Rainbow Textbooks Adopted in California

The American Spectator reports:

In 2016, when California officially added LGBT mandates to the state-approved curriculum, the San Francisco Chronicle called the event “a landmark move that puts the ongoing LGBT civil rights fight into the mainstream of public education.” Publishers duly responded, as they have with previous state laws and guidelines. They created schoolbooks that, among many instructional tasks, select, recognize, and feature historical figures based on their sexuality. Outing historical figures, often based on thin speculation, is new to school-level history, and many historians and textbook editors are uneasy with the trend, but California authorities rejected non-conforming submissions.

Several Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) books didn’t meet California reviewers’ requests for explicit references. The publisher’s middle-school text failed to sexualize historical figures Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and James Buchanan, for example. The HMH rejection is ironic since, in 1990, Houghton Mifflin gained what amounted to a state monopoly, creating textbooks to match California’s daring new content framework.

The priorities of government schools in California.