In early 2014 David Brockman, Ph.D, parishioner at St. Luke’s in the Meadow, Fort Worth, was asked by the nonprofit watchdog group Texas Freedom Network (TFN) to join ten other scholars in an independent review of the social studies textbooks up for adoption by the State of Texas.
The Network was “troubled by the exclusion of credentialed scholars from the official textbook review panels and my job was to evaluate the coverage of religions in world geography and world history textbooks,” Brockman writes in an article for Religious Dispatches, published on Thursday, December 17, 2014, entitled “6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewers of Controversial Texas Textbooks”
Brockman is an Adjunct Lecturer at Southern Methodist University, Adjunct at Brite Divinity School, and Adjunct Professor at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University,
Brockman writes, “In September 2014, I found myself standing before a mostly hostile Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) testifying about religious imbalance and inaccuracies in public school textbooks under consideration for adoption. To my great surprise, I also found myself quoted inPolitico, the Washington Post, and several Texas newspapers. Al Jazeera America sought me out for an on-camera interview. For a religious studies scholar more at home in the classroom or library cubicle, the swirl of media attention was, well, disconcerting.”
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