Texas
Texas education leaders unveil Bible-infused elementary school curriculum
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Elementary school curriculum proposed this week would infuse new state reading and language arts lessons with teachings on the Bible, marking the latest push by Texas Republicans to put more Christianity in public schools.
The Texas Education Agency released the thousands of pages of educational materials this week. They have been made available for public viewing and feedback and, if approved by the State Board of Education in November, will be available for public schools to roll out in August of 2025. Districts will have the option of whether to use the materials, but will be incentivized to do so with up to $60 per student in additional funding.
TEA Commissioner Mike Morath said the materials are based on extensive cognitive science research and will help improve students’ reading and math scores. In 2019, less than half of students met grade-level standards for reading, and that percentage has declined since the pandemic, based on state standardized test scores.
The new materials have prompted criticism, though. The education news site The 74 first reported the redesign on Wednesday and included excerpts of lesson plans with biblical references. They also reported that a New York-based curriculum vendor, Amplify, opted out of bidding on a contract after the state sought to insert biblical materials, but not other religious texts, into the curriculum. The state education agency rejected those claims, saying multiple religions are included throughout the curriculum. Because of Texas’ size, textbooks that are developed for its schools are often used in other states.
Morath told The Texas Tribune on Thursday that religious materials are a “small piece of the content pie.” His office could not quantify what percentage of each grade’s textbook would be devoted to biblical references. The Tribune has not reviewed all materials, which include the state-designed textbooks as well as proposals from 25 different vendors.
But an initial review of the proposed state textbooks show that religious materials feature prominently, with texts sourced from the Bible as the most heavily used.
“It’s a tiny fraction of the overall fraction — it’s just where it makes sense to do that,” Morath said. “It’s a very small but appropriate fraction.”
The textbooks mark a shift toward a “classical, broad-based liberal arts education,” from a more skills-based curriculum, Morath said.
“You’re trying to build vocabulary, build background knowledge so that when kids are reading Steinbeck in high school, they get the references,” Morath said.
The instructional materials were unveiled amid a broader movement by Republicans to further infuse conservative Christianity into public life. At last week’s Texas GOP convention — which was replete with calls for “spiritual warfare” against their political opponents — delegates voted on a new platform that calls on lawmakers and the SBOE to “require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance.”
Throughout the three-day convention, Republican leaders and attendees frequently claimed that Democrats sought to indoctrinate schoolchildren as part of a war on Christianity. SBOE Chair Aaron Kinsey, of Midland, echoed those claims in a speech to delegates, promising to use his position to advance Republican beliefs and oppose Critical Race Theory, “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives or “whatever acronym the left comes up with next.”
“You have a chairman,” Kinsey said, “who will fight for these three-letter words: G-O-D, G-O-P and U-S-A.”
Mark Chancey, a Southern Methodist University religious studies professor who focuses on movements to put the Bible in public schools, said there is “nothing inherently inappropriate” with teaching the Bible or other religious texts, so long as it’s done neutrally. But he’s concerned by some of the proposed curriculum, including lessons that he said seem to treat biblical stories as “straightforward historical accounts.”
“It serves a civic good for students to be taught about religion,” he said. “But that’s different from giving students religious instruction. The question is going to be whether these materials teach about religion, or whether they cross the line into giving religious instruction.”
For example: The curriculum promotes lessons on Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” alongside the Gospel of Matthew, which centers on Jesus’ crucifixion and its atonement for human sin. “These are very strong, central claims of Christian theology,” Chancey said. “And students will have questions about that. How are teachers supposed to respond to those questions?”
It’s not unforeseeable, he said, for those conversations to lead to even thornier areas that are still divisive even among Christians.
If the state education board approves the materials in November, schools will not be required to use them. But a measure approved by lawmakers last year will offer more money to public school districts that do choose to adopt any of the materials.
Some of that content includes a first grade lesson stating the Liberty Bell “reminded [the Founding Fathers] of how God helped free the Hebrew people in the Bible” as well as a fifth grade poetry lessons on “A Psalm of David,” described as “one of the most popular poems ever written.”
Other religions are also included. A second grade lesson highlights the Jewish celebration of Purim. A fourth grade poetry unit includes Kshemendra, a poet from India who “studied Buddhism and Hinduism.”
Some State Board of Education members told the Tribune they had not yet read through the materials and would decide whether or not to approve the content based on standards they’ve already established.
Keven Ellis, a Republican state school board member who lives in Lufkin, said the role of the board is to make sure the materials are appropriate for each grade-level and that they align with the state’s curriculum standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.
“My focus will remain on approving instructional materials that improve outcomes in phonics, language arts and math,” Ellis said.
State curriculum guidelines spell out that “the instructional material should recognize and not contradict that parents have the right to ‘direct the moral and religious training’ of their children and the duty to support their children’s education.’” Ellis did not respond to inquiries about the religious material.
Staci Childs, a Houston Democrat who sits on the SBOE, said she believes it’s okay to include Biblical references as long as other religions are also introduced to students.
“As a Christian, I think it is okay [to teach the Bible] as long as you’re normalizing the introduction of all religions and all types of mythologies so students have a varied and robust and true depiction of the materials in the text of our past,” Childs said. “To only infuse Bible verses and teachings of the Bible is completely insensitive to all the different types of students we have in Texas and a disrespect to the faiths they may acknowledge.”
Last year, the state directed the TEA to create its own textbooks when the Legislature passed House Bill 1605. Lawmakers said the purpose of the policy was to give teachers access to high-quality instructional materials.
A teacher vacancy task force that had convened in 2022 found that teachers spend significant time creating and looking for lesson plans. Lawmakers said the new state textbooks will save teachers time.
In an op-ed published in the Dallas Morning News this week, state Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, and state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, said the new materials “will provide much needed relief to teachers by eliminating the need to spend dozens of hours outside of the classroom developing curriculum.”
Morath said the materials are designed for Texas students, with references to the state’s geography and industries, as well as Texas-based historical figures like Clara Driscoll, known for her historic preservation work rescuing the Alamo from destruction, decades after the pivotal battle at the former Catholic mission in San Antonio.
“We’ve tried to make it as tightly based on the needs of Texas students as possible,” Morath said.
Soon after the materials were released on Wednesday morning, Gov. Greg Abbott released a statement saying he supported the curriculum.
“The materials will also allow our students to better understand the connection of history, art, community, literature, and religion on pivotal events like the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement, and the American Revolution,” Abbott said in a statement.
When asked directly if Abbott had any role in developing the new content, Morath answered: “I’m not sure any. This was entirely a project of TEA.” Morath added that the governor is keenly attentive to the subject of public education.
“The governor has been very interested in getting back to fundamentals of education for a long time,” Morath said, “and so this is some of the lens that we think about, but he’s not alone in that perspective.”
Before HB 1605’s passage, the Texas Education Agency was creating new instructional materials in order to help improve students’ reading and math scores. Those materials were piloted in about 400 districts, a TEA spokesperson said. Some had full-scale, district-wide implementation while others tested the materials in a few grade levels.
Morath cited pilot studies in districts like Temple and Lubbock, where students’ reading scores increased by as much as 16 points after adopting the newer reading and language arts program.
About 300 people, most of whom are educators, are reviewing all of the instructional materials and will present their feedback to the State Board of Education. TEA did not provide a list of the reviewers but said they were selected by the SBOE.
Members of the public can also weigh in and offer feedback on the materials until August 16 and from there, the materials will go before the state board in November for final approval. If approved, the materials will immediately be available for download.
Chancey, the Southern Methodist University religion professor, said teaching the Bible in any public setting immediately prompts a variety of complicated questions. First among them: Which of the many Bible translations should be used? “The choice of translation brought into the public school has at times proven controversial,” he said.
Meanwhile, Chancey said, the proposed instructions on religious liberty in the original colonies seem to be a “tremendous oversimplification,” failing to note the persecution faced by other religious groups, namely Quakers and early Baptists. Omitting that, he said, misses the real lesson to be learned from studying America’s early settlers: “The dangers of religious favoritism.”
The proposed state textbook calls for excerpts of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” to be paired with the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, whose defiance of the Babylonian leader Nebuchadnezzar is cited by King as an example of civil disobedience. And yet, the proposed curriculum does not appear to include any excerpts on the intended audience or a core theme of King’s letter: White moderates and clergy, whom King chastised for critiquing his civil disobedience while remaining “silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”
Morath said the excerpt chosen is the one that would be appropriate for a fifth grader, based on their vocabulary and knowledge-level.
“We would expect students to return to it in deeper and deeper ways,” Morath said. “You have to give him bits of knowledge that build on prior bits of knowledge, and you’re steadily giving them more and more and more exposure.”
This instructional redesign for public schools comes amid an ongoing embrace on the right of Christian nationalism, which claims that the United States founding was ordained by God, and that its laws and institutions should thus favor their conservative, Christian views. Recent polling from the Public Religion Research Institute found that more than half of Republicans adhere to or sympathize with pillars of Christian nationalism, including beliefs that the U.S. should be a strictly Christian nation. Of those respondents, PRRI found, roughly half supported having an authoritarian leader who maintains Christian dominance in society.
Southern Methodist University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Isabela Ocampo Restrepo | The Texas Tribune
Isabela Ocampo Restrepo
is an engagement fellow who works on the Audience team to find creative ways to interact with the Tribune’s readers. She previously was an audience engagement intern at the Austin American-Statesman and a social media intern for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. She was raised in Medellin, Colombia, speaks Spanish and English fluently, and is getting her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.
Texas
Texas Democrats underperformed yet again. Now what?
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Texas Democrats are starting to sound like the little boy who cried “battleground state,” after yet another election cycle where they shouted from the rooftops that Texas should be viewed as capable of going blue and then drastically underperformed expectations.
President-elect Donald Trump won Texas by 14 percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday — a surprisingly wide margin that bested his 2020 and 2016 performances in the state. Texas has for decades reliably gone for the Republican presidential nominee, but Democrats have been heartened that for the past several election cycles, the margin had been steadily narrowing.
The party’s Senate candidate, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas, out performed Harris but still lost to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz by 9 percentage points, according to unofficial results published by The Associated Press. That’s more than three times the margin that Beto O’Rourke lost to Cruz six years ago, and a wider loss margin than a majority of polls put the race in recent months. It also came after Senate Democrats and other national party officials visited Texas and invested in Allred’s race, citing him as one of the best chances to flip a seat in the upper chamber to protect their majority — which they lost on Tuesday.
The minority party also lost ground in the Legislature where Republicans now control 88 seats in the House and 20 in the Senate. And in South Texas, Republicans made historic gains in the predominantly Hispanic region that has reliably supported Democrats, and they lost their challenge to retake a South Texas congressional seat the GOP had won in 2022.
“This to me is a complete disaster. They underperformed everywhere,” said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas San Antonio. “They are disorganized. They are a party in the wilderness.”
State Democrats have been especially hopeful since 2018 — after they rode a blue wave down the ballot off of O’Rourke’s history-making Senate run. That year they flipped Texas House districts, local government seats and state appellate courts. Republicans still controlled the Legislature and occupied every statewide office, but Democrats saw that year as the beginning of a new era.
It led to high hopes in 2020, when Democrats fell far short of their goal of flipping the Texas House blue. And then again in 2022, when O’Rourke ran for governor and lost by double-digit margins to Gov. Greg Abbott. That was a midterm election where Republicans underperformed nationwide — everywhere, that is, except for Texas and Florida.
Republicans on Tuesday night relished running up the score against their political foes. Gov. Greg Abbott’s top political adviser pointed at a potentially larger problem for Democrats going forward: How will they get donors to continue funding their campaigns after losing again?
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“So do you think national Democratic donors will ever believe these Texas Democrat grifters again?” Dave Carney said on social media.
Soul searching
Democratic operatives were left licking their wounds Wednesday morning on numerous debriefing calls to figure out what had gone wrong Tuesday.
Among the issues they identified: a national red wave that delivered massive wins for Trump as well as GOP control of the U.S. Senate; a lack of infrastructure and coordination between federal and local campaigns across the state that left Democrats underperforming at every level; and a refusal to acknowledge the increasing realignment of parts of the electorate that were previously the core of the Democratic base, namely working class voters and Latinos.
Ali Zaidi, a Democratic political operative who ran Mike Collier’s campaign for lieutenant governor in 2022 said many in the party are rooted in a “pre-2012” belief that an increasingly diverse Texas would lead automatically to Democratic gains. But many voters of color this cycle cast their ballots for Republicans, like Latinos in South Texas.
Zaidi said Democrats need to either adjust how they connect with Latino voters in the state or look for votes in other places.
“Campaigns are not magical things that change how people feel about the world,” he said, adding that campaigns need to meet people where they are. “If an electorate is no longer a reliable electorate for you the answer as a campaign is to find a new electorate that works for you.”
Several Democrats said the catastrophic election, not only in the state but around the country, should compel the party to do some serious soul searching on what their message should be. Matt Angle, a veteran Texas Democratic operative and director of the Lone Star Project, expressed frustration that the party focused more on what drove the base than kitchen-table issues that were actually on the minds of many voters, such as the economy.
“One of the things that annoys me a lot of times about Democrats as progressives [is] that they say we need to decide what we stand for, and we need to then go push that on voters,” Angle said. But “we need to find out where voters are and meet them where they are.”
Chad Wilbanks, a Republican strategist and former Texas GOP executive director, said the Democratic party is out of touch with the state because they care more about “political correctness” than what voters are telling them.
“They have lost the battle of ideas,” he said. “In Texas, we want a secure border, we want to feel safe in our homes and in our schools. That’s important. [And] inflation plays a major role.”
But even if Democrats were to coalesce behind a persuasive message, the state party faces the challenge of not having the long-term infrastructure to support their candidates running for statewide office. Years of neglect in the decades since the party lost control has left much of its functions outsourced to outside groups, including activist organizations and super PACs, Angle said.
Without a leader Angle said there needed to be an “alpha” elected official to lead the effort as Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen did when he was in office, to coordinate the disparate efforts working to elect Democrats. Allred began to fill that role during the campaign, heading the first Senate-led coordinated campaign in Texas in decades, which consolidated resources up and down the ticket.
The Texas Majority PAC, which is backed by billionaire George Soros, was among the groups that also tried to fill in this cycle and help coordinate Democratic efforts. The group spent more than $600,000 in Cameron County and $700,000 in Hidalgo County – both of which are located in the Rio Grande Valley and were flipped by Trump at the top of the ticket in a stunning upset.
Katherine Fischer, the group’s deputy executive director, said Tuesday’s results were “devastating” and not the results Democrats had wanted. But she found a silver lining in the party’s ability to hold on to the seat of U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, in Hidalgo County, through coordination with the congressman’s campaign and the local party operations.
Fischer said her group will pick apart the election and issue a report but given the margin of victory for Republicans, it’s hard to pinpoint what Democrats could have done to change the outcomes.
“You lose by 10 or 15 points or something shifts by 20 points, [and] there’s no amount of strategy that can combat that,” Fischer said. “There’s some major issues within the Democrat party writ large that we need to reckon with like how voters perceive the Democratic party and how that perception has come to differ so wildly from reality and what we do to recover that.”
Fischer said her group always envisioned its project being one dependent on multiple cycles. The PAC is focused on continuing to build out sorely needed Democratic infrastructure for years to come, she said, acknowledging there are no easy answers from this cycle.
Democrats in Texas often bemoan the lack of investment from the top of the ticket in the state, which is largely written off as unwinnable by national groups. Tides changed this cycle, as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Majority PAC invested over $15 million in Allred’s Senate race as election day approached. National Democratic groups also invested over $1 million in protecting Vicente’s congressional seat.
U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Austin, said it’s not enough to plead for a massive influx of cash at the last minute.
“Texas needs long-term paid organizing efforts like in other battleground states, where we communicate those everyday, working people issues to disaffected voters, and I think it gives us a lot to learn from this election,” Casar said. “Because a strategy where we’re just trying to persuade a small number of voters on television cannot compete with the kind of on-the-ground organizing efforts that Republicans have put in.”
Luke Warford, a former strategist for the Texas Democrats who now runs a fund to create party infrastructure, said the party needs to invest in candidate recruitment, staff training, communications and how to successfully target voters — all things the Texas GOP excel at.
“If we do that and still lose, then we need to go back to the drawing board,” he said.
Fischer said Democrats needed to be honest with donors about the election’s results but also communicate a long-term plan.
“I hope donors who gave to the Allred campaign or to any other project in Texas understand their dollars were not wasted and most states don’t flip over night,” she said. “They don’t flip in one cycle or two cycles, it takes time.”
Texas Democrats aren’t counting themselves out yet. They plan to be back in the spotlight in 2026 when Sen. John Cornyn’s seat is up for reelection, along with statewide elected seats like governor. “If history is right, Trump will have done enough to upset enough people,” Angle said. “You know we shouldn’t look forward with dread. We need to have real clear eyes and really accurately assess what happened this election, but to be hopeful moving forward.”
Voting FAQ: 2024 Elections
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Lower-level judges and local county offices will also appear on the ballot:
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Texas
2024 Presidential Election: How Texas voted by county
Donald Trump won Texas early in the night on his path to winning the presidency.
Analysts gave little hope of Texas turning blue in the presidential race on Election Night, and they were right.
According to unofficial vote totals, Trump earned 56.3% of the vote in Texas. His opponent, Kamala Harris, won 42.4%.
Harris won just 12 of Texas’ 254 counties, including Harris, Dallas, Travis and Bexar counties.
Trump flipped many of south Texas counties that he lost in his 2020 race against Joe Biden.
AP estimates show Trump won 57.7% of Starr County in South Texas, along the border.
He is the first Republican presidential candidate to win the heavily-Hispanic county since 1892.
Trump lost Starr County to Hillary Clinton by 60 points in 2016.
Texas has not voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
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