Here’s some provocative reading to ruin  – no, enrich – your long weekend in between watching the Nordic combined and the biathlon.

Texas rules: Size matters when it comes to textbooks. I’m talking about the population of states that buy them, not the tonnage of the tomes that middle schoolers carry on their backs.

California is big enough to push its weight around with textbook publishers and control its autonomy. But pity small states that are prey to the looney dictates of the self-righteous majority  on the Texas State Board of Education.

In “How Christian Were the Founders?” New York Times Magazine writer Russell Shorto details how a fundamentalist Christian bloc on the 15-member board has put its ideological stamp on science, language arts and history textbooks that end up in circulation around the nation. That explains why Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority and the NRA get inserted into the history of the ‘80s, while Ted Kennedy gets rubbed out, and why conservative views get inserted into standards texts.

There’s a larger agenda: In the candid words of Cynthia Dunbar, a Christian activist on the Texas board, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

Tales from the crypt: If you’re not yet convinced that the state’s teacher tenure laws need changing, check out the  exhaustive piece “LAUSD’s Dance of the Lemons” in the latest LA Weekly. The subtitle, “why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible,” says it all.

The Los Angeles Times did a good article in December on the district’s Sisyphean efforts to fire a handful of teachers charged with misconduct. The LA Weekly goes a step further and looks at attempts to dismiss for poor performance. It is, to no surprise, expensive and frustrating.

Among the findings in the five-month investigation:

• “Principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing” even the worst performers.  The district spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance. Four were fired after legal battles that averaged five years. Two were paid large settlements, and one teacher was reinstated. The average cost of case: $500,000.

• The district paid 32 tenured teachers more than $1.5 million to quit. All were allowed to leave with  clean records, with no indication, to the next district that employs them, that they exited under pressure.

• Teachers with negative reviews must be offered mentor training to improve, under the Peer Assistance and Review training. Sometimes teachers respond well; for others – the “frequent fliers” –  it’s futile. Three district teachers have taken the retraining five times in the past three years, 18 have taken it four times, and 45 three times.

United Teachers Los Angeles President A.J. Duffy dismissed claims that it’s difficult to identify and fire bad teachers as an “urban legend,” according to the paper.

By John Fensterwald on February 12th, 2010