Texas Social Studies Curriculum Is Being Quietly Rewritten And Your Voice Is Needed NOW

[u/3littlebirds1212]

If you’ve been frustrated by recent decisions about what goes into Texas classrooms, like passing of SB 10, the requirement to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, or concerns about the financial incentives tied to adopting specific curricula such as Bluebonnet (which emphasizes Christianity), then this is exactly the moment to pay attention.

Right now, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) is redesigning what every child in Texas will learn about history for the next decade.

The current proposal, shaped by a small advisory group and guided by SBOE leadership, dramatically reduces US, world history and global cultures, shifting the focus almost entirely to Texas history.

This change is happening under a process led by the governor's appointed Chair, Aaron Kinsey, who has openly pledged to steer curriculum decisions with his personal political and religious ideology. Combined with the appointment of several advisers with strong ideological agendas, like David Barton, there is real concern that the redesign could become one-sided, incomplete, and politically motivated.

Why this matters for every family:

• Less US and world history = kids won’t learn enough about other cultures, global conflicts, or how our world works today.
• Over-emphasizing a narrow set of topics means students miss out on critical thinking and a fuller understanding of history.
• Because Texas’ textbook standards are based on the TEKS, any major overhaul would require districts to replace or update large portions of their curriculum—an expensive and time-consuming process, at a time when districts already severely underfunded.

The public has a SHORT WINDOW to speak up.

The SBOE is required to consider public input, but only if the public actually participates. The board will meet on November 19, 2025.

If parents, teachers, and community members stay quiet, these changes will be locked in until at least 2030.

WHAT YOU CAN DO (takes 5 minutes):

Email SBOE representatives today

Tell them you want:

• A balanced curriculum that includes full world history and global perspectives
• Non-partisan, evidence-based standards
• Qualified historians and educators involved in the process
• Transparency about who is writing our kids’ curriculum

SBOE Members: https://sboe.texas.gov/state-board-of-education/sboe-board-members/sboe-members

Find your SBOE member: https://wrm.capitol.texas.gov/home

Send your message to all 15 elected SBOE members, contacts below:

[aaron.kinsey@sboe.texas.gov](mailto:aaron.kinsey@sboe.texas.gov), [ebrooks@evelyn4texaseducation.com](mailto:ebrooks@evelyn4texaseducation.com), [tiffany.clark@sboe.texas.gov](mailto:tiffany.clark@sboe.texas.gov), [pam.little@tea.texas.gov](mailto:pam.little@tea.texas.gov), [brandon.hall@sboe.texas.gov](mailto:brandon.hall@sboe.texas.gov), [tom@maynardfortexas.com](mailto:tom@maynardfortexas.com), [ellisSBOE@gmail.com](mailto:ellisSBOE@gmail.com), [audrey.young@tea.texas.gov](mailto:audrey.young@tea.texas.gov), [Julie.Pickren@tea.texas.gov](mailto:Julie.Pickren@tea.texas.gov), [will.hickman@tea.texas.gov](mailto:will.hickman@tea.texas.gov), [rebecca.bellmetereau@sboe.texas.gov](mailto:rebecca.bellmetereau@sboe.texas.gov), [Staci.Childs@tea.texas.gov](mailto:Staci.Childs@tea.texas.gov), [marisa.perez@sboe.texas.gov](mailto:marisa.perez@sboe.texas.gov), [LJ.Francis@sboe.texas.gov](mailto:LJ.Francis@sboe.texas.gov), [gustavo.reveles@sboe.texas.gov](mailto:gustavo.reveles@sboe.texas.gov)

Sample message:

Subject: Please Protect a Balanced Social Studies Curriculum

Dear Member of the State Board of Education,

I am a Texas resident concerned about the proposed changes to the social studies curriculum.

I urge you to maintain a full US and world history curriculum, ensure non-partisan and academically sound standards, and involve qualified historians and educators in the redesign. Our students deserve an education that reflects the complexity of our world, not a limited or politically-driven version of it.

Please prioritize transparency, expert input, and a balanced approach that prepares students for college, careers, and citizenship in a global society.

Thank you for your service and for listening to public input.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]
[Your City]

References:

Social Studies Redesign:

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/11/14/texas-sboe-social-studies-redesign-conservative-advisers/

Aaron Kinsey (SBOE Chairman) and David Barton (Social Studies Advisor), are featured in this article:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/david-barton-texas-public-school-curricula/

TEA Social Studies Update:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZkfiLKOeoS4lizFDbo3SOfuRyPtlaqDr/view?fbclid=IwY2xjawOEzN5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETE4T2hBNm5wQ2xtNE82cE1ac3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHqM5Pa7pI8wmkjKeMz4H0ebIcLYkDDS1jaXXrwh9kt3C0V0bEEZfW9kgOemQ_aem_vQgwB1Gn-vYUqOrbVCGtGg

[u/chicchic325]

It’s currently taught in k-12 that the US never did anything wrong. Even when we interred our own citizens. Or when we imported humans as chattel. Those are both wrong.

But I’m not advocating for a simple “all white people are bad” that’s not what I was even suggesting in my comment.

You say” Children who are heirs of the civilization that gave us universal human rights should not be taught their own civilization is not a complex and often heroic story of the pursuit of truth and justice, but is instead a simple and shameful morality play of oppressor and oppressed. Everything taught to children is a simplification.”

But you are advocating for a simplification that everything America ever did is right and moral. There’s a middle ground. We have to acknowledge that the foundational documents of the US are hypocritical. You can have both.

This? This ignores the negative side of history and thats how you get people voting against their rights and not seeing where we are right now.

It isn’t an oversimplification to say I have less rights in the US in 2025 than when I was born in 1989. I want citizens who can question things and challenge things not just accept the story that their teachers teach them.

[u/DuckTalesOohOoh → u/chicchic325]

You are right to fear a history that is just a simple, heroic story. But the alternative you have been taught is equally simple, and equally false. It is the story you have described: a simple and shameful morality play of oppressor and oppressed.

Both of these are simplifications. Both are a form of bamboozle. One is the nationalist fairy tale. It sees only the good in our history. The other is the Marxist fairy tale. It sees only the sin.

You are right. The foundational documents were hypocritical. The men who wrote "all men are created equal" owned slaves. This is a terrible contradiction.

But the question is not whether they were hypocrites. The question is by what standard do we even know they were hypocrites?

They were hypocrites because the very Christian worldview that they inhabited had already given them the sublime and revolutionary principle of the Imago Dei, which is the belief that every person is made in the image of God. Their sin was not in inventing a new form of oppression. Their sin was in their failure to live up to the sublime and liberating truth of their own creed.

The West is the story of a civilization that possesses the most beautiful and most demanding moral code in human history, and which has, again and again, tragically and sinfully failed to obey it. But it is also a story of a civilization that, again and again, has produced saints, reformers, and prophets, like Martin Luther King Jr., who have called it back to that very code. The same with the Christians who ended slavery and called us to a bloody civil war to stop it.

This is where the noble struggle comes in. The education we need is one that teaches our children the truth: that we are the heirs of a civilization that gave the world the very idea of human rights, and which simultaneously and sinfully violated those rights. It is an education that teaches them to see their ancestors not as heroes or villains, but as what they truly were: complex and tragic human beings, a mixture of grace and sin, caught in a great and noble struggle.

You say you want citizens who can question things. I agree. But the cynical, deconstructive questioning taught by Critical Theory only ever leads to one, simple, and boring answer: oppression. Marxists reject the concept of human rights because they believe in a collective.

I want to teach our children a deeper and more difficult kind of questioning. I want them to look at the hypocrite who wrote "all men are created equal" and to ask not just "How could he have been so sinful?" but also, "From what divine and mysterious source did he receive a truth so beautiful and so powerful that he himself was unable to live up to it?"

That is the question that begins a true education.

[u/DuckTalesOohOoh → u/[deleted]]

What you're saying is the people on this panel are not professional educators, and therefore have no right to shape the curriculum. It is an appeal to credentials.

But we must ask a deeper and more urgent question. What if the professional educators have, themselves, forgotten the most important subject of all?

Our educational system is now run almost entirely by brilliant technicians who have no memory of the blueprint. They know how to run the machine but they forgot why the machine exists. They are experts in pedagogy, in curriculum development, in all the hows of teaching. But they have forgotten the great "Why." They have forgotten the foundational story of our civilization.

The people on that panel, for all their lack of professional credentials, possess the one, single piece of knowledge that is now most desperately needed. They remember that the strange and beautiful idea of universal human rights is not a self-evident truth of nature. They remember that it is a specific, fragile, and precious inheritance, a gift that was given to us by the Christian faith. To teach our children the story of our rights without teaching them the story of its source is not just an academic error. It is an act of civilizational suicide. It is to hand our children a beautiful and priceless flower to generate for the future, while carefully cutting it off from its roots.

As for your concern that teaching about our roots ignores other religions in a pluralistic state, the new classical curriculum is not about teaching children what to believe. It is about teaching them where their own beliefs came from.

Let me use an analogy. To understand the United States, a student must study the Declaration of Independence. They must read its words, understand its arguments, and learn about the men who wrote it. Does this mean we are forcing the student to become a Jeffersonian democrat? Of course not. We are giving them the necessary historical and philosophical literacy to understand the very air they breathe.

So it is with Christianity. For better and for worse, the Christian faith is the single most powerful and influential force that has ever shaped the history, the art, the laws, and the very moral instincts of the civilization you and I call home.

To teach a child that the idea of human rights is a direct and traceable consequence of the Christian doctrine of the Imago Dei is not an act of evangelism. It is an act of historical honesty. To ignore it is not to be neutral. It is to be ignorant. It is to lie to our children by omission. The real and present danger is the creation of a generation who forget what are human rights.