People For has been tracking the Religious Right’s crusade to politicize textbooks—and fighting against it—since the 1980s. Our new Right Wing Watch: In Focus report outlines how the latest right-wing takeover of Texas textbooks fits into the history of the religious right’s efforts to influence public education:

Religious Right leaders in Texas have been waging war against science and history for the past few decades. A primary target and battleground has been the state’s public schools, in particular the statewide approval process for textbooks. People For the American Way Foundation first started working with Texans to resist Religious Right takeovers of textbooks back in the 1980s.

The Religious Right has invested so heavily in Texas textbooks because of the national implications. School districts in Texas have to buy books from a state-approved list, and Texas is such an enormous market that textbook publishers will generally do whatever they can to get on that list. Textbooks written and edited to meet Texas standards end up being used all over the country. So Religious Right leaders in Texas can doom millions of American students to stunted, scientifically dubious science books and ideologically slanted history and social studies books. Advances in printing technology make it easier to prevent that from happening now, but it will take vigilance to keep publishers from following the path of least resistance.

Earlier this month, we led a coalition of groups to deliver over 130,000 petitions to a textbook publisher in New York urging them to reject Texas’s new right-wing curriculum standards. You can sign the petition here.

Read the full Right Wing Watch report here.