Texas GOP is Opposed to Critical Thinking

Not to mention a variety of other good ideas...

And it's not a moment too soon!  In 2010 Texas celebrated a 3.7 percent increase in their High School graduation rate.  At 84.3% Texas was but a few points below the national average of 84.6%.  Time they put a stop to that troubling trend lest they create High School graduates who can analyze, evaluate, or even synthesize ideas instead of honoring their father and mother and supporting Israel without reservation because the Bible tells them so.

This commitment to ignorance has been dissed in varying degrees of granularity and snarkiness at other blogs, but here's the source document.  The leaders of the Texican Republican Party would much rather young people not git all uppity with their book learnin and all:

"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

Seems this new-fangled HOTS stuff is based on something called Bloom's Taxonomy, some sort of wild-eyed, modern teaching "theory" invented in 1956...in Chicago (if you know what I mean).

Yup, when it comes to clear thinking don't bother messing with Texas, especially its Republicans.

Image credit: High School Graduation Rates by State http://www.raconline.org/racmaps/mapfiles/education.png  PS, The Rural Assistance Center hosts a wide variety of very important metrics