TX ED BOARD: DON’T CALL ALAMO DEFENDERS “HEROES”

AUSTIN — A panel advising the State Board of Education on what seventh-graders should learn in their social studies courses has urged deleting the label “heroic“ from a curriculum standard about the Alamo’s defenders.

The proposed tweak to a directive about what teachers should teach about Texas history and the state’s most iconic battle infuriated several state politicians, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who characterized the nonbinding advice as political correctness run amok.

“Stop political correctness in our schools,” Abbott, a Republican, tweeted Thursday in response to the story, first reported by Texas Monthly. “Of course Texas schoolchildren should be taught that Alamo defenders were ‘Heroic’! I fully expect the State Board of Education to agree. Contact your SBOE Member to complain.”

The proposed tweak to a directive about what teachers should teach about Texas history and the state’s most iconic battle infuriated several state politicians, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who characterized the nonbinding advice as political correctness run amok.

Davey Crockett

“Stop political correctness in our schools,” Abbott, a Republican, tweeted Thursday in response to the story, first reported by Texas Monthly. “Of course Texas schoolchildren should be taught that Alamo defenders were ‘Heroic’! I fully expect the State Board of Education to agree. Contact your SBOE Member to complain.”

The recommendation, made in a report issued last month, was one of several hundred tweaks, additions and deletions offered up by the advisory group reviewing state curriculum standards for social studies. The panel said “heroic” was a “value-charged word.”

But Barbara Stevens, president general of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, said the word is critical to giving Texas history its proper context.

“Words like ‘heroic’ to describe such men are indeed ‘value charged,’ and it is because anything less would be a disservice to their memories,” Stevens said. “To minimize the study of the Republic of Texas is to fail to teach a pivotal portion of the state’s history.”

Current seventh-grade social studies curriculum standards include the “siege of the Alamo and all of the heroic defenders who gave their lives there.” The advisory committee recommended cutting the phrase “and all of the heroic defenders who gave their lives there.”

THE TRAVIS LETTER:

William B.Travis

The advisory committee, made up of educators and historians, also suggested removing the requirement that students explain “the Travis Letter,” sometimes referred to as the “Victory or Death” letter. It was written by Lt. Col. William Barrett Travis during the Alamo battle. In it, he declared, “I shall never surrender or retreat” from the thousand or more Mexican soldiers besieging the Alamo.

“I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country — victory or death,” Travis wrote in 1836.

Land Commissioner George P. Bush, whose office oversees the Alamo historical site, said the proposed changes were a nonstarter for him.

“This politically correct nonsense is why I’ll always fight to honor the Alamo defenders‘ sacrifice. His letter & the defenders’ actions must remain at the very core of TX history teaching,” Bush tweeted Thursday, referring to the Travis letter. “This is not debatable to me.”