AUSTIN — Texas students are not learning enough about Hispanic contributions to history, and the state’s curriculum should include more of those lessons, some state officials said.

"I’m not saying in every paragraph I want a Hispanic; I’m just saying put some in there," said Mary Helen Berlanga, a member of the State Board of Education.

Next year, the board will begin reviewing the social studies part of the state’s curriculum called Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, she said. If the curriculum does not explicitly require specific examples of Hispanics who contributed to American and Texas history, she said, those lessons would remain absent from textbooks.

Especially in a state where more than 45 percent of public school students are Hispanic, Berlanga said, that is unacceptable.

"I just think it’s time we get history correct," she said.

There are some lessons about Hispanics, such as César Chávez and Pancho Villa, in the state’s social studies curriculum, said Jim Harrington, curriculum coach at Socorro High School.

Since the late 1990s, though, he said, schools have moved away from specific Hispanic history courses because the material is not required for TEKS or the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, test.

Socorro, he said, had to drop its Chicano studies course in the 1990s.

Many teachers at Socorro and other local schools are Hispanic and passionate about their culture and their community, Harrington said. Those teachers weave in their own knowledge so that students learn about contributions Hispanics made throughout history and how they affect current events.

If Hispanic contributions are not a part of the state’s required curriculum, though, he said, students in other regions might miss out on those lessons.

"I think it’s valuable to get the entire picture of what was going on in America at the time," Harrington said.

Rene Nuñez, who represents El Paso on the State Board of Education, said it’s critical for Hispanic children all over Texas to understand their heritage and to see role models who look like them.

"There’s just not enough information to make our Hispanic kids proud of who they are," Nuñez said.

Public schools largely omit the two centuries of Texas history under the rule of Spain and Mexico, Texas State Historian Frank de la Teja wrote in an editorial last week. "Textbooks focus on the arrival of settlers from the United States, but, for many Texans, the heritage from south of the Rio Grande is one to which they can better relate," he wrote.

While Texas education leaders work to make history lessons more relevant to students, de la Teja said, the Internet offers information textbooks do not. He urged youths to look at the Handbook of Texas Online at www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/ "until all of our schools embrace the entire rich and diverse story of Texas."

Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culberson said committees would begin reviewing the state’s social studies curriculum next fall. Any changes the committee makes, however, won’t show up in textbooks until at least the 2013-14 school year.

Source The Mexican Times