Vote Draws Near on Texas Curriculum

State school board sets vote on English, reading amid continued criticism.

For more than three years, members of the Texas state board of education have been directing an effort to revise the state’s standards for English-language arts and reading—a document that will apply to $626 million in instructional materials due to hit Texas classrooms in fall 2010.

But in the lead-up to next week’s scheduled meeting and vote on those standards, participants in the process were scrambling to provide copies of the final proposal to all board members and the public, a measure of just how complex and controversial the process has been.

“Usually, the document is pretty well finalized after first reading, nearly two months before the vote,” Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, which provides staff for the board, said in an interview last week. “For whatever reason, English is always the more difficult subject for us to adopt standards on,...