The Texas State Board of Education is poised to vote on a new set of controversial social studies standards, capping months of heated debate over the role of Christianity in U.S. history, whether and how students should learn about Islam, and what constitutes American identity and values.
The new standards, which would take effect during the 2030-31 school year if adopted, would also shift the topics and time periods students learn about at each grade, substantially altering what the state’s more than 5.5 million students learn. The board is set to vote on the proposal this week.
The changes could have implications beyond Texas, experts say.
“Success in adopting these standards would reflect a certain Christian nationalist momentum,” said Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University, who researches how religion is taught in public schools.
“It provides a model for those with the same ideology in other states to look to for guidance,” he said.
A growing number of states—including Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Utah—have moved to incorporate Christian teaching and text into K-12 classrooms. Texas has been a leader in this trend, requiring classrooms to display a copy of the Ten Commandments and approving a state curriculum for elementary English/language arts that prominently features Bible stories and references to religious figures. Also, this week, the state board is considering a required reading list for grades K-12 ELA classes, which includes excerpts from the Old and New testaments.
Because Texas has the second-largest number of students in the nation, publishers keep a close eye on changes to standards in the state. “Traditionally,” said Chancey, “what happens in Texas affects material that ends up in textbooks.”
The proposed social studies standards emphasize the influence of the Bible and the Ten Commandments on the founders and American systems of law and government. They reference Biblical figures like Abraham and Moses, sometimes requiring students to draw connections between religious texts and history—such as a 6th grade standard that asks students to compare Harriet Tubman with Moses in the Exodus story.
During hours of public testimony that stretched into the night on Monday, critics of the standards identified other examples they said were problematic: Describing the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II as a “contribution” made on the American home front to the war effort; a disproportionate focus on Western civilization in world history; the absence of women’s history from some grade levels; and mentions of Islam solely in the context of conflict or slavery.
Proponents of the standards argue that they simply reflect the historical relevance of Christianity to America’s founding, and don’t proselytize religious faith.
“When it comes down to history, we have to answer two fundamental questions: Who are we, and how did we get here?” said Rep. Hillary Hickland, a Republican in the Texas House of Representatives, during Monday’s meeting.
“These questions cannot be fully answered without acknowledging the significant role that Biblical references and Judeo-Christian principles have played in shaping our nation’s history, institutions, and civic traditions.”
But opponents say the standards privilege Christianity in a way that distorts the historical record.
“This is an attempt to break down and destroy the idea that there is a separation of church and state,” said Whit Barringer, a program and data analyst at the American Historical Association, the largest professional organization of historians in the United States, which has advocated against the standards.
Texas has a long history of debate over social studies
Debates over social studies have long been contentious in the Lone Star state.
The 2010 revision process made national headlines, as Texas state board of education members, educators, and community members battled over the standards’ treatment of the separation of church and state and the role of discrimination in U.S. history—issues that would again be central more than 15 years later.
The adopted standards were “deeply ideological” and “very openly right-wing,” said Jeremy Stern, an independent scholar and an author on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s periodic national reviews of states’ U.S. history standards. An update in 2018 represented a “good-faith effort” to move more toward the center, Stern said. But then tensions mounted again in 2022.
That year, the state board convened work groups of educators, subject-matter experts, and community members to revise the standards again. Proposed drafts would have placed a greater emphasis on the way diverse groups shaped Texas and the United States, including standards related to LGBTQ+ history and racial injustice.
Nationally, it was a charged time in social studies education. In several states across the country, commentators and politicians claimed that guidelines for the subject embedded “critical race theory,” taking issue with what they viewed as an overemphasis on cultural diversity and historical inequities.
A similar story played out in Texas. In board meetings, conservative nonprofits and some parents said the proposed 2022 standards sidelined Texas history and didn’t do enough to promote American exceptionalism. Eventually, the board voted to delay the revision until 2025.
Now, the state board of education has adopted a guiding framework for the standards that presents the founding of the United States and Texas as “the noblest experiment.”
Democrats on the board have raised concerns about conflicts of interest, after tax filings revealed that the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative group that has been advocating for the standards, awarded a grant to one of the standards’ content advisers. Other content advisers appointed by the state board have promoted the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation and pushed for curriculum overhauls that scrub references to diversity.
Christianity, Islam are major flashpoints in the standards
Debates over religion’s role in the standards—and specifically, whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation—have taken center stage at board meetings over the past year.
The standards, for example, ask 3rd graders to describe how Christian beliefs have helped shape American ideas about equality and describe Moses’s contributions as a “law-giver.” Fifth graders are expected to explain how religious freedom inspired colonial American beliefs about “American exceptionalism.”
Supporters of the standards argue that Christianity played a major role in shaping the country, and that the guidelines simply reflect this influence.
“You literally cannot understand Western civilizations and America’s foundation, our legal system, or our foundation of morality without referencing the Bible,” said Mandy Drogin, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
But some experts say that position obscures important nuances.
“Yes, Christianity was important in the American founding, and has always been important for American history,” said Chancey, the Southern Methodist University professor. “These standards go wrong by elevating Biblical influence beyond other sources and mischaracterizing the specific ways in which the Bible and Christian thought were influential.”
For instance, he said, one 3rd grade standard asks students to “describe how Hebrew teachings, including the Ten Commandments, provided foundational ideas about right and wrong that influenced American laws.” While religious tenets contributed to those ideas, so did Roman law and English common law, neither of which is mentioned in the standard.
“It’s striking that we get so much emphasis on the Bible as early as 3rd grade,” he said.
At Monday’s board meeting, commenters also discussed the standards’ treatment of Islam at length. The religion receives relatively few mentions in the standards, and most are in reference to Christian and Islamic conflicts or 21st century terrorism.
Critics of the guidelines argued that this would present students with an incomplete and biased portrayal of Muslim people and make Muslim children feel unwelcome in Texas public schools.
Texas politics has seen a recent surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric, with some Republican candidates for office making what they call the “Islamification” of Texas central to their campaigns. Earlier this month, delegates at the Republican Party of Texas Convention told Muslim attendees to leave, and said that immigrants who don’t believe in Judeo-Christian values create problems for the country. On Monday, some commenters shared similar sentiments.
Texas State Sen. Bob Hall, a Republican, said that Islam was not a religion but a “totalitarian theocracy, not unlike totalitarian systems of Communism, Nazism, and globalism.” Texas schools, he said, should teach children about the “evils of Islamic theocracy.”
While religion took up much of the airtime at Monday’s meeting, historians have identified other concerns with the standards, too. The American Historical Association has published analyses arguing that the document features factual inaccuracies, significant omissions, and ideological biases.
Watershed moments in American history, like emancipation or reforms of the Progressive Era, are downplayed, said Julia Brookins, the association’s senior program analyst for teaching and learning.
“You wouldn’t have a sense of how profoundly different the world is now from the world of 250 years ago, or 2,000 years ago—and that seems to be intentional,” she said. “It’s almost as if you were to take the idea of originalism from jurisprudence, and try to make that fit U.S. history.”
Standards would restructure social studies scope and sequence
If adopted, the new guidelines would require teachers to overhaul their lessons—but not just due to changes in individual standards.
The board also adopted a new social studies framework, which outlines the scope and sequence of content throughout grades K-8. It marks a significant shift in how the subject is structured.
In Texas classrooms now, students learn about most topics for the first time in elementary school, and then revisit them in more depth in middle school. For example, 5th graders learn about the purpose of, and key ideas within, the U.S. Constitution. In 8th grade, they study the entire document in more depth.
The new framework doesn’t return to topics in the same way, instead taking a chronological approach: 3rd grade covers prehistory to 500 C.E., 4th grade covers 500-1500, 5th grade covers 1500-1800, 6th grade covers the 19th century, 7th grade covers the 20th century, and 8th grade is a Texas and U.S. “capstone.” It also eliminates a standalone middle school course on world cultures and politics.
This is an unusual structure for K-8 social studies, said Tina Ellsworth, the president of the National Council for the Social Studies. “Overwhelmingly, it’s spiraled at the elementary level,” she said.
Proponents of the framework have argued that it allows teachers to better contextualize change over time. But some teachers say it could result in students entering high school with a shallower understanding of pivotal eras in American history.
Elementary schools often struggle to fit in time for social studies, said Meghan Dougherty, a curriculum coordinator in a central Texas district, and a member of one of the work groups. The current framework allows for that reality, returning to important topics like the U.S. Constitution again in middle school.
“This new framework is assuming they’re going to teach this stuff in the elementary grades,” she said. “It’s shifting that really heavy Constitution year from 8th grade to 5th grade.”
The new structure would also require new materials, and for teachers at each grade level to be trained on the topics they would now need to cover, said Brendan Gillis, the director of teaching and learning at the AHA.
A similar situation has unfolded over the past few years in South Dakota, said Gillis, where state leaders adopted new social studies standards spearheaded by a former professor at Hillsdale College, a private Christian college in Michigan.
“The state developed standards that were structured in a way different from anywhere else, so the only solution to get materials to teachers was to award a contract,” Gillis said. South Dakota partnered with social studies curriculum provider Studies Weekly to provide free materials to districts.
In Texas, districts already have access to a state-provided curriculum in ELA, with Bluebonnet Learning. The materials have proved controversial, and the state plans to spend over $8 million in taxpayer funds to fix more than 4,000 errors embedded in the initial release of the program.
If the standards are adopted, Texas officials will have to navigate finding materials to meet the new standards, preparing teachers, and likely managing continued political fervor.
“I know there are lots of states that are watching to see how that turns out,” said Drogin, of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “And hopefully, they will soon follow suit.”
