The State Board of Education (SBOE) meeting began late on Tuesday due to continuing winter weather concerns, so the decision was made to only take up items related to instructional materials and postpone items related to personal financial literacy until Thursday. The board made recommendations to improve the upcoming cycle, approved changes to the suitability reviewer selection process, and tweaked the process for formally rejecting materials in accordance with House Bill (HB) 100.
These items were a slow warmup for an exhaustive Wednesday that bore witness to a disturbing scope creep over several topics that will have enduring effects on student learning.
TEA Annual Report
Commissioner Mike Morath began the day by presenting the board with the TEA 2025 Annual Report. This report is a useful tool for advocates as it not only provides data and statistics from the previous year but also a recap of significant legislation like HB 2. It can also hint at the policy priorities of the agency for the coming year.
Civics Training
There were several items that the SBOE scrutinized heavily, beginning with the required civics training requirements from SB 3. The agency is proposing a “trainer of trainer” model where one administrator and one teacher will be trained from each campus at a central facility, such as an education service center, and then return to their districts and provide that training to other teachers in the topics required of the bill. Teacher trainers will earn a stipend for successfully completing the training. The SBOE spent time discussing the content of the proposed modules as they will only have approval and not editorial review of the eventual trainings, but they will be able to annually review the civics training. Some members expressed concern that due to employment moves, this may end up with inconsistent implementation.
Required Vocabulary
Next up, the board received an update and discussed the education commissioner’s recommendations for vocabulary lists to be taught in K-12 as required by HB 1605. The bill included this provision because evidence shows that mastery of academic vocabulary is a strong indicator of overall academic success and college readiness. TEA is proposing that this list be comprised of general academic vocabulary (including academic skills), content-specific vocabulary (terms specifically found in the TEKS), and vocabulary from literary works.
If the list were limited to the first two factors, this item would be almost administrative. However, the final factor of basing some of the list on “required literary works” is potentially problematic. It should absolutely be a goal to have students reading deeply and widely at grade level and beyond in order to build knowledge (and hey, just enjoy reading), but the discussion of the literary works list (next item) made it apparent that there is a concerted effort by the state to control what is being read by students. It is important to note that these vocabulary lists will be adopted into the TEKS and therefore every word on the list is eligible for inclusion on the state assessments.
Literary Works List
Over 60 people signed up to testify on the proposed list of required literary works mandated by HB 1605. Overwhelmingly, testifiers criticized the lists for a few primary reasons:
- The lists exceed the scope of the law which requires the SBOE to adopt a minimum of one work where the TEA has recommended multiple titles for inclusion at each grade level. Teachers pointed out that this removes flexibility and autonomy from their classrooms and would also create additional demands on classroom time.
- There was also concern about the inclusion of books at inappropriate grade levels. There were repeated asks to reduce the quantity of works in the list which will be adopted into the TEKS and therefore eligible for the state assessment.
- Testifiers also pointed out the lack of cultural representation that is a key factor in engaging students in reading not only in school but over the course of a lifetime. Testifiers asked that the list be diversified and reduced so that teachers and students would be able to select works (as required in the TEKS) that allow students to become more independent and critical readers.
Further, these lists could become a “back door” requirement for the controversial Bluebonnet Curriculum that many districts have actively rejected. Several of the proposed works list the publisher as the “State of Texas” which indicates that the only acceptable version would be nested within Bluebonnet.
One positive point is that TEA seems very aware of creating a parallel list for emergent bilingual students by providing either a direct translation option or a substitute Spanish-language text.
An amendment to drastically reduce the lists was introduced by board member Will Hickman and it received support. He cited similar concerns that the list is overly prescriptive and suggested that time to teach be a considered factor in the ultimate adoption of these lists. However, there was still a discrepancy as to what titles should be included such as religious texts. Ultimately, the SBOE decided to postpone the literary lists to their following meeting in April.
Social Studies
The final item on Wednesday provided an opportunity for the board to consider recommendations from content advisors on key topics and subtopics for the social studies TEKS.
Testifiers ranged in their criticism of the key topics. Several cited the exclusion of world history instruction which necessarily includes honoring the contributions of multiple civilizations and cultures. Others emphasized the overall density of topics in grades 3-8 (the old “mile wide, inch deep” argument), as well as the age appropriateness of said topics and lack of focus for the high school courses. Only one content advisor of the nine appointed for the Social Studies TEKS review has experience in a K-12 classroom, so it is unsurprising that the recommended key topics are going to be full of errors.
A few of the content advisors were also invited to provide testimony on their work. There are still doubts among the board members about whether or not the advisors were actually writing the standards. They insisted that they were not charged with writing TEKS but simply provided these very “robust” topics to guide the working groups. One advisor acknowledged that if the 54 pages of topics (that she also admitted were not developed with group consensus) before the board were fully adopted, it would overwhelm the standards and set teachers up to fail.
All of this is problematic, but the heart of the issue with the standards is this is a “comprehensive overhaul” from instruction as it has existed for decades in Texas classrooms. Though the board voted in favor of the new chronological framework and its varying emphasis on selective aspects of history, there is no precedent or data supporting this as sound pedagogy. Further, the content advisors seem to have had undue influence over the end product where all previous TEKS revisions were driven primarily by the working groups. One testifier alluded to this:
We need to be honest about what is happening here. This process is not being driven by the elected State Board of Education; it is being driven by the Texas Education Agency. What you are being asked to consider today is the end product of a process you [the SBOE] did not control. Content advisors. Content advisors were selected through a commissioner driven process, the framework was shaped upstream by TEA, the guardrails were set before this ever reached the SBOE and by the time it gets here the range of options have already been narrowed. That is not genuine deliberation, that is managed consent. – Mary Lowe
While Texas AFT admires the Thursday efforts to add more accuracy and diversity to the key topics before they are delivered to the working groups, we fear this is simply masking the deeper systemic problems of transparency and lack of public engagement so far in this process. The next step is for TEA to convene the first work group which will take place next week in Austin.
Charter School Update
There are 14 charter applications still undergoing the external review process: seven new, seven returning applicants. There is ongoing concern that these proposed operators may be able to open their campuses in any location in Texas and not the geography named in their application, a common practice among charters. The agency will hold capacity interviews in early May for those who successfully pass this review, and the commissioner will make his recommendations for approval to the SBOE in late May with final SBOE considerations happening at their June meeting.
Final Thoughts
There is much to be outraged about in the current new cycles and while we are seeing human rights violations across the country, it can seem trivial to ask Hotline readers to direct precious energy to examining what is happening in Texas public education. But the obfuscation of what should be public-facing activities of an elected body should give us pause, especially when the result is a further whitewashing of history and literature in our state. Unfortunately, this is just the latest step in a slow march away from local control and centralization of state power over the last public good we have, our schools. Texas AFT will monitor these activities closely between now and April and report to our members as needed.