“It’s worse than I imagined.”
That’s the simple note our founder Cecile Richards, daughter of the fierce Texas Governor Ann Richards, passed to a friend at a State Board of Education (SBOE) meeting in 1995.
Just a month later, she founded Texas Freedom Network to counter how the religious right was hijacking public education to promote their own extreme ideology. More than 30 years later, the fight continues.
The SBOE is made up of just 15 members, and while they represent 5.5 million Texas children, they alone decide what is—and isn’t—taught in our public schools. Right now they are reviewing the Social Studies Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS. They should be focused on crafting a curriculum that teaches the truth and serves the needs of all students, but instead, its far-right members are using their extreme influence to—once again—push an ideological agenda.
The process has been rushed. Parents and educators have been left out, and instead, politically motivated content advisors have pushed standards that are incomplete and unteachable.
It would be hard to rank our core academics as more or less important than others, but it is undoubtedly true that, when it comes to Social Studies, few other subjects do more to prepare our kids for engaging with the world around them. Texas students deserve honest, complete and age-appropriate history, not a sloppy, ideological version of events that fail them beyond the classroom.
As proposed, the curriculum is full of developmentally inappropriate concepts for our kids. The content is overly dense and prioritizes memorization over understanding. Between all of the historical inaccuracies, oversimplifications and myths, you’re left with standards that frame history through a Western-centric lens that elevates Christianity while virtually ignoring every other faith and culture.
The SBOE is meeting the week of June 22 for a final vote and discussion on the proposed curriculum. But these drafts are too fundamentally flawed to be fixed by board members, no matter how many amendments they offer. The board should pause this process and send back the drafts to work groups composed of educators, not political activists. That’s the only way to ensure the new standards are teachable, appropriate for public schools, and truly prepare students for success.
The good news? You can help us stop them! Write to your Board Member. Sign up for public testimony and show up Monday, June 22 to let your voice be heard. At tfn.org/sboe, we offer many resources to help you learn more and get involved.
The fight over the Social Studies TEKS is about whether Texas can be trusted to educate its own children. Every parent, educator, and community member has a stake in getting this right. The SBOE’s rushed timeline, ideologically motivated members, and exclusion of teachers from the process put the future of our kids at risk.
We have to speak up. We need to tell the SBOE to teach the truth!
