The Real Issue with Texas’s Curriculum Changes

T he Texas State Board of Education recently approved new K–12 standards that emphasize American and Texan history relative to world history, and make biblical stories required reading. The proposal was met with pushback, of course, regarding the focus on American and Christian material. Americans United for Separation of Church and State condemned the curriculum, calling it “Christian Nationalism.”

Most media outlets have covered the new literature syllabus or the social studies curriculum without digging into the changes. The Houston Chronicle published a list of the books that Texan students will read for each corresponding year of their education.

Setting aside the arguments over the separation of church and state for a moment, the aspect of Texas’s curriculum that I find the most objectionable is the lax workload. Ninth graders, for example, read Great Expectations, Animal Farm, and several excerpts from longer books. That’s it! Two full-length novels over the course of an entire nine months.

Twelfth graders — fully grown adults who can vote, drive, and enlist — read Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, and some poetry, speeches, and essays. The poetry that they have specified is hilarious. Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the thing with feathers” is twelve lines long, and yet it is one text out of nine given to high school seniors. There’s no way that studying Dickinson’s poem takes more than a couple of class days. Regardless of content, this is not a serious curriculum.

It’s an unfortunate fact of the 21st century that children of all ages read far fewer books than they used to. Starting during the digital age, and accelerating during the pandemic, reading decline has led to a generation with minuscule attention spans and lowered cognitive ability. Add to that the shift from difficult to easy literature, and we’ve got a serious problem.

A look at a statement by the National Council of Teachers in English in 2022 illustrates the crisis of rigor better than I ever could. Written in the Time of Woke (before 2024), the statement is chock-full of buzzwords: “structural racism,” “economic injustice.” Apparently, the primary goal of English teachers should be to create a classroom of social justice warriors dedicated to fighting inequality. It is no wonder that Texas is trying to counter this progressive dominance.

Yet in almost the same breath, the statement gives recommendations for changing the reading landscape: substituting contemporary media for canonical literature (Buzzfeed listicles instead of Mark Twain), having students write self-expressively instead of reading for information and discipline. Why these anti-rigor changes? What could possibly be the reason for making things objectively easier? The National Council of Teachers in English argues that it is to “advance multicultural understanding and address issues of equity.”

In other words, the progressive infiltration of education has brought havoc to both the curriculum (what kids are reading) and the rigor (how much kids are reading). Both have lowered the standards for schools. Both were altered in the name of equity.

Texas and many other states have taken the important first step to reclaim education from the woke mob. But conservative reform requires more than just redirection. Wokeness is ultimately an expression of mediocrity, and Texas must fight back on both fronts to recapture both content and rigor.

The other interesting part of this debacle is the fact that Texas is apparently the only state to issue statewide reading requirements. Other states leave reading lists up to teachers or local school boards. It’s sad that public K–12 education has gone so far left that state intervention is necessary, but hopefully, with this new foundation of change, Texas can lead the charge in reform.