Slurpee Textbooks: Will Bill’s Bill Fill the Bill?

When State Representative Bill Hammond of Dallas says that too many Texas students are on a “slurpee” diet (“all sugar and no protein”), he’s not talking about the fare in the lunchroom, but the books in the classroom. And he’s introduced legislation to put some meat and potatoes back into the average student’s intellectual diet.

In Texas, the state pays for a school district’s textbooks-if the texts are chosen from a list of two to five books per subject and grade level, approved by the State Board of Education. No law prevents any of the state’s thousand-plus separate school districts from choosing other texts they deem more rigorous, more literary, or what have you. There’s a catch, however: the district that wants a broader range of textbooks must pay for the extra books out of its own coffers.

Hammond, a Republican serving his third term in the Texas House, has introduced two bills aimed at improving Texas textbooks. House Bill 164 would expand the state-approved book list to allow eight to fifteen selections per subject and grade level. Robby Collins, legislative liaison for the Dallas Independent School District, thinks Hammond’s bill could provide needed help. “From the perspective of an urban school district with a wide diversity of student needs, the more different materials you have, the better.” Collins says.

Hammond’s other bill is likely to prove more coniroversial. House Bill 165 would allow school districts to choose any texts they like, whether approved by the state board or not, without losing any state funding. The bill will probably come under attack by liberals who fear that school districts with large fundamentalist factions might select books heavy on “creation science” and light on evolution and human sexuality. At the other end of the spectrum. conservatives will envision texts loaded with “values clarification” exercises, psychobabble, evolution, and other betes noires of the right.

Hammond’s HB 165 will probably face tough sledding in the legislative session, though the bill would phase in the local option system over a five-year period, with health and biology texts (the usual sources of conflict) coming at the end of the cycle. Robby Collins raises a practical objection to the bill: what happens when students taught from widely varying textbooks must lake the state’s standardized tests in order to graduate? ’Texas has 1,063 districts with that many school boards and constituencies,” Collins says. “If a school out in Podunk Holler has a philosophy that only certain things should be taught, and we give the kids a test over material they have not seen, they’re not going to graduate.”