Texas students top national science test

According to the Texas Education Agency:

According to test results released today by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), every major ethnic group in Texas scored higher on the redesigned eighth-grade NAEP science test than did their peers nationally, and white students earned the second-highest score in the country.

Tim Lambert adds:

This week the Texas Education Agency (TEA) announced the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing for students across the country. Texas minority public school students scored tops in the country on the science test and white students were second in the nation. This is huge news, especially with all the controversy surrounding the State Board of Education adoption of science standards a few years ago.

I’m sure a lot of you outside Texas have heard about the controversy that Lambert mentions.  They’re removing Thomas Jefferson!!!  They’re anti-science!!! Here’s how that came about.  Texas created the State Board of Education as a body elected by the citizens.  Like every other elected office above the local level in Texas, Republicans tend to win more than Democrats.  So as Democratic power retreated, the SBOE became yet another target of well-funded far left lobbies like the Texas Freedom Network, which is run by the daughter of the late Ann Richards.  These left wing groups target the SBOE members largely because the members have a very hard time fighting back: SBOE positions are unpaid, and they don’t have rapid reaction communications staffs to defend them.  They tend not to have any staff at all.  These “progressive” lobbies attack conservatives on the SBOE relentlessly, and the media here run with the attacks without identifying their partisan origins.  So every single thing the SBOE does gets blown out of all proportion.  These “progressives” have an agenda: They want to take SBOE out of the elected realm and convert it into an appointed bureaucracy, which they’ll pack with “progressives” who will do what “progressives” tend to do: Water down standards, downplay the great aspects of US and Texas history, and the rest.  It is these “progressives” who would destroy education in Texas, not the maligned conservatives on the Texas SBOE.