Tiffany Perkinz is running in the Democratic primary for the SBOE in District 7, which represents parts of Beaumont, Galveston, and Prairieland. (Photo courtesy of Perkinz campaign)
Texas voters have a large say in shaping public education this year, as eight out of 15 State Board of Education districts will be on the ballot March 3.
Tiffany Perkinz is a mother, former English teacher, and owns her own tutoring business. Now, she’s fighting for a chance to put a dent in the Republican-dominated Texas State Board of Education.
Perkinz is running in the Democratic primary for the SBOE in District 7, which represents parts of Beaumont, Galveston, and Pearland. She will face five other Democrats—Adam Khan, Ben Estrada, Janell Burse, and Debra Drake Ambroise—on March 3. Her hope is to unseat Republican incumbent Julie Pickren in the general election on Nov. 3.
Pickren was voted off of Alvin Independent School District’s school board in 2021 after she attended the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and boasted on Facebook that she sang “God Bless America” as rioters forced their way into the building.
Despite the controversy, she was elected to the Texas State Board of Education a year later.
“ I think that it’s important that we flip as many seats in Texas as possible to save the state—and the nation—from MAGA, Christian-nationalist agendas,” Perkinz told COURIER Texas.
”The representation that they have right now is not focused on what constituents want, instead they’re answering to what a very narrow group of people want,” she added. “The things they’re pushing through are not popular.”
In 2024, the Texas SBOE passed Bluebonnet Learning, which are fact-challenged learning materials for kindergarten through eighth-grade students infused with a Bible-based curriculum. The board is also rewriting its social studies curriculum, which is meant to put a greater emphasis on Texas history and deviate from world history, geography, and other cultures.
Critics say the “hyper-partisan” panel in charge of the overhaul is not only rewriting history, but erasing it too. Perkinz agrees and said it’s just one reason why she wanted to get involved in her district’s race.
“The State Board of Education affects curriculum, they determine what millions of kids across the state of Texas learn, so when they’re curating a curriculum that is very white, male-centric, American exceptionalism—they’re championing that in the social studies re-write— and that’s what’s affecting what kids are going to go out into the world and have knowledge of,” she said. “We don’t exist in a bubble.”
Perkinz said instead of preparing students to have a seat at the table in a global economy, the current State Board of Education is preparing them to stay in Texas forever.
She also pointed to the Texas Education Agency’s newly-proposed required reading list as another inspiration for her candidacy.
The SBOE will vote on a list of thousands of titles—to include fairy tales, nursery rhymes, historical speeches, classic literary novels, and the Bible—that would be required for students to read across different grade levels.
”The Bible aside and the lack of diverse representation aside, the bigger issue, and the one that I think maybe even traditional Republicans can connect with that, is that we have a long tradition of valuing local control. That’s always been kind of part of our Texas values. We’ve never been one for big, centralized government, and that’s what this is,” she said.
Texas is already facing a teacher shortage, and Perkinz said this is only going to exacerbate the problem.
“They curated this list deliberately to center white men, to center American exceptionalism, and to center Christian nationalism, but the bigger issue is why are we centralizing this type of power in Austin when the role of the board should be to set broad academic standards and then each individual ISD decides how to best teach those academic standards based on their students, their communities, their needs?” Perkinz said.
“I’ve taught all levels of English, between seventh and 12th grade, and this is going to kill the joy of teaching for English teachers, they’re not going to want to teach in Texas,” she added.
Proponents of the list say it’s going to boost literacy rates, but Laney Hawes, co-founder of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, said that’s not true.
“It’s going to limit our students’ ability to choose books that they want to read, it’s going to hinder five and a half million public ed students, and I believe we’re going to see literacy rates across the state drop because of it,” Hawes said.
The law that triggered the creation of the list, House Bill 1605, only requires one mandatory book per grade. The TEA’s list has upwards to 20 mandatory titles per grade.
“ What we have here is a big state government that wants to curate everything that our students learn. They have a very narrow agenda, and they want to force it on all Texas students,” Hawes said.
But Perkinz said people are starting to wake up to what’s going on, and are pushing back against these unpopular policies the board is instilling in public education.
“ Once we instill better teacher morale, then we’re going to see improvements in literacy rates, and we can return to a Texas where our classrooms are not being used as playgrounds for culture wars, and where teachers are selecting their own books, and where the curriculum is diverse,” she said.
Her all-system approach is one she hopes to bring to the SBOE.
“Teachers have continually been scapegoated and have a target on their back from this rise of anti-intellectualism,” she said. “They’re not being treated as experts, and that affects teacher morale, which trickles down to the students, so that needs to end.”
Early voting began on Tuesday and runs through Feb. 27. The general election is Nov. 3.
See who else is on the ballot in SBOE elections across the state.
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