Updated 12:45 p.m June 26.

The State Board of Education members approved a final revision of high school language arts TEKS curriculum standards at the June 23 meeting. According to a press release, the new standard has been under construction for two and a half years.



The State Board of Education will decide Friday whether to approve the new Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, curriculum for high school English Language Arts and Reading, Spanish Language Arts, and Reading and English as a Second Language.

Curriculum in the latter two subjects has not been amended since 2014. If approved, the revised curriculum would be implemented by the 2020-21 school year.

“The proposed revisions to the English and Spanish language arts and reading curriculum standards look significantly different because they are grouped into new strands, but the concepts remain very similar,” said Debbie Ratcliffe, director of media relations at the Texas Education Agency.

The goal of TEKS is to provide a comprehensive outline of the knowledge and skills that students should be able to demonstrate after completing school curriculum in a subject.

The proposed TEKS is meant to better align students to transition through material at each grade level as well as improve coordination between curriculum expectations and the realistic ability of a student to adopt material. For example, the revised TEKS for English I would not require students to be able to “determine the meaning of grade-level technical academic English words in multiple content areas (e.g., science, mathematics, social studies, the arts) derived from Latin, Greek, or other linguistic roots and affixes,” and spends more time focusing on oral skills for speaking and discussing.

The changes as proposed would also split the current English as a second language course into two courses: English Language Development and Acquisition (ELDA) and English I and II for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). Formerly, ESOL placed foreign language speakers in a beginner, intermediate, advanced or advanced high category in each of the four language components of English. The new TEKS not only increases the number of language components to seven but also devotes the ELDA class to basic English acquisition and makes ESOL I a co-requisite that runs more like a standard English course.

The complete texts of the current TEKS and the revised TEKS are available online.

A public hearing of the proposed TEKS is scheduled for 9 a.m. Tuesday at William B. Travis Building, 1701 N. Congress Ave., Room 1-104, Austin. Testimony will be limited to 2 minutes per person. Live streaming of the meeting is also available online.

Drafting for the revisions began in September 2015 to overhaul English and Spanish language arts and reading TEKS for K-12 grades. In January, the state board approved the curriculum for grades K-8 but delayed approval for the high school curriculum until April, when the revised high school TEKS curriculum was approved for first reading and filing authorization.