Concerned Texans gave public comments Tuesday in Austin about planned changes to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for social studies for elementary, middle and high school students.
Last year, Texas’ State Board of Education (SBOE) voted to put less emphasis on world history and culture and place an increased concentration on Texas and U.S. history.
Felicia Martin, the president and executive director of the Texas Freedom Network, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on equality and social justice for all Texans, said the new curriculum offers a very one-sided version of history and limits knowledge.
“We believe that a curriculum that exclusively focuses on the Americas and Europe leaves the rest of the world out at those perspectives and really treats them as sort of a sideshow,” Martin said.
“The work group dismissed coverage of the civilizations of Africa and Asia as nonessential ... and they also removed standards addressed in early Islam, bizarrely arguing that it lacked any connection to the development of Europe,” Martin continued. “This is not conjecture, this is fact, that advances in mathematics, science, medicine and other areas came to Europe from the early Islamic world.”
Adrian Reyna, a social studies teacher with San Antonio Independent School District and the executive vice president for the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel, shared his thoughts.
“I mean, we’re talking about removing mentions of the Japanese internment camps, mentioning opposition to the civil rights movement that has existed, right,” he said. “You see the very Western and, you know, American, Texas-centric, Christian-centric framing of history.”
The SBOE is looking to streamline historical topics in a chronological order.
Ancient history reportedly would be introduced in earlier grades, and class work would progress to the modern era as students move up to the next grade level.
History lessons for students in kindergarten through second grade would focus on key figures, places and events.
Lessons for third through eighth graders would incorporate coursework on the development of western civilization, the U.S. and Texas with middle school coursework seeing a heavier and intentional emphasis on the latter two.
“You’re talking about a standard that would be required for all students in all districts to do a reading list that you could not deviate from,” Martin said.
Should the proposed social studies TEKS mandates pass, Reyna said teachers can expect their workload to increase even more, especially those with younger students.
“What they’re asking the younger grades to do and some of the content pieces that they’re asking the younger grade to start to grasp, I think, are just developmentally not the right age group to be exposing students to those things, or at least in that format,” he said.
KSAT called and emailed the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has expressed support for the proposed changes. They did not give KSAT a statement.
An official vote was not on SBOE’s agenda Tuesday; however, a vote is expected to take place this summer.
If approved, the new curriculum would go into effect at the start of the 2030-2031 school year.
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