Conservative ex-lawmakers: Texas must stop starving public schools

This June, the Texas State Board of Education adopted new social studies standards and a required literature reading list for its public schools. These changes follow Texas’s 2024 release of its “Bluebonnet” curriculum, a package of instructional resources for elementary school, which sparked controversy over the inclusion of Bible stories in the reading materials.

Bible stories, canonical books, and “patriotic” social studies standards have each invited familiar charges of culture-war excess. Perhaps. But look again—and look at these three things together.

Taken together, these initiatives suggest something more consequential than conservative provocation.

Texas appears to be developing a coherent theory of education: knowledge is cumulative, literacy depends on background knowledge, and language proficiency has an unavoidable cultural valence, meaning that it reflects the knowledge a speech community shares and assumes its members possess. Furthermore, Texas’s theory of education assumes that public education is obligated to equip every child with the knowledge, language, habits, and skills needed for full and effective participation in America’s civic, cultural, and economic life.

Texas may not have gotten every curricular choice right. But it appears to know what it thinks education is for. That alone distinguishes it from much of American schooling.

Start with the state’s new social studies standards.

Their most striking feature is not their ideological orientation but their specificity and architecture. In the early grades, children learn stories, people, places, events, and traditions. Beginning in third grade, the standards become broadly chronological, moving from ancient civilizations through Greece and Rome, the medieval world, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, European colonization, the American Revolution, and the Constitution. The standards explicitly call for concepts to be embedded in stories and historical content in order to “create schema for understanding.”

This is a significant departure from the way American education often thinks about social studies—and education more broadly. For decades, schools have been encouraged to focus on skills: critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, collaboration, and, in literacy, comprehension strategies such as finding the main idea, making inferences, and identifying the author’s purpose. The tacit assumption is that the particular content used to practice these skills is negotiable and interchangeable.

Beginning in third grade, the standards become broadly chronological, moving from ancient civilizations through Greece and Rome, the medieval world, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, European colonization, the American Revolution, and the Constitution.

Texas’s approach goes in the opposite direction: Knowledge builds on knowledge. What a child learns in second grade affects what she can understand in fifth grade, which affects what she can comprehend in eighth grade. A student who understands Greece and Rome, Hebrew Scriptures, medieval institutions, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment is better prepared to understand the American founding. The fifth-grade standards make those connections explicit.

This is not merely a theory of history or literacy instruction. It’s a theory of education itself.

If literacy depends on knowledge, and knowledge is cumulative, content cannot be endlessly interchangeable—a school’s entire curriculum is therefore a literacy curriculum. That helps explain why Texas’s social studies standards, Bluebonnet curriculum, and reading list should be viewed as parts of a whole. Coherence demands choices. A school system cannot be indifferent to whether one classroom studies ancient Egypt, another spends six weeks on a generic unit about “communities,” and a third pursues student-selected projects, and then assume all children will arrive at the next grade equally prepared.

, one of the nation’s most important advocates for knowledge-building curriculum, recently praised the ambition and specificity of the Texas social studies standards while worrying that their perceived ideological coloration could unnecessarily inflame the culture wars. That concern is worth taking seriously; Virginia, which she points to as an exemplar, shows that content-rich standards can be built through a more bipartisan process.

But Texas is attempting something broader than writing better standards for a single subject: aligning literacy, curriculum, culture, and civics around a common theory of education.

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To Wexler’s broader point about political provocation, conversations about curriculum are unavoidably complicated and uncomfortable, because background knowledge is not culturally neutral and does not always yield to preferred notions of inclusivity.

E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s deepest insight was not merely that reading comprehension depends upon knowing facts. He also understood that language is a cultural artifact. A speech community’s history, religion, literature, myths, symbols, idioms, and collective memories become embedded in the language its members speak and read. A “David and Goliath” struggle, a “Trojan horse,” an “Achilles’ heel,” and “Big Brother” are not mere decorative flourishes appended to English. They are part of English.

This raises an essential but uncomfortable curricular question: What does the language we want children to master assume they already know?

That question does not yield an immutable list of names, books, and events. Speech communities change, and America’s cultural inheritance has always expanded and evolved. Nor does it render representation irrelevant. America’s diversity and the contributions and experiences of its people must be taken seriously, treated respectfully, and taught truthfully.

A “David and Goliath” struggle, a “Trojan horse,” an “Achilles’ heel,” and “Big Brother” are not mere decorative flourishes appended to English. They are part of English.

But “representation” is not the purpose of public education. A curriculum is not principally a mirror in which every child must see a flattering reflection of himself. Its more important function is to give children access to a world they did not make but must learn to navigate—including the taken-for-granted cultural knowledge their more privileged peers are likely to encounter outside school. That is an equity argument. Affluent and highly educated families will always find ways to transmit sophisticated language, cultural knowledge, institutional know-how, and civic confidence to their children. Children who depend chiefly upon school for access to those things have the greatest need for an explicit, cumulative, coherent curriculum.

Critics have also charged that the new Texas standards and curricula are overly patriotic. But public schools are, if nothing else, public institutions. It should not be controversial for them to cultivate some measure of affection for the community, state, and country that created and sustains them. This need not require triumphalism, mythology, or silence about injustice. But it is simply incorrect to view critique as neutral but affirmation as ideological. A curriculum can estrange children from their country just as surely as it can teach uncritical reverence for it.

Moreover, it’s simply not accurate to say that the standards paper over American failures. They include slavery, the Civil War, Juneteenth, segregation, the civil rights movement, and figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, Ruby Bridges, and Hector P. Garcia. The story the standards tell is not merely one of national greatness, but of ideals, failures to honor them, and struggles to extend them.

A curriculum can estrange children from their country just as surely as it can teach uncritical reverence for it.

It’s also worth noting that civic education is not merely about attachment. Children need knowledge of American history and institutions so they can understand their rights, navigate government, make persuasive arguments, pursue opportunities, advance their interests, participate in self-government, and change institutions intelligently when necessary.

The Texas social studies standards are admirably explicit about this knowledge-building component of civics. They aim to develop responsible citizens who understand constitutional government, consent of the governed, civic virtue, individual rights, and the preservation of liberty.

In sum, literacy gives children access to the speech community, and civic knowledge gives them agency within the political community. The pursuit of both aims tends to spark political controversy and debate, but they are vital nonetheless.

None of Texas’s curricular reforms guarantee success. The state’s greatest challenge may be practical: Its new social studies standards are enormously ambitious, yet social studies is easily squeezed out by reading and math, and classroom practice is hard to change through state policy alone.

Texas appears to have grappled with this problem. Its ambitions extend beyond aligning standards and curriculum to creating coherence across the larger education system.

“What the State Board has done is significant because it has attempted to ensure coherence in the standards,” Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath told me. “What broader laws in Texas do is ensure that coherence is supported by high-quality instructional materials, teacher preparation, in-service training, and, ultimately, assessment.”

Each of those levers matters, but not equally. Better teacher preparation and training can help change practice. Aligned assessment is more powerful still. Texas plans to align its reading assessments with its knowledge-building ambitions, drawing some passages from the literary works list and others from content students will have studied in science and social studies. If schools know that reading comprehension will be tested partly through material students are supposed to have encountered, the familiar dictum that “what gets tested gets taught” may finally be put to constructive purpose. Schools will have less incentive to sacrifice history and science for generic reading-skills practice if state reading tests reward the acquisition of specific domains of knowledge.

Whether all this is enough to change classroom practice remains to be seen. But Texas is at least attempting to align the major levers available to a state: what children are expected to know, the materials teachers use, how teachers are prepared and trained, and what the state measures. That is a far more serious theory of implementation than states typically bring to reform efforts.

If schools know that reading comprehension will be tested partly through material students are supposed to have encountered, the familiar dictum that “what gets tested gets taught” may finally be put to constructive purpose. Schools will have less incentive to sacrifice history and science for generic reading-skills practice if state reading tests reward the acquisition of specific domains of knowledge.

This larger development—and the contrast to business as usual—is worth recognizing and praising. American education has spent decades fruitlessly pursuing skills without knowledge, literacy without content, diversity without commonality, and citizenship without grateful inheritance. Texas is attempting something different: a coherent approach to knowledge, language, literacy, and civic formation.

Whether it can execute that vision remains an open question.

Some of its individual choices deserve debate, and others will surely require revision. But the fact that Texas’s emerging theory conflicts with several fashionable ideas about education is not the problem.

It is the point.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)

He writes and speaks extensively on education and education-reform issues, with an emphasis on literacy, curriculum, civic education, and classroom practice. His 2019 book, How the Other Half Learns, based on a year of observations at New York City’s Success Academy.

Note: This article first appeared in the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly newsletter and on ’s excellent substack.

Texas Has a Theory of Education