What Does Texas Senate Bill 3 Actually Ban?
No, there was never a legislative requirement to teach Texas students that the KKK is morally bad.
Once in a while, media organizations are actively part of the culture war problem. Today, the Huffington Post created a problem with its coverage of Texas Senate Bill 3.
In a piece published Monday, HuffPo reported that Republican senators in Texas passed a bill to eliminate the requirement that public schools teach kids the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy were wrong:
It looks bad. But there is a small problem: Texas never had state legislative requirements to teach it as morally bad to begin with. And Senate Bill 3 doesn’t even mention the KKK. So what caused this furor?
Let’s look at what really happened (Republicans overreached into school-board business, got burned, and then acted hypocritically). There are very good reasons to be critical of Texas Republicans in this story, and it was a problematic bill to begin with… but they did not try to block teaching that the KKK is bad. So let’s respond to what actually happened, honestly and without exaggeration.
Quick summary of the Senate Bill 3 story
In May 2021, Republicans in the Texas House introduced a bill requiring students read the Declaration of Independence and a few other documents (it did other things too, but that’s the relevant part to this story).
House Democrats didn’t have enough legislators to stop the bill, so they added a few dozen additional documents, including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech and a required lesson that says the KKK was morally wrong.
When Republicans in the Senate got the final bill, they stripped out what the Democrats had added and passed the original bill.
That’s the quick version.
Here’s how Democrats responded:
To be clear, Texas Republicans did nothing to erase King, Chavez, nor Anthony from the Texas curriculum. Those figures are still required subjects in Texas public schools. The bill also does not “recast the KKK as the good guys,” by any stretch. This is an absurd level of hyperbole.
From the Dallas Morning News (emphasis mine).
“[SB3] eliminates a list of required teachings included in the new law, including the history of Native Americans, the Chicano movement and the history of white supremacy and the ways in which it is morally wrong. Hughes said he deleted the required teaching list because his bill is about broad concepts and not detailed curriculum. The State Board of Education is the body charged with defining curriculum standards for grades and subjects.”
So, let me level-set with you. I’m a lifelong Democrat. I vote straight blue every election. In my opinion, there are fact-based, rational reasons the political left is a better side to be on in America.
Because I believe that, I don’t think “my side” should rely on misinformation and falsehoods. We don’t need to. Not only is it ethically better to rely on truthful stories, it’s strategically and pragmatically better!
We don’t need to exaggerate to be in the right.
We don’t need to overcorrect to be correct.
Having said that, I’m about to criticize my fellow lefties here. I believe this can become a virtuous circle: if we spend a bit more time acknowledging where we’ve gone wrong and genuinely trying to fix it, our fellow citizens across the aisle have incentives to do the same. Besides, if we won’t hold our fellow Democrats to these standards, it’s impossible to demand Republicans to hold themselves to similar ones — and this country desperately needs at least one side of the aisle to elevate those standards.
Alright, back to the HuffPo story. Take a look at the reactions it provoked from people like former Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub and journalist David Leavitt:
Reminder: no, Senate Bill 3 does not ban teachers from calling the KKK bad.
Again, SB3 does not outlaw anything of the sort.
Hold on. Nobody argued the KKK isn’t morally wrong. Leavitt has 269,000 twitter followers. Shaub has 656,000 followers.
The Texas Tribune is one of the only news outlets to attempt to correct the record.
“Materials that the upcoming law will require that are not in the current standards …include the writings of Ona Judge and Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists.”
So, there is a lot of righteous outrage, but it is being wasted on a story that isn’t true.
A closer look at what happened
This appears to be the actual sequence of events:
The Texas state legislature normally doesn’t require students to read anything. Here is the full text of the existing Texas Education Code 28.002 – Required Curriculum. Try searching the document for any mention of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Martin Luther King Jr., Anthony, Chavez, KKK, Rosa Parks, slavery, or any other topic. You won’t find any mention of them, because Code 28.002 left such decisions to the board of education.
That changed in May, when Republicans in the Texas House decided to get involved. They wanted to change Code 28.002 and get the legislature involved in telling students what to read. House Republicans drafted a bill, HB 3979, to add those *new requirements* for students.
Critics at the time said this was a bad idea. The legislature should keep its hands out of reading requirements, leave Code 28.002 alone, and allow the board of education to do what they do best. Besides, the Republicans did a shoddy job of bringing in experts and teachers to make sure a good bill was drafted. Here you can see what the Republican legislators wanted to add to Code 28.002. Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Federalist Papers, you get it.
At this point, HB 3979 went to the House Democrats. Knowing they lacked the representatives they’d need to stop the bill, Democrats decided to add to it. Democratic representative Erin Zwiener gives a rundown of their strategy here. They basically said, ‘OK, if you’re going to make the state require kids to read the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers, let’s also add dozens of important works by civil rights leaders, labor movement leaders, Native Americans; along with a mandate to teach that slavery, the KKK and eugenics are morally wrong, and lessons about various landmark legal cases.’
This appears to be where Huffington Post got the idea that there were prior requirements to teach that the KKK was morally wrong. But this was a theoretical addition to the bill that was never implemented, and wouldn’t have been until September.
Now, would it have been a good addition to the curriculum? Well, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) already requires learning about the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Along with King, Anthony, Chavez, Rosa Parks, slavery, the evils of the KKK and Jim Crow. Here is a summary of what’s required in high school. HB 3979 / SB3 would have no impact on that, except to say TEKS must ensure students not only study the Constitution, but read it too.
Long story short: the Republicans proposed a bill saying “the state legislature is now demanding that these pieces of required reading are… double required” and the Democrats slapped on some additional things and said “let’s also double-require 40+ additional readings!”
Finally, after the bill went back and forth a bit, it arrived at the Texas Senate as Senate Bill 3. When the senators saw it, they decided the list had become a bit too long. Or maybe they didn’t like what the Democrats added. Here is an analysis of the changes to the bill between the house and senate versions (look at Section 2 for the relevant part). So, the Republican senators removed most of what the Democrats added, which reverted it back to something similar to the original bill.
Their stated reasoning? The legislature shouldn’t be dictating such a full list of what gets taught; rather, the State Board of Education (SBOE) should set those more detailed requirements. Nevermind the hypocrisy that this is literally what the Republicans were aiming to do.
The result? Republicans “won” by passing the bill they wanted to pass in the first place. Democrats “won” because, while they didn’t have the numbers to stop the bill, they made sure their opponents had the bad optics of removing items by iconic minority writers, while leaving in the Federalist Papers.
None of this political posturing benefitted students.
So, why does this matter?
Why stick up for these assholes? I hear some people asking. Because they deserve criticism for what they actually did! Not for things they didn’t do.
Also, accurate information matters and we should expect better from news outlets. “Bill would halt lessons on Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez and other civil rights leaders and historic moments,” crowed the Daily Mail. It would not halt any of those lessons. It would not even restrict TEKS from requiring those lessons, as TEKS already does.
The Independent tweeted that the bill “would end classroom requirement to call white supremacy ‘morally wrong.’” They must have missed that it was not a classroom requirement to begin with (the proposed bill would go into effect in September, 2021). And the TEKS requirement to teach about those important civil rights topics would be unchanged by SB3.
Other media outlets had trouble reporting the story accurately, including The Hill. Bloomberg was similarly confused, beginning with the claim that SB3 would “end requirements that public schools include writings on women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement.”
Even NBC messed the story up, before eventually admitting that the House bill had added brand-new requirements “But in the Senate bill, those agenda items were removed.”
Altogether, they confused a lot of very influential people.
This might have been a good time to not use words, Travis.
This is a very wrong interpretation.
This is not a change to the curriculum. It is a rejection of hypothetical additions to a bill. TEKS still requires teaching all these things. The legislature still does not.
It is dystopian, yes, in the sense that these media outlets should not be reporting misinformation.
The Texas Tribune was one of the few outlets that appeared to include the missing context (emphasis added).
“Many of the items his bill would strip were added by House Democrats during the regular legislative session — but were not part of the bill when the Senate originally passed the legislation earlier this year. In his agenda for the special session, Abbott said he wanted legislation that resembled that earlier Senate version.”
Misdirected outrage helps nobody
There is a second reason this matters: who wants to waste outrage on non-issues? How much outrage was wasted on the Jussie Smollett hoax?
Just yesterday, NPR wrung its hands over how the Daily Wire writes stories that are technically true, but misleading. Will the Huffington Post receive a similar treatment for this piece?
They spread misinformation to millions upon millions of readers:
This is nonsense. The school board still mandates that teaching. It’s just that the legislature doesn’t double-require it.
Kendi actually managed to get the story mostly right, in the sense that the law dropped proposed requirements that were still nonexistent.
Again, the senate passed a bill that *failed to add* a requirement at the legislative level. They did not pass a bill *to eliminate* anything.
Sigh.
In the grand scheme of things, why spend so much energy on this? Shouldn’t I be spending more time attacking the “real bad guys?”
This one story might not seem like a big deal, but over time they add up. Sadly, stories like this get published almost on a weekly basis. It’s unlikely fact checkers will step in, and retractions are even less likely. This type of story is not the most important error in a world where a large percentage of a major political party won’t even recognize the results of a presidential election. But it is an easily avoidable error, and there is no good reason for my fellow Democrats to simply let it slide. A recent Poynter study shows only 29% of Americans trust the news, and this story is part of the reason why.
Millions and millions and millions of people on my side have ingested the information in this story. Only a handful have seen attempts to fact-check it. How does it benefit me or the people I care about to be misinformed?
Feeding right-wing narratives
At the end of the day, what happened in Texas offered a chance to make clear points, as the educational nonprofit IDRA was poised to do:
“While the legislature should have never gotten into the business of dictating specific TEKS, you have done so with the passage of HB 3979. And now that you have, selectively stripping the TEKS that focus on communities of color, women and movements for justice sends a signal to the students of Texas that many of their elected officials simply do not value those specific histories, cultures and contributions.
It is important to make clear that your vote on this bill is a moral one that will send strong messages to all Texans, not just your constituents. Supporting this bill indicates your commitment to curricula that reflects the perceived heroism of founders but not their fallibility. Your support will restrict students and teachers from confronting and engaging with history in ways that lead to a more humane future.”
That message would have been impactful, had it not been completely swallowed up by HuffPo’s bogus claim. They, and other news outlets, made sure Democrats were enraged, instead, about Republicans supposedly eliminating a non-existent requirement to teach the immorality of the KKK.
In doing so, these outlets have allowed right-wing media an opportunity to reinforce what conservatives already think: that HuffPo and mainstream networks will attack conservatives on false pretenses; that fact checkers will completely ignore this error; that corporate media outlets do the job of Democratic political activists by spreading this type of misinformation, and that left-leaning publications are as “fake news” as anything the right has to offer.
And they have evidence! How does it help the left if the right can back up those narratives, change the minds of voters, and seem perfectly reasonable?
Time and again, I watch my fellow Democrats bend and distort news — or watch it distorted and fail to call it out. Don’t we want to act like we have facts on our side? Exaggeration shouldn’t be necessary. There are so many things to criticize Republicans about in 2021, so why not do it honestly?
Summing up, and what we can do
We deserve media that reports accurately on topics like this, rather than inventing controversies for clicks. There are a few lessons from this story that I hope can bridge divides:
If Democrats can share this sort of article in good faith, without realizing its flaws, we should remember that Republicans can also share false articles in good faith.
If this article can convince people that their opponents are slightly worse than they really are, then maybe our opponents aren’t quite so bad after all.
Left-leaning news outlets can play a role in misinformation, and that’s worth remembering.
If this exaggerated story made its way into your news diet, what else are you getting that’s also false? It’s a good reminder to be humble about what we’re convinced is true.
We can all respond by calling out the authors and editors responsible for the article, submitting it to PolitiFact or Snopes, and even speaking out in the comments below the tweets and posts made by these journalists and public figures. Look back and see how wrong the tweets embedded in this post are. Look at the mostly well-intentioned outrage, wasted.
We can remind everyone that “our side” is not interested in misinformation, because we care about accuracy and facts even when they are inconvenient.
UPDATE: CBS affiliate KHOU-11 fact-checked the story a week later, on July 26, writing in no uncertain terms: “No, Texas has not banned schools from teaching about MLK’s speeches or KKK’s history with white supremacy.” That was three days too late for ABC, which got caught up in the misinformation with the headline, “MLK Jr., the KKK, and more may soon be cut from Texas education requirements,” and has still, along with the other outlets mentioned here, failed to issue corrections.
I came here from a rabbit hole on Twitter. Thank you for writing this. We need more stuff like this to become prominent so people can shortcut past the bullshit.