The California Senate on Friday approved legislation that sends a clear message to Texas and textbook publishers: don’t mess with our kids’ minds. ‘My bill begins the process of ensuring that California students will not end up being taught with Texas standards,’ State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), who authored and sponsored the legislation, said in an interview. Texas standards had better not ‘creep into our textbooks,’ he said. The S.B. 1451 measure – approved on a bipartisan vote of 25-5 – requires California’s Board of Education to examine and report any discrepancies between the new Texas standards and California’s standards. ‘At that point,’ Yee told Raw Story, ‘we will make it very, very clear that we won’t accept textbooks that minimize the contributions of minorities and propagate the close connection between church and state.’ California, also a critical client for textbook companies, can counteract Texas’s influence on how books are written for schools across the country. ‘It’s a warning to the textbooks writers and companies,’ said Yee, who served on the San Francisco Board of Education earlier in his career and is currently the second highest ranking Democrat in California’s upper house. The Texas modifications […]