Dozens of Texans shared their feedback Feb. 25 on the current phase of a lengthy revision of the state’s social studies curriculum standards. Parents, educators and students urged the State Board of Education to slow the revision process down and give those drafting the new curriculum more time to work.
“We have one opportunity to get this right for an entire generation of students,” said Meghan Dougherty, an Austin-area social studies specialist involved in the process.
The state is currently overhauling the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for social studies, which are the standards that dictate what public school students should learn at each grade level. The board, with input from outside advisers and work groups, is expected to adopt the new standards this summer before they are rolled out to classrooms in 2030.
What’s happening
In January, the elected board members approved a list of topics to be included in the new social studies standards, with an emphasis on Texas and American history. The topics were drafted by nine content advisers, who are historians, educators and consultants appointed by the SBOE to guide the revision process.
The approved topics were sent to a nearly 130-member work group, which included teachers, school administrators, academic experts, higher education leaders and parents.
The work group met from Feb. 9-11 to review the list and recommend adding, removing or adjusting content. A second work group will meet in the coming weeks and make additional recommendations before the board’s next meeting in early April, according to the Texas Education Agency.
During a Feb. 25 progress meeting, the board received updates from TEA staff and others involved in the revision process, but did not make any changes to the proposed social studies standards. Several work group members testified during a public portion of the meeting, expressing concerns that they did not have enough time to thoroughly review the standards and make changes. The list of topics is 54 pages, and the work group produced a 189-page document with its recommendations.
“[We were] given two days, approximately 12 hours each day, to revise entire grade bands,” said Courtney Williamson, a Marble Falls ISD social studies teacher who was in the first work group. “Some groups were responsible for three full grade levels worth of TEKS, and that timeframe did not allow for deep cross-grade collaboration.”
Zooming in
Members of the first work group labeled nearly every proposed set of topics, from kindergarten through high school history classes, as having “too much content.” They told the SBOE they worried teachers would not have enough time to get through all the topics in one school year.
“The current problem with our TEKS is not a lack of content—it is too much content and not enough time to teach it to develop reading, writing and historical thinking skills,” Dougherty, a work group participant, said.
Dougherty said the work group was told they could “cut content or add content, but not both.” Her team, which worked on the plan for high school U.S. history standards, chose to cut content.
She said the high school curriculum proposal included “a great deal of specificity” about the Civil War and earlier periods, but sections about the 20th and 21st centuries were “lacking detail,” which she said could “dumb down” students’ understanding of recent history.
Dougherty said the proposed standards did not include instruction on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, Japanese internment in the 1940s and the use of the atomic bomb.
SBOE member Tiffany Clark, D-DeSoto, asked Dougherty to compare the social studies standards currently used in K-12 schools, which were adopted in 2010, with the proposal before the board.
“The proposed topics for the high school US History course seem significantly less robust than what we have currently,” Dougherty responded. “What we talked about in the work group is that there were significant gaps and omissions.”
Caleb Denton, an Austin-area eighth-grade student, told the board he was concerned the proposed standards place too much emphasis on Texas history over other perspectives.
“As a young Texan preparing to enter high school and start thinking about college, … I need knowledge of economics, geography, world history, culture and current issues so I can understand how Texas and the United States interact with the rest of the world,” Denton said during public testimony Feb. 25. “I understand that one goal of the new framework was to eliminate silos in learning, but from a student’s perspective, it feels like everything has been placed into one Texas-focused silo instead.”
Another perspective
Each of the appointed content advisers reviewed the work group’s recommendations and made additional suggestions.
“I am pleased by the move toward a narrative approach to history, and an emphasis on Western civilization as shaping the bedrock principles of our nation,” wrote content adviser Donald Frazier, a historian at Schreiner University in Kerrville. “Other world cultures influenced the formation of the United States, but none—by far—compare to that of the collective West.”
Frazier also noted that the proposed standards were Texas-heavy because “this is a curriculum for Texas students.”
“Some may argue that Texas is too heavily represented in this framework. To the contrary,” Frazier wrote. “Texas is the best expression of the American idea, and as a result, a culmination of the American promise.”
SBOE member Brandon Hall, R-Aledo, echoed Frazier’s comments during the board’s Feb. 25 discussion of the proposal, arguing that “the most important perspective is our perspective as Americans.”
“Whether you’re a first-generation American or you go way back, we can all unify around that, because that’s our story, that’s who we are as a people,” Hall said. “We need to teach the perspective of American exceptionalism, Texan exceptionalism, the exceptionalism of Western civilization, because that’s who we are.”
Stay tuned
The SBOE is expected to lay out the detailed social studies standards in early April, with an initial vote slated for that meeting. A final vote is scheduled for June, although the new social studies curriculum, whenever it is approved, will not be used in Texas public schools until the 2030-31 school year, according to board documents.
Also of note
Earlier in the Feb. 25 meeting, the SBOE also ordered that roughly 4,200 errors, typos and licensing issues in the state-developed Bluebonnet Learning textbooks be corrected. The changes come about 15 months after the instructional materials were approved for classroom use, with some school districts opting to use them this school year.
Some board members expressed concerns about the number of corrections, wondering how some errors slipped past content reviewers and education officials during the state’s annual instructional materials review process. The Bluebonnet curriculum has also been criticized for frequent biblical references in the reading materials, although proponents of the textbooks said they were designed to provide students with rigorous, age-appropriate content, Community Impact previously reported.