In recent days, hair-on-fire reports like this one from the Huffington Post claim that the Texas Senate “has passed a bill to eliminate a requirement that public schools teach that the Ku Klux Klan and its white supremacist campaign of terror are ‘morally wrong.’”
The reports are misleading at best; even Texas news outlets that should know better are piling on.
But National Review Editor Rich Lowry took to Twitter on Tuesday to debunk the claim. Here’s how he broke it down:
This story, widely amplified on Twitter, saying that Texas is eliminating a requirement to teach about the KKK is completely dishonest.
What happened is that Democrats added a bunch of concepts and documents that schoolkids should know in the anti-CRT [critical race theory] bill that passed the House a few weeks ago.
The list was incredibly detailed and extensive, when it’s the role of the state board of education, not the legislature, to get into the weeds of the specifics of the curriculum. Besides, many of the items are already covered in the curriculum.
It was widely expected that the Senate would pare down the House bill, and that’s what it did, including cutting a provision citing the KKK.
This emphatically does not mean that Texas is banning teaching about the KKK—anyone saying otherwise is misinformed or lying.
The bill does not subtract anything from the current curriculum, and says so explicitly:
“(e) Nothing in this section may be construed as limiting the teaching of or instruction in the essential knowledge and skills adopted under this subchapter.”