Reading, writing and religion? A Texas curriculum advisory board’s link to faith-based advocacy

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Shortly after leaving his position as Housing and Urban Development Secretary with the Trump administration, Ben Carson began working on a supplemental curriculum for elementary school students he called Little Patriots. When the program launched publicly in 2021, he said it was meant to compensate for a lack of emphasis on "the good things of our nation."

The initial curriculum, comprising short videos and quizzes, contained significant inaccuracies and an undue emphasis on Christianity in U.S. history, including the erroneous assertion that all founding fathers were Christians, according to an American Historical Association historian who reviewed the materials at the request of a reporter at the time.

When asked about a series of errors, such as the incorrect date for the Battle of Bull Run, Little Patriots's developers made some corrections. However, they staunchly defended the curriculum's Christian emphasis, saying in a statement “we aim to deliver a program that enables our country's children to learn about Faith, Liberty, Community and Life and the role these pillars played throughout our nation's history."

Three years later, Carson is now part of a panel tasked with reviewing a new, state-authored kindergarten through high school curriculum in Texas. Since an early version of the curriculum was released a few months ago, it has been heavily criticized for what many call an oversized emphasis on Christianity. The curriculum and feedback on it can be reviewed on the Texas State Board of Education’s website.

Carson is one of 10 people picked by Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath for the Open Education Resources Advisory Board to ensure the materials are accurate, age-appropriate and free from bias. While some panelists are experienced educators, others are not and at least half of them, such as Carson, have a history of faith based advocacy.

The advisory panel's composition raises questions about how the Texas Education Agency (TEA) selected its members and whether they were predisposed to green-light a Bible-infused curriculum that aligned with their beliefs. The instance is just the latest controversy to come before an education board that has a long and shaky history with the separation of church and state in its curriculum and textbooks.

The state curriculum, tentatively dubbed Bluebonnet Learning, will be optional for school districts to adopt but heavily incentivized with extra funding, sparking significant interest and concern about the role it will play in shaping the future of the state’s education system.

"Instead of looking for help primarily from nonpolitical educators and researchers working in our state's world-class universities, the commissioner is farming out the education of Texas kids to people who favor political agendas over teaching our kids the truth," said Val Benavidez, president of the Texas Freedom Network, an advocacy organization that focuses on the separation of church and state and religious freedom.

The TEA would not release documents related to the advisory board’s advice through an open records request. Instead, the agency asked the attorney general whether such documents could be withheld, arguing that it “and the Open Education Resource Advisory Board share a privity of interest in the matters at issue.”

Texas shapes its curriculum 

The panel on which Carson was selected to serve was created by House Bill 1605, the only law passed last year aimed at addressing Texas’ critical teacher shortage.

State-provided resources proved helpful for educators during the pandemic, leading some educators and lawmakers to call for the creation of a more refined product that would be available for teachers of all grades.

There would be multiple benefits for supporters of the legislation, which called for the creation of a comprehensive K-12 curriculum that schools across Texas could adopt at no cost. It would help keep teachers from spending countless hours preparing their own lesson plans, they said, and the new curriculum would align with the state's standardized test. Another goal is to align teaching with the most up-to-date cognitive science on how students learn to read.

Districts are still free to choose the curriculum their teachers use, but are incentivized to adopt the state-authored materials, and other curricula deemed by the state as “high quality instructional materials,” with $40 per student per year and an additional $20 per student per year that can be used for printing costs. The extra $60 per student will only apply to the state materials if the state education board approves them in November.

The incentives come as districts face lagging state funding, declining enrollment and corresponding budget deficits. Many district leaders have already said they don't plan to adopt the state-developed materials, if passed, with some citing the quality of existing materials, and others concerned about the religious content and related parental pushback.

The Northside Independent School District, for example, one of the largest in the state, will continue to use its own, district-created curriculum “because it allows us, as a district, to better meet the needs of our students and to more effectively align our K-12 instruction vertically,” district spokesperson Barry Perez said.

Others like Michael Lee, superintendent of Booker Independent School District in the Texas Panhandle will be taking a closer look.

“We will certainly look at the curriculum,” Lee previously told the Texas Tribune. “We will look at any area to find a dollar.”

HB 1605 also called for the creation of a 10-member advisory board to vet the state-authored curriculum.

In particular, the law requires the board to ensure the materials are:

• Of the highest quality.
• Aligned with state standards adopted by the state education board.
• Suitable for the age of students at the grade level for which the materials are developed.
• Free from bias and factual errors.
• In compliance with state law regarding required and prohibited curriculum.

Feedback from the advisory board was used to “advise the agency on the development of the materials,” according to the TEA, and their feedback was not shared with the state education board, which will make the final decision on the curriculum. The advisory board did not collectively discuss the curriculum, and TEA was not required to change the curriculum as a result of any members recommendation.

Through a separate process, hundreds of state-approved teachers and other curriculum experts were charged by the state education board with analyzing the same teaching materials as the advisory board, ensuring they met state standards and certain physical and electronic specifications, as well as weeding out disproven methods of teaching students how to read.

The reviews will be considered along with public comments as the state education board decides whether to approve, reject or request edits to the state curriculum before it is made available for districts to adopt.

With more than 30,000 pages of materials, including lesson plans, letters for parents and actual workbooks, each advisory board member was allowed to choose which materials to review, according to the TEA.

Unlike the teachers and curriculum experts tapped by the state education board, however, notable advisory board members have tangential and largely partisan connections to education and curriculum.

In a statement, the TEA said board members were chosen "based off experience and expertise."

The agency did not respond to questions about why panelists with religious backgrounds were selected to vet a statewide curriculum on reading and language arts.

‘Outsized play to Christianity?’

Before launching the Little Patriots program, which organizers say has grown to be used by more than 200,000 students nationwide, Carson was an ex-officio member of the 1776 Commission, a highly criticized initiative of former president Donald Trump’s, tasked with elevating a “patriotic education” at the local level for all schools. The commission stopped short of calling for a national curriculum.

Echoing the criticism of the advisory board in Texas, the American Historical Association criticized the 1776 Commission for a noted lack of U.S. history experts.

The final report published by the commission in the waning days of the Trump administration called for a return to teaching "faith-based virtues" as the bedrock for the founding of the nation and the inspiration for the Declaration of Independence.

Another Texas advisory board member, Thomas Lindsay, the higher education policy director for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, was also a member of the 1776 Commission.

Influential in shaping the state’s conservative policy agenda,TPPF has a history of advocating for more Christianity in schools, including through setting aside time for prayer or Bible reading in schools and requiring a framed copy of the Ten Commandments to be in each classroom.

In a 2023 article, the group called for a “revival of faith now more than ever,” adding, “there is not a revival more needed than among our youth.”

In recent interviews, Lindsay and Carson pushed back on the idea that the materials they reviewed for the Texas curriculum over-emphasized Christianity in an inappropriate way.

Carson said in a recent interview that references to faith, no matter how relevant, are going to be criticized by the public.

"Our Judeo-Christian foundation is a very important part of who we are,” Carson said. “Historically, it differentiated this nation from several other nations throughout the world, and there's no reason that our young people shouldn't understand that history."

Lindsay said learning about the Bible is necessary to understand other cultural references and common turns of phrase.

"Whether you're an atheist, an agnostic or some different religion, you can't understand the history of this country, you can't understand the history of the world, if you don't understand some sort of knowledge of the Bible," he said. "That's what the [Open Education Resource] curriculum is trying to do."

He pointed to phrases like "writing on the wall," a reference to the Book of Daniel and "by the skin of your teeth,” a phrase used in Job 19:20.

Beyond that, he said the new materials are higher quality and more comprehensive than those that school districts have used in recent years, citing a TEA study that found only 19% of classroom work across the state is actually considered “on grade-level.”

In an essay rebutting critics, Lindsay also cited success seen at early pilots of the eventual state-authored curriculum at the Lubbock and Temple school districts.

Other advisory board members include Marvin McNeese, who oversees the general education program at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston and Andrea Ramírez, who served as the director of the Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiatives at the U.S. Department of Education during the Trump administration.

McNeese said in an interview that he has grappled with contextualizing biblical references without proselytizing while preparing coursework for the general education courses at his college, which is accredited by both religious and non-religious entities.

"It is my job as we prep our courses to make sure that … if we are including any Bible, it is just … a presentation of the information," he said. "It is not proselytizing, it's not creating an act of worship, at least not within our classes."

McNeese said the 500 pages of state-authored curriculum materials he reviewed, "stayed on the right side of that line.”

Other board members, including Ramírez, pushed back on the idea that they were selected to rubber-stamp a faith-heavy collection of materials, adding that religious references are only one part of the broad curriculum.

"I do not … think the [Open Education Resource] curriculum materials give outsized play to Christianity or any faith," she said. "It is with great relevance to understand that the mention of religious traditions, regardless of the faith, make up a small portion of the product when contextually relevant."

Like other board members, Ramírez has a deep history of commingling education and Christianity. For two years, she hosted a weekly television program focused on the "nexus of faith and education," and in opinion columns for several Christian publications, she called for the quality of education to be addressed across the nation.

"When God's word is applied to our view of education and educational issues, we often come to a realization that education equality, for example, access to quality education, is an issue that needs the Body of Christ's attention," she wrote.

Former Democratic Sen. Eddie Lucio, who was outspoken about his Christian faith and pro-life stances during his time in the Texas Legislature, was also tapped for the board. But the lawmaker didn't review any materials, citing personal family health issues. He declined to comment on the process.

Board member pushed for cultural relevance 

Other panelists include Eliza Paul, a transportation engineer married to state Rep. Dennis Paul, R-Houston; former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman; University of Texas at Austin Professor Sharon Vaughn; actor and author Danica McKellar; and former SBOE chair and Texas Historical Commission board member Donna Bahorich.

Bahorich saw firsthand the controversy associated with religious materials in public school curricula in 2018 when she abstained from a vote on whether references to Moses should remain in social studies curricula.

As she reviewed the materials this year, she was mindful of the reaction religious materials could garner.

"I wanted to make sure that the biblical material focused on cultural relevance and to be sure that it stays in that vein," she said. "Because biblical references are going to raise controversy, right? … Because it hadn't been something that was in the current works."

"It is not a typical thing that you see," she added.

Advisory board members shared feedback between December 2023 and March 2024, and did not provide one comprehensive report.

The initial curriculum, written with the advice of the advisory board, has already been altered in response to public feedback and backlash in recent weeks and shared with state education board members in a letter from the education agency.

The agency made changes to address concerns by critics, including rewording some religious aspects, providing additional context in letters sent home to parents and removing small portions of the materials. In the letter, the agency also pushed back on other claims of an outsized focus on Christianity, pointing to the inclusion of other religious texts, like the Hebrew Bible.

Bahorich said that the reviews and ongoing comprehensive process will result in a high-quality and thoroughly vetted curriculum.

"I'm a big proponent of what the state is doing here," she said. "The board is very attentive to the public's concerns about things, and you know, it'll be adjusted."

Broad-based criticism

In the months since the curriculum was originally published for review, a variety of critics have come out in opposition to the materials, including religious leaders, advocacy organizations and scholars.

David Brockman, a religious studies scholar who reviewed the materials, said in a recent report authored for the Texas Freedom Network that he found an overemphasis on Christianity in the lessons, including detailed Bible lessons "even when they are both unnecessary and unwarranted."

For example, a kindergarten unit on the appreciation of art includes an entire art lesson on the creation and flood stories from the Bible, referencing in passing that Maya, Aztec and Greeks sometimes decorated their pottery to "show their religious beliefs of how the world was created."

"In sharp contrast, it treats the biblical stories in great detail, devoting four pages to them, with accompanying artworks illustrating specific events from these stories," according to the report, and "in a subsequent application exercise, students are drilled, not on the artwork, but on the details of the biblical creation story."

Criticism came after the state published a preliminary version of the materials for review and comment, garnering a mix of reactions, according to Shannon Trejo, the deputy commissioner for the Office of School Programs at the education agency.

Some of the complaints included the notion that there were not enough religious materials, for example, she said. Others included qualms about the way phonics is taught, the use of student grouping in lessons and the use of read-aloud texts.

Despite the intense pushback, religious source material has only been intended to build background knowledge, Trejo said.

"There are connections between certain religious source material, events, people and happenings in the United States and across the world," she said. "And if you don't have the advantage of knowing that background, you don't get a really good sense of the depth of what happened, or who those people were or what occurred."

TEA officials and advisory board members who were interviewed pointed to a proposed lesson that pairs Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" with the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, whose defiance of the Babylonian leader Nebuchadnezzar is cited by King as an example of civil disobedience.

While the letter has been taught in the past, students might have lost the whole meaning due to hesitance to provide the biblical background, according to Todd Davis, the associate commissioner for instructional strategy for the agency.

"What our materials do is give the opportunity to understand what that reference of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego really is, but it's not about learning the Bible. It's about learning a deeper understanding of Dr. Martin Luther King's message,” he said.

What happens next 

In addition to the Christian influence, the materials "whitewash" negative events consequential to the early history of America, including the brutal treatment of Native Americans and the foundational role played by slavery, critics say.

"Through the use of mild terms such as ‘share,’ ‘introduce,’ and ‘teach,’ rather than the more accurate ‘attempt to convert,’ the authors misleadingly suggest that conversion efforts were a friendly dialogue between religions and consistently conceal the religious intolerance and often brutal power dynamics at play in these efforts," Brockman said in the Texas Freedom Network report.

McNeese pushed back that the lessons were designed to be age-appropriate, adding that he "would question whether it's appropriate to get into such gory detail with those age grades."

McNeese and Lindsay said parents should view the curriculum on its own merits, regardless of the board's affiliations or other criticism.

Advocates who pushed for the passage of the law, including the nonprofit Texas 2036, which focuses on workforce development and education, hope that the rigorous curriculum at the heart of recent controversy won’t be sidelined.

"The conversations that are happening are vital to ensuring that teachers and students have access to the best curriculum possible,” Gabe Grantham, a policy adviser for the organization said. “I do hope that goal of getting high-quality materials in the hands of teachers isn't lost in all of this, though.”

"As with anything we talk about with education, time is always of the essence, because any time we wait, we are having another child move through the education system without the supports necessary to reach their full potential,” he added.

The state education board will meet in November to vote on open education resources and other curricula.

Disclosure: Texas 2036, Texas Freedom Network and Texas Public Policy Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.