End Run around Board of Education?

Texas Freedom Network has a blog, which is reporting that the state legislature is not necessarily going to let the Texas State Board of Education have its way with the science curriculum:

State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, has just filed legislation that would strip the Texas State Board of Education of all authority assigned to it by statute. Among the board’s powers that would go away: setting curriculum standards and adopting textbooks. That authority would be transferred to the Texas Education Agency.

The only authority the board would keep under Senate Bill 440 is power granted under the state Constitution, primarily managing the Permanent School Fund. Removing that authority and eliminating the board altogether would require passage of a constitutional amendment, followed by approval from Texas voters.

We noted last month that state lawmakers had begun looking at ways to rein in the deeply politicized board. We wouldn’t be surprised to see additional legislation targeting the board.

More here.

Not sure how much to rely on TFN's spin, but I sure hope this is more or less right. Hard as it may be for the rest of the world to believe based on our last eight years being governed at the federal level by rabid mole rats, there are certain traces of pragmatism among some parts of the Texas Republican party, and their numerical control of the legislature is slender.

Update: While in this article I refer to the departing federal administration as being constituted of rabid mole rats, in the other article I posted today I refer to them as drunken lemurs. I have been called to account for this discrepancy. I must say it is a good question. Most likely, it is a coalition of some kind between the two groups, which clearly have largely coinciding interests.