In February, the Texas Education Agency received final approval from the State Board of Education to make roughly 4,200 corrections and changes to Bluebonnet Learning. Now, the price Texans will have to pay to make those corrections has been revealed.
According to a contract provided to FOX 4 in Dallas by the state board of education’s Vice Chair Pam Little, more than $8 million of taxpayer money will be spent to fix the errors. The cost falls on taxpayers because the TEA developed the materials using state funding
Bluebonnet Learning, which was created by the TEA and approved by the SBOE in November 2024, covers kindergarten through eighth-grade math, and a kindergarten through fifth-grade reading language arts program that uses Christian stories from the Bible in reading materials.
It was pushed through the legislature by Republican lawmakers, and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott celebrated the passage, stating, “The passage of Bluebonnet Learning is a critical step forward to bring students back to the basics of education and provide the best education in the nation.”
While the materials are optional for schools to use, those that adopt it receive extra state funding—$60 per student.
The materials have drawn heavy criticism since their passage and approval from faith leaders and parents for its emphasis on Christianity at the exclusion of other faiths. Other critics claimed Bluebonnet got facts wrong and is littered with historical inaccuracies.
The errors found in February were mostly from teacher feedback, and included grammatical mistakes, copyright and imaging problems, and factual errors.
The $8 million price tag to fix the errors consists of reprints, along with shipping new texts and the disposal of old text, according to FOX 4.
“In doing a little bit further research, it seems like 1,900 of them were actual errors, and 1,062 of those were licensing image issues, meaning that they used images that they did not have the approval to use,” Little told FOX 4.
The SBOE is meeting all week to vote on a Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills social studies rewrite, along with a newly proposed required reading list that includes passages from the Bible.
During this week’s meeting, Little said she would be directing questions about the high costs to TEA commissioner Mike Morath.
Earlier this year in a meeting discussing the errors, Little said she was concerned the board has set a precedent for “sloppy publishing,” and Democratic board member Tiffany Clark said the board “failed students” in districts already using the curriculum who have learned incorrect information.
