Texans urge State Board of Education to slow rewrite of K-12 social studies standards

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 U.S. 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.