Testimony for the Texas State Board of Education Public Hearing HEALTH EDUCATION TEXTBOOK ADOPTION
Steven Schafersman, Ph.D.
TEXAS CITIZENS FOR SCIENCE
July 14, 2004The Health Education textbooks submitted by publishers this year are grossly inadequate: they teach abstinence-only sex education and exclude many important topics about human sexuality that students need to know, they do not conform to the TEKS, and they should not be adopted without major substantive changes.
The health education books used now in Texas are totally inadequate in presenting topics important to teenagers. The textbooks deliberately omit information about contraception, birth control, family planning, abortion, sexual intimacy, different sexualities, etc. These books all devote an inordinate amount of attention to sexual abstinence, the Texas method of choice to deal with adolescent sexuality. The result has been a generation of Texas teenagers effectively kept ignorant of the most important information they need to deal with the sexual situations and problems they face almost daily. The new health textbooks submitted for adoption this year continue this misguided, counterproductive, and tragic practice.
The result of such willful ignorance is the fact that Texas ranks 5th in teenage pregnancies and 2nd in teenage births (Utah is first); because there are so many obstacles to obtaining abortions in Texas, the state only ranks 26th in teenage abortions. The prevalence of STDs among Texas teenagers is also among the highest in the nation: Texas ranks 7th for chlamydia, 13th for gonorrhea, and 19th for syphilis among the states. These undesirable statistics are completely avoidable, because northern states have rates of about 50% of those in Texas, and other industrialized countries--such as those in Europe and Japan--have such rates at about 10% of those in Texas, since they provide their adolescent students reliable, scientific, and honest instruction about human sexuality, not deliberately keeping students ignorant.
Believing that students this age will remain abstinent--because that is all that is taught to them in Texas health education classes--is more than unrealistic, it is absurd and dangerous. Over 60% of Texas school students will engage in sexual activity before they turn 18. Keeping students ignorant of honest, reliable, and scientific knowledge about extremely important topics of interest is unbelievably counter-productive and unethical. This is an example of anti-education or miseducation, a practice that should be condemned, not one to be accepted, much less endorsed, by public officials charged with ensuring the quality of health education in Texas.
One of the worst aspects of the Texas textbook adoption process is that the Texas Education Agency's textbook review panel and the members of the State Board of Education don't have to censor these health books themselves. All the new 2005 health education textbooks submitted for adoption in Texas come self-censored by the authors and publishers to appeal to the Texas market! Although students are desperate for reliable information about teenage sexuality, birth control, contraception, prophylaxis, and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases by young adults who choose to engage in sexual activity, all of the books purposefully omit these vital topics, thus continuing the propagation of ignorance among young adults in Texas. The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills refuses to require most of this vital information, but even the topic it does--the effectiveness of barrier protection for the prevention of STDs--is omitted by four of the books!
My written testimony reviews and analyzes the treatment of sex education in five different health education textbooks published by Holt, Glencoe-McGraw Hill, and Thomson-Delmar submitted for adoption this year. In brief, the five 2005 health textbooks all promote sexual abstinence-only and avoid mentioning other methods of prophylaxis for prevention of STDs and contraception for prevention of pregnancy. Four are Texas Editions, and you know what that means: keeping the students ignorant. Over 60% of Texas students engage in sexual activity before graduating from high school, so the textbooks, the state health education curriculum, and the state's public education officials are all complicit in the extremely high teenage pregnancy and STD rates in Texas.
Abstinence-only sex education programs have been proven to be counterproductive in preventing the very undesirable social behaviors and effects that the programs and their supporters wish to end. Until the Texas SBOE begins to treat human sexuality in an honest and scientifically-realistic manner within the health education curriculum, Texas will continue to have some of the worst sexuality and health statistics in the nation.
About 12 years ago, the Texas Department of Health publicly asked that health education textbooks include information about contraception and prophylaxis due to the extremely high rates of unwanted pregnancy and STDs among Texas teenagers. The Department of Health needs to get involved again in 2004 to help stop the foolish business-as-usual (textbook censorship) at the TEA and SBOE and among health education textbook authors and publishers (self-censorship). Our state's tragically high pregnancy and STD rates must be lowered!
The TCS written testimony is available online as an HTML file, a PDF file, and a Word document at http://www.texscience.org/health.php. This testimony reviews and analyzes the treatment of sex education in five different health education textbooks, and has been submitted to the State Board of Education for publication in the public record. The website about these controversial health education books also includes links to national and Texas health statistics, including teenage pregnancy and STD infection rates, links to national organizations that promote reliable and realistic sex education, and links to news stories about health education textbook adoption and the high rates of pregnancy and STD rates in Texas.
Steven Schafersman, President
Texas Citizens for Science
P.O. Box 13022
Odessa, TX 79768-3022
Phone: 432-352-2265
Email: info@txscience.org
Web: http://www.texscience.org/