Texas Schools Still Pushing Muslim Bias And Need To Be Investigated, According To Official

Over a month after a Texas school district debunked allegations that their third-party curriculum was indoctrinating young students in Islam, the claims of bias refuse to die, and now may be revived by a local politician.

The Irving Independent School District convened a school board session in December after a chain email made the rounds of board member inboxes, alleging that “Christians are going to have to stand up against the pro Islamic teaching in our public schools with CSCOPE curriculum," reports The Dallas Morning News.

The special work session and its 72-page report found the email's claims to be quite the opposite. In fact, the board reported that schools in the district held a clear Christian bias.

The results of a 72-page investigation done by the organization were not surprising: there’s a Christian bias in schools, not a Muslim one.

CSCOPE is a third-party curriculum package used by schools in the state, and is an offshoot of the Texas Education Service Centers. It received close to $25 million in state finding in 2011.

In December, conservative blog WorldNetDaily apparently refused to accept the findings of the board, and published an article claiming that students using the CSCOPE package are learning that “Allah is the Almighty God," reports Right Wing Watch.

This week, WorldNetDaily published a new piece titled "Obama interested in 'Allah-is-God' curriculum" which repeated the indoctrination claims, adding that "CSCOPE lessons promote Islam, teaching conversion methods and presenting verses from the Quran that denigrate other faiths."

The site also reached out to Republican Texas Sen. Dan Patrick, the chairman of the education committee. Patrick said he was weighing an investigation of CSCOPE, adding that the package "needs to be closely examined by the legislature.”

The way Islam is treated in Texas textbooks has been a topic of controversy for the past several years. In 2010, the Texas State Board of Education adopted a nonbinding resolution that encouraged publishers to limit the number of references to Islam in their history books, according to the Associated Press.

A 2011 report by an assistant professor of history at The University of Texas at El Paso noted that Fordham Institute gave Texas history standards a "D" grade due to "troubling" lessons that pushed a "politicized distortion of history."