by Gail Collins
The state legislature has diluted the board’s ability to control what books local districts pick. And the expanding Web-based curricula make it easier for publishers to work around the preferences of any one state, no matter how big. But students all around the country will be feeling the effect of Texas on their textbooks for years, if not generations. That’s because the school board’s most important contribution has not been to make textbooks inaccurate. It’s been to help make them unreadable.
“Readable? I’ve never heard a discussion of that,” said Julie McGee.
The typical school textbook is composed of a general narrative sprinkled liberally with “boxes”—sidebars presenting the biographies of prominent individuals, and highlighting particular trends, social issues, or historical events. As the textbook wars mounted, those boxes multiplied like gerbils. It’s the ideal place to stash the guy who broke the motorcycle speed record, or the cattle boom or, perhaps, the gold standard. (It’s also where, in bows to gender and racial equality, mini-biographies of prominent women and minorities can be floated.) In an era of computerized publishing, changing the boxes is easy. The problem comes when the publisher has to change the narrative, something endless committees of experts may have labored over at the cost of millions of dollars.
All the bickering and pressuring over the years has caused publishers to shy away from using the kind of clear, lively language that might raise hackles in one corner or another. The more writers were constrained by confusing demands and conflicting requests, the more they produced unreadable mush. Texas, you may not be surprised to hear, has been particularly good at making things mushy. In 2011, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, issued an evaluation of US history standards for public schools. The institute was a long-time critic of curricula that insisted that representatives of women and minorities be included in all parts of American history. But the authors, Sheldon Stern and Jeremy Stern, really hated what the Texas board had done. Besides incorporating “all the familiar politically correct group categories,” the authors said, “the document distorts or suppresses less triumphal or more nuanced aspects of our past that the Board found politically unacceptable. (Slavery and segregation are all but ignored, while religious influences are grossly exaggerated.) The resulting fusion is a confusing, unteachable hodgepodge.”
All around the country, teachers and students are left to make their way through murky generalities as they struggle through the swamps of boxes and lists. “Maybe the most striking thing about current history textbooks is that they have lost their compelling narrative,” wrote historian Russell Shorto.
And that’s the legacy. Texas certainly didn’t single-handedly mess up American textbooks, but its size, its purchasing heft, and the pickiness of the school board’s endless demands—not to mention the boards’ overall craziness—certainly made it the trend leader. Texas has never managed to get evolution out of American science textbooks. It’s been far more successful in helping to make evolution—and history, and everything else—seem really, really boring.
8
Speedy the Sperm and Friends
“If you teach kids about sex,
kids will start having sex.”
And now . . . Texas and sex. Once again, we are not going to worry all that much about whether the state’s agenda is making its own residents happy, or even whether its behavior is constitutional, although I am going to go way out on a limb and say that I doubt that even the current Supreme Court would approve of a public school sex education class that urges students to ask themselves, when evaluating a prospective spouse, “Is Jesus their first love?”
No, we’re just going to concern ourselves with how Texas’s attitudes affect the other forty-nine states—some of which, if we’re going to be honest here, have state legislatures that can occasionally make the one in Austin look like a Woodstock reunion.
Texas is, nevertheless, pretty darned conservative. One of the interesting things about the empty-place ethos is that the theory about leaving people alone to do whatever they want does not apply at all when it comes to sex. Long after the Supreme Court struck down the state’s anti-sodomy law as unconstitutional, the legislature still refused to take it off the books. Texas regulations on abortion are among the most draconian in the country, and it pushes abstinence-only sex education in its public schools. It refuses to accept federal funding for sex education programs that teach kids how to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases with tactics other than celibacy. Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Department of State Health Services, explained this last one by saying that the state’s “first choice is that teens choose not to have sex.”
If we lived in a world where parents and teachers always got their first choice when it came to teenagers’ sexual behavior, Texas would be so in the vanguard.
The state does not actually dictate what kind of sex education public schools should offer, beyond requiring that abstinence must always be presented as the best choice, and until recently, no one had any real notion of what was going on in all these classes. Then in 2009, the Texas Freedom Network, a liberal nonprofit, funded a herculean effort to come up with some answers. David Wiley and Kelly Wilson, two professors of health education at Texas State University, contacted every district and requested information on their sex instruction programs, under the Texas Public Information Act. Wiley said he was drawn to the subject since his undergraduate students regularly told him that they got little or no sex education in school, even though the state’s education code requires that it be part of the curriculum. Also, he said, “Last year a sincere male student asked aloud, ‘What is my risk for cervical cancer?’ ”
They got documents from more than 96 percent of the districts. After plowing through the information, the professors concluded that “abstinence-only programs have a stranglehold on sexuality education in Texas public schools.” More than 94 percent gave that instruction exclusively, while a small percentage completely ignored the rule that said they had to have something. (“We’re a small rural school district and we don’t follow laws we disagree with,” wrote a superintendent from a small district in west central Texas. “Drug problems only arose when we started teaching about drugs, and if you teach kids about sex, kids will start having sex.”)
“Speedy the Sperm”
Most districts got their materials—and sometimes their speakers—from private vendors marketing programs like “Worth the Wait,” “Aim for Success,” or “W.A.I.T. Training.” If non-abstinence methods of preventing pregnancy came up in the class material at all, the researchers found, it was almost invariably in terms of condom failure rates. “Students, condoms aren’t safe. Never have been, never will be,” one abstinence speaker warned her classes. Students in another program were told to pass around a leaky balloon to illustrate the danger of using condoms. The teacher was instructed to tell the student left holding the deflated balloon at the end that “if he had been the one to get a leaky condom it could have meant he was at high risk or even death.” Another curriculum, “Why kNOw?” has the poor teacher construct an 18-foot-long model known as “Speedy the Sperm” to demonstrate condoms’ alleged failure to guard against STDs.
“There’s this huge myth that if you promote condoms it gives kids a false sense of protection,” said Dr. Susan Tortolero, an expert in pregnancy prevention issues. “Seat belts have a higher failure rate.” The only foolproof way to avoid pregnancy is, of course, not to have sex. But once that horse is out of the barn, there doesn’t seem to be any effective way to get kids to refrain from having it again. That’s the point at which it becomes important that they understand the dangers of unprotected sex, and that sex with a condom is far, far safer than sex with nothing at all.
Almost 30 percent of Texas school districts simply relied on one of the four state-approved health textbooks, whose publishers generally opted for self-censorship and obfuscation. Three of the four never mentioned the word “condom.
” (The other brought it up exactly one time.) The most widely used book, the imaginatively named Health, warned that “barrier protection is not 100 percent effective in preventing the transmission of STDs,” but never explained what “barrier protection” was. Another, Lifetime Health, listed “8 Steps to Protect Yourself from STDs,” none of which involved using condoms. One of the steps was “get plenty of rest,” which the book suggested would lead to better decision-making.
Besides incoherence, there was also the stuff that was flat-out wrong. “After analyzing sexuality materials turned over by school districts under the Texas Public Information Act, we were able to document a factual error in 41 percent of school districts in the state,” the Wiley report said.
Quite a bit of the information Texas students are getting seems to have arrived from another era. An abstinence-only program used in three districts assures them that “if a woman is dry, the sperm will die”—which harks back to colonial-era theories that it was impossible for a woman to get pregnant unless she enjoyed the sex. There are repeated suggestions that premarital sex could have fatal consequences—reminiscent of the 1950s’ legends about couples who had illicit sex in the back seat of a car and then were murdered by the Lovers Lane Maniac. (A video used in three Texas districts has a boy asking an evangelical educator what will happen if he has sex before marriage. “Well, I guess you’ll have to be prepared to die,” is the response.)
“Our schools are failing Texas families by turning out generations of sexually illiterate young people at a time of high rates of teen pregnancy and STDs,” Wiley and Wilson wrote mournfully.
In an effort to improve things ever so slightly, Representative Michael Villarreal of San Antonio proposed a bill in 2011 that would have required that the information taught to public school students in sex education class be medically accurate. (Villarreal, you may remember, is the guy who wanted to require that practice teaching involve being in a classroom. The man has a genius for proposing that Texas do things the outside world presumed it was doing all along.) The bill failed to even make it out of committee. The legislator who cast the swing vote against it was a pediatrician.
“We basically lost two-thirds of the budget”
The biggest problem with trying to frighten kids, or shame them, into not having sex is that it doesn’t work. The schools may assure students, as one program does, that “divorce rate for two virgins who get married is less than 3 percent.” But most Texas high-schoolers are not virgins. Slightly over half of ninth- to twelfth-graders reported having had sex in 2009—higher than the national figure of 46 percent. By the time they’re seniors, 69 percent of Texas students are sexually active, and they indulge in risky behavior like sex with a large number of partners at rates higher than the national average.
The state has the third-highest rate of teenage births in the country, and the second-highest rate of repeat births to teenage girls. Sixty-three out of every 1,000 girls between fifteen and nineteen years old become mothers. That compares to 5 out of 1,000 in the Netherlands, and 42 in the United States as a whole. Texas is also well ahead of Rwanda (44), Micronesia (51), and Egypt (50).
It doesn’t have to be that way. Back in 1992, California’s teen birth rate was about the same as that of Texas—74 births for every 1,000 women between fifteen and nineteen, while Texas had 79. Then California committed to do something about the situation. “The thing is, we know how to prevent teen pregnancy,” said Tortolero, who is director of the Prevention Research Center at the University of Texas. “It’s being done all over the world. It’s being done in other states.” California refused to take any money for abstinence-only education. It required all of its public middle and high schools to teach HIV/AIDS prevention, in a way that stresses the superiority of the abstinence option while also giving kids all the facts about the importance of using condoms if one decides to be sexually active. (The information also has to be medically accurate.) Family planning services are extremely easy to obtain. By 2008, when Texas’s teenage fertility rate was 63 per thousand, California’s was 39.5 and continuing to drop.
We know the consequences of a large number of teenage births. The young mother is more likely to drop out of school, live in poverty, and remain a single parent. The teen fathers have a similarly dismal prospect, which includes being unusually likely to conceive children with multiple women and engage in substance abuse. The children themselves are more likely to experience abuse or neglect, end up in foster care, and, if they’re male, end up in prison.
Still, if you didn’t know better, you’d think there was a concerted effort going on in Texas to increase the number of children being born to teen parents. The state is also one of the most restrictive in the country when it comes to teen access to birth control. Even if a teenage girl has already given birth, she can’t get state-funded contraception services without a parent’s consent. And Texas is one of only four states that don’t cover contraception under the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program.
In 2011, the legislature also decimated funding for family planning programs for adults. “We basically lost two-thirds of the budget,” said Fran Hagerty of the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas. Family planning money, which used to be a miserly $99 million for the state’s two-year budget cycle, was slashed to $38 million. It was impossible to get rid of the last bit, since it comes from a federal program for family planning and family planning alone. “But there’s been some discussion that they might not renew the grant,” Hagerty added grimly.
The lawmakers were driven in part by an antipathy toward Planned Parenthood, which provides a large chunk of the state’s family planning services and also performs abortions under a separate funding stream. “I’m in politics primarily because of the life issue. Protecting life has got to be the government’s highest responsibility,” said Representative Bryan Hughes, who made it clear that he opposed abortion even in cases of rape. (Governor Perry made an exception for victims of rape and incest until he began courting the evangelical vote in Iowa, at which point he announced he had undergone a “transformation.”) However, the antipathy toward family planning was also driven by a less-often-vocalized dislike of contraception in general. “They talk about Planned Parenthood, but there’s a faction that basically doesn’t like access to birth control,” said Hagerty. State Senator Bob Deuell, a Republican physician who opposes abortion but supports family planning, said he hadn’t gotten direct criticism for his position from pro-life groups. But he hadn’t exactly gotten any rewards from the movement for his work on making contraceptive services more available. “No, I guess you’ve got a point there,” he said.
“A terrible recipe for the future”
The result of all this is not just teen pregnancy but a huge number of poor women of all ages giving birth. Texas has the second-highest birth rate in the country after Utah, and nearly 60 percent of the women giving birth are low-income enough to qualify for Medicaid. While the state makes every conceivable effort to keep its Medicaid spending low, the overall bill for pre-and postnatal care and delivery is about $1 billion a year.
Now we’re getting into the national impact of the way Texas goes. Medicaid is a federal program, and more than half of that billion-dollar bill is paid by federal taxpayers. Happy to be of help—but don’t the rest of us have a right to demand that Texas at least make sure poor women who don’t want to be pregnant have easy access to federally funded contraception?
And let’s take this further. We’ve been looking at the way the Texas version of states’ rights has affected the rest of the country directly, in everything from other states’ banks to other states’ schools. But there’s also the matter of our shared future. Texas has had an 800,000 increase in the number of schoolchildren in the last decade, and all those youngsters aren’t going to be spending their lives within the state’s borders. Eventually, more than a tenth of the national workforce will be Texas-born.
Which is not necessarily g
ood news. Funding for schools hasn’t kept up with the booming population, and lately the state has not just been failing to fund the increased costs, but cutting back on its financial support altogether. “The decisions we’re making today really give me concern about the world we’re creating,” said Representative Villarreal. “Legislation gutting our family planning service program and cutting education to the bone. That’s a terrible recipe for the future.”
For the country’s future as well. When Texas decisions stay in Texas, the rest of us might be willing to let the state do what its elected officials like, even if that means educating its children that condoms kill and frigid women can’t get pregnant. But the decisions made about Texas sex education have echoes. They reverberate through the educational system, and then into the national workforce and the national economy a couple of decades down the line.
SINCE THE TEXAS Freedom Network issued its terrifying report on the state of sex education in the public schools, there’s been a jump in the number of districts offering programs that go beyond Speedy the Sperm to more sophisticated “abstinence-plus” approaches. That’s got to be good news, but they aren’t getting any encouragement from the governor.
“Abstinence works,” Perry told the Texas Tribune’s Evan Smith during his reelection campaign in 2010.
“But we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the country,” Smith pointed out, suggesting that the abstinence education part didn’t seem to be working at all.
“It works,” Perry said doggedly. “Maybe it is the way it’s being taught, or maybe it is the way it is being applied out there, but the fact of the matter is it is the best form to teach our children.”
