Happy Wednesday☀️

I hope you’re staying safe in this Texas heat, and getting excited for a new school year!

This week, you’ll hear from a Houston mom who is pursuing a new tactic in order to get Ten Commandments posters out of her daughter’s Spring Branch ISD classroom ahead of the 2026-2027 school year. 

You’ll also find out where Texas’ education system ranks nationwide thanks to a new study conducted by WalletHub.

Finally, did you know National Book Lovers Day is this Saturday, Aug. 9? Before you pick up your favorite book to celebrate, we’ll take a look at a new analysis from the Texas Freedom to Read Project that’s tracking over 100 classic works of literature that were removed in Texas public schools last year. 

If you missed last week’s edition you can read it here. 

Emily Roth  never planned on teaching her six-year-old about the Ten Commandments.

“It’s a belief system that we don’t follow as a religious doctrine,” Roth told Courier Texas.

But that plan changed when posters of the Ten Commandments went up in her daughter’s kindergarten classroom last October.

The new classroom decor was a result of Senate Bill 10, which went into effect at the beginning of last school year and requires the Ten Commandments be visibly displayed in public school classrooms. 

“I find it incredibly unacceptable,” she said. 

That’s why Roth, who has two children in Spring Branch Independent School District in Houston, is challenging the new law in court. 

Ever since the passage of Senate Bill 13 in 2025, more books—including classic works of literature—are being stripped from public school library shelves in Texas. 

The law requires that school boards, rather than librarians, have the final say over which books or materials can be put in school libraries, banning anything that doesn’t adhere to “local community values.” 

It also creates an advisory committee made up of parents the board can delegate decision making to, and requires school districts remove books with “indecent,” “profane,” or “sexually explicit” material, allowing board members to veto new library purchases.

As a result, over 100 titles, including Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize in Literature winners, have been removed across districts during the 2025-2026 school year, according to a new analysis by the Texas Freedom to Read Project.

A new study from WalletHub ranks Texas’ school system 32nd nationwide. The analysis compared each state’s school system in more than 30 factors, including academic outcomes, funding, graduation rates, teacher credentials, safety, class sizes, and test scores.

Texas also came in the bottom half in other categories: Tying Idaho for 40th in the highest percentage of high school students who reported being threatened or injured, and ranking 46th in per-student spending for public elementary and secondary schools.

The state ranks 17th in school safety.

I want to hear from you. Do you think this is an accurate reflection? 

While writing today’s “Get educated on education” feature, I was reminded of the novel “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros. Its removal from public schools last year came as a surprise—the book was a required reading in my high school English class. It’s a shorter one, but I thought it’d be a great choice for this month’s banned book. 

It was removed from Brazosport, Jim Hogg County, and Rains ISDs last school year, and follows Esperanza Cordero, a young Mexican-American girl growing up in a Chicago neighborhood through a series of vignettes.

It deals with topics of identity, poverty, and womanhood.

Here are three discussion questions to get started:

1. How does Mango Street shape the identities of the people who live there?

2. From vignettes 1-11, which has stood out the most to you so far?

3. Do you think these early vignettes would help students develop empathy for experiences different from their own?