Revisions to the curriculum in any subject inevitably produce spirited debates on what merits changes to better prepare students for life after graduation. While science and mathematics have taken center stage in the past, recent changes to Texas’ English and social studies standards have ignited more controversy than any other subject in the past decade. These changes throw teachers into the middle of yet another curriculum upheaval and leave them to incorporate new topics into their lessons and discard those that no longer conform to the TEKS.
In June, after a series of contentious meetings, the State Board of Education approved a list of required literary works as well as significant changes to the social studies curriculum.
Required literary works
For the first time, the TEKS will include specific literary works to be taught in each grade level. Many other states have produced lists of recommended literary works, but Texas is the first to put forth such a list as a requirement. The reading lists will be phased in beginning with the 2030-31 school year.
Americans are reading less than in decades past, partially attributable to the rise of short-form digital media and increased reliance on personal devices for information and interpersonal communication. Facing pressure to increase performance on state assessments, many school districts have abandoned reading novels as a class to focus on more explicit test preparation. These worrying trends and other factors served as motivation to create a list of required literary works for Texas public schools.
Nobody can deny the importance of fostering a lifelong love of reading in our students, but deciding which literary works can best do so is a difficult task. Early drafts of the list from TEA included far too many works per grade level to effectively cover and drew criticism that teachers would have no agency in deciding appropriate works for the wide variety of students they teach. The SBOE heard these concerns and cut the list down to about 40% of its original length to address those concerns.
Click here to view the full SBOE-approved K-12 literary list.
Bible passages
The list for each grade level includes passages from the Christian Bible. Proponents of including Bible passages expressed their support for creating a common cultural foundation for students, explaining that our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Without sufficient knowledge of the Bible, they claimed, students might not understand fundamental aspects of our country and government.
Opponents challenged that defense as cover for proselytizing in public schools and claimed that the Bible’s persistent presence in the curriculum would infringe on parents’ unique rights to direct their children’s religious upbringing.
In the end, the Bible passages survived in the final draft.
Technical concerns
During the debate on the list of required literary works, SBOE Vice Chair Pam Little (R-Fairview) questioned whether the literary works on the list would have to undergo the same quality and suitability review process required for approved high-quality instructional materials (HQIM). Including these works in the TEKS could imply that they are of a high enough quality to merit the designation despite not having survived the HQIM gauntlet. Additionally, every other instructional material submitted for consideration as HQIM so far has been a product from a publisher, not an existing literary work.
In an earlier meeting, Little expressed deep concerns about thousands of corrections requested by TEA to the state’s Bluebonnet curriculum. Adoption of the new list of required literary works will likely require Bluebonnet to undergo a lengthy and costly rewrite to incorporate these works right after thousands of other edits were approved.
A handful of works on the list have also been out of print for some time. Member Will Hickman (R-Houston) attempted to remove those works from the list for that reason, but without much success. Other members reassured him that publishers would likely jump at the chance to put these works back in print if they end up being required reading.
Teachers and school districts also expressed concerns about the potential costs of acquiring literary works for their students. While some of the storybooks required in lower grades might only necessitate one copy per classroom, the novels listed in middle school and above would require one copy per student, perhaps even one per student per year if a teacher expects their students to annotate.
State testing
The only way the state can ensure a student has mastered the TEKS is through assessment. As the new list of required literary works is included in the TEKS, it is officially fair game for inclusion in future state assessments; TEA demurred when asked how exactly knowledge of a particular literary work might be tested.
Will students be asked plot details of the required works much like a reading quiz? Will passages in the assessment be replaced exclusively by passages from the required works? Will students be expected to reproduce certain interpretations of the certain interpretations of these works? These questions have yet to be answered.
The existing STAAR test will be phased out soon and replaced with three shorter tests: one in the first few weeks of the year to establish a baseline for students’ knowledge, another in the middle of the year to check progress and provide formative information to help teachers adjust instruction, and a summative assessment at the end of the year that will function much like the current STAAR. As with many of the other questions surrounding how required literary works will be assessed, it is unclear if any required literary works will appear on the beginning and middle-of-year exams in any capacity.
Social studies TEKS
The state’s social studies curriculum also went through one of the most significant changes in recent memory. While standards in each subject are typically reviewed on a ten-year cycle, the last attempt at changing the social studies standards in 2022 failed, pushing the process back to recommence in 2025.
Work groups consisting of teachers, professors, and other qualified members of the public are typically convened to debate changes to the TEKS. These groups work with a content advisor appointed by SBOE to oversee their deliberations. During this round of TEKS reviews, content advisors took a much more hands-on role in communicating with the SBOE and, in some cases, minimized the opinions of the work group participants.
SBOE members from both parties appeared frustrated with the process at times. During their deliberations on individual TEKS, members often appealed to the content advisors’ expertise to support their desired changes or attack the accuracy of proposed changes from other members. In most cases, the content advisors answered the members’ questions with far more detail than one would expect in the TEKS, only occasionally injecting their opinion about what should or should not be included.
James Combs-Lay, a history teacher and TCTA member in Houston, participated in one of the work groups and expressed concerns with a lack of transparency in the process and the quality of the SBOE’s final product.
In describing the changes, he stated that “[m]ost topics are… taught just once, and then not meaningfully revisited for years, or at all. There’s no prior knowledge to build from anymore; every topic is new information every year.”
One of the major structural changes to the curriculum is that history is presented chronologically from third grade onward instead of spiraling topics between school years. As such, some early grade levels feature hundreds or thousands of years of history while later grades attempt to cover hundreds of years of American history in a single year.
Combs-Lay also explained that these changes could incur significant costs on school districts already struggling to scrape by. The changes require school districts to purchase new curriculum, and could also strand teachers who were previously trained to teach a certain course or grade band because their sequence of courses no longer functions in the same way. Further, educator preparation programs would also need to adjust the way in which they prepare teachers to account for the changes in the social studies sequence.
So far, the SBOE has only completed its revisions for the K-8 curriculum; standalone high school courses will be edited at a future meeting. These curriculum changes will be phased in beginning in the 2030-31 school year.
Looking forward
With the latest set of curriculum revisions mostly in the rearview mirror, it now falls to teachers and curriculum departments to make sense of the changes and find the best way to present the standards to students. No Bluebonnet curriculum currently exists for social studies, nor are there any approved social studies HQIM products.
The next major TEKS review will be for mathematics, last reviewed in 2012. The SBOE has already convened an ad hoc committee to conduct preliminary research into potential changes to the mathematics curriculum, and their recommendations will be presented at a future SBOE meeting.
For future curriculum reviews, get involved early if you want to participate in the process. The more teachers get involved, the better the end result will be. Despite the outsize influence of TEA content advisors in the latest round of curriculum changes, teachers should always push to be the leading voice in curriculum for Texas students.
This article appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of The Classroom Teacher.
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