Rural Texas schools caught between politicized state board and national policies that don't fit

Schools in Texas, which has more rural students than any other state, are caught in a "growing power struggle" between state school officials who are imposing politically driven textbook standards and federal education officials whose offer of extra money comes with strings that state officials reject and that local officials say leaves them out, reports Michael Birnbaum for The Washington Post.

Birnbaum starts his story with a Tea Party gathering in Madisonville hearing from a state school board member (who lost his renomination bid in the recent primary election) making assertions that historians say are dubious and advocating "social-studies standards that set Texas apart from other states because, among other changes, they recast sections on the American Revolution to put more emphasis on Christianity and less on the writings of Thomas Jefferson."

Texas was among 10 states that did not apply for Race to the Top funds from the U.S. Department of Education. To Madisonville School Superintendent Keith Smith, the state's "version of local control takes away just as much power from him as the federal kind," Birnbaum reports. "He said the tug of war about standards and states' rights is just a distraction from more basic questions of equity in statewide school funding," and that many Race to the Top ideals, such as charter schools, don't apply to his town, which has 4,159 people at the 2000 census. The local schools sometimes are at odds with the state, too; they "scrapped a state-approved reading curriculum and bought their own after tests suggested that they needed to do better." (Read more)