, we're gonna see more of the same [problems]," Valentine said. "There's no reason to think we wouldn't."
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