Moar,

Although lessons vary, many teachers are trying to present a more balanced perspective of what happened after Columbus reached the Caribbean and the suffering of indigenous populations.

By balanced they mean radical Marxist, Progressive or other vigorously anti-Western interpretations of the history of Columbus and the Western discovery of the Americas. 

“The whole terminology has changed,” said James Kracht, executive associate dean for academic affairs in the Texas A&M College of Education and Human Development. “You don’t hear people using the world ’discovery’ anymore like they used to. ’Columbus discovers America.’ Because how could he discover America if there were already people living here?”

Of course we don't, because most teachers are educated by professors who teach from a position of hostility toward traditional Western thought, interpretation and philosophy, and many teachers aren't educated well enough to recognize that and adjust.  Then there are those that do recognize that, but agree with the underlying philosophies and play along.  The public school system is mostly built around progressive philosophical concepts, so you have that as well.  Then obviously most textbooks and workbooks are designed by people from a higher education background, who are for the most part leftists.  Which is why we get the stupid, "How could he discover it if there were already people there?" nonsense.

In Texas, students start learning in the fifth grade about the “Columbian Exchange” — which consisted not only of gold, crops and goods shipped back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, but diseases carried by settlers that decimated native populations.

And Europeans picked up and brought back syphilis from the Americas, educators need to quit acting like Westerners waged biological war on Native Americans.  They're bacteria, parasites and viruses, they spread with human contact, except in Madagascar, where they close their damned port every time someone sneezes, it's biology, it happens, especially in an era where people didn't really understand how the spread of disease worked.  I'll also note that the dean I quote above parrots this bullshit on the second page.

They won't teach these kids that the Natives gave Westerners nasty diseases too, because they're taught to teach that America is the bad guy,

America, Marxism's bad guy,