Tea Partier Ginger Russell seems to have outsmarted the Texas Education Agency, Thomas Ratliff, and the entire Texas education establishment in the battle over CSCOPE, the anti-American and anti-Christian curriculum hotly opposed by parents all over the state.
Russell has published 10 CSCOPE tests and answers, which compromise their integrity and render them unusable to teachers.
In response, a suggestion has been floated by desperate pro-CSCOPE forces that there is a copyright on the CSCOPE materials.
Too bad for them, the Texas Education Agency’s own attorney already declared CSCOPE to be public domain. They were trying to circumvent a newly-passed law designed to remove CSCOPE curriculum from Texas classrooms. Their claim was that teachers could still use CSCOPE even though the TEA could no longer make it compulsory.
The following is a quote from the Beaumont Enterprise on July 19, 2013:
However, the Board of Education heard Wednesday from a top Texas Education Agency attorney who suggested that CSCOPE has simply been moved into the public domain. That would scrap previous intellectual property concerns, meaning any school district who wanted to could continue to use the curriculum system.
For this play by the education establishment to work, CSCOPE needed to be made public domain. If not, teachers lack legal access to the materials.
TEA attorney David Anderson said, “The CSCOPE lessons are in the public domain in the sense that Shakespeare is in the public domain and anyone is allowed to use it.”
Public domain means the copyright is gone, forfeited, and the education establishment can’t have it both ways. No doubt they will try to go put the copyright genie back in the bottle, but their credibility has taken another mortal blow.
Russell and all of the anti-CSCOPE warriors are fighting very well.
–Beaumont Enterprise article
–TEA “CSCOPE is public domain like Shakespeare” quote