Like every year, the nation has spent the last month captivated by the NCAA basketball tournament. In addition to showcasing the nation’s top basketball talent, the tournament also exposes us to one of the most unconscionable economic arrangements in American history: the failure to pay college athletes.

Every year, the NCAA finds new ways to extract economic value from the sweat of its athletes. From shoe deals to video game licensing to television contracts, the labor of college athletes generates billions of dollars every year for TV networks, schools, coaches, apparel companies, hotels, airlines and countless other entities that do not have to lace up sneakers, miss class, or risk injury. In fact, the only people who do not benefit from the ever-expanding “athletic industrial complex” are the athletes themselves.

The primary argument against payment has been that they are student athletes who are being rewarded with a full ride to college. If tainted by money, proponents argue, collegians will lose their innocence and be hastily hurled into the dark world of profit-making. Like any effective pimp, the NCAA pretends to protect its athletes from the harsh realities of the “real world” while exploiting them in the most extravagant ways imaginable.

While the romantic notion of the “student-athlete” may have been authentic 50 years ago, today’s college player is markedly different. Today’s athlete is expected to practice 4-6 hours a day, work out 12 months out of the year, and miss out on many of the personal, social, and intellectual experiences that color our idyllic memories of college. In nearly every way, today’s college player is much more like an overworked semi-professional than an amateur student in need of protection from corporate bloodsuckers.

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Last night, I debated Bill O’Reilly the Westboro Baptist Church controversy, as well as the responsibility of the courts.

Over the past two months, as the nation debated the merits of health insurance reform and troop escalation, another major political movement quietly slipped by the American public virtually unnoticed. In Texas, the uber-conservative State Board of Education has tentatively endorsed a set of curriculum reforms that will have a devastating impact on the entire nation.

Under the guise of providing “ideological balance” to the Texas curriculum, the school board has recommended a sweeping set of changes that will strongly tilt the district’s curriculum toward a far Right ideology. Among the board’s proposed changes: eliminating figures like Cesar Chavez, Edward Kennedy, and even Thomas Jefferson; replacing the word “capitalism” with “free enterprise system,” implying that there wasn’t a racial dimension to the internment of 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II and emphasizing the Christian beliefs of the Founding Fathers.

Scared yet? It gets worse.

Because of Texas’ enormous $22 billion educational endowment, which it uses to purchase nearly 50 million textbooks per year, the state holds considerable sway with the handful of publishers that service U.S. school districts. As a result, the decisions made by the highly partisan board will radically reshape the content of textbooks not only in Texas, but around the nation.

To be fair, school textbooks have never been apolitical or neutral. Like all aspects of schooling, they always reflect and reinforce a particular agenda, worldview, and ideology. This is not only because of political machinery, but because knowledge itself is under constant debate, reexamination, and revision. What counts as a “fact” today may be disproven and discarded next year. As a result, we must always make tough decisions about the people, events, and ideas that will be included or excluded within our canons of knowledge. This unavoidable subjectivity, however, cannot be used as an excuse for installing arbitrary procedures that only serve to reinforce the interests of dominant political groups.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what is happening in Texas.

Instead of assembling experts who make informed decisions on relevant issues, the Texas school board is primarily comprised of random ideologues whose primary qualification is being conservative. Of the fifteen current board members, ten are Republican. Seven of the ten identify as extremely conservative. The board is comprised of multiple attorneys, a dentist, a newspaper publisher, and several other people who are perfectly intelligent but thoroughly unqualified to be the arbiters of historical, scientific, or social knowledge for an entire nation.

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Last weekend, I joined Tim Wise and Ben Zimmer in a great conversation about the dangerous tone and tenor of the current health care debate.