Next week, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) will take up the third and final reading of the state’s social studies TEKS — the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills that govern what our children learn in public schools. This vote has been a long time coming. The last attempt to update these standards collapsed in 2022 under a wave of public backlash. Now, with a statutory deadline of July 2025 under SB24 from the 89th Legislature, the board must finish the job.
What’s at stake couldn’t be clearer: will Texas teach its children to understand and take pride in the civilization that built this country, or will it yield to a vocal fringe determined to reframe our history as a story of shame?
The standards backed by Republicans and the Texas Education Agency are grounded in American and Texas history, Western Civilization, and the principles of American exceptionalism. These are not radical ideas. They are the intellectual foundation of the freest, most prosperous, and most innovative nation the world has ever seen. Our foundational principles — rooted in Western and Christian tradition — produced more economic output, more scientific advancement, and lifted more people out of poverty globally than any civilization in human history. That story deserves to be taught, understood, and celebrated.
What we have heard from the other side, however, is something that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. Democrat board member Marisa Perez-Diaz declared that “America is not exceptional in any way except that we have a huge hubris over who we are.” Democrat member Staci Childs called the Founding Fathers “despicable.” Across hours of public testimony at recent SBOE meetings, speaker after speaker has argued — in one form or another — that America is fundamentally evil.
Some want to reduce the entirety of American history to the lens of slavery — ignoring that slavery was neither unique to America nor was America its primary perpetrator. Others have pushed to prioritize the teaching of Arab or African culture over American culture in American public schools. These are not balanced perspectives. They are an agenda.
And the Democrats on the board have been candid about their strategy. In workshops leading up to this vote, they have laid out a playbook: work the amendment process, make their changes sound reasonable, find “moderate” Republicans willing to deal, and insert their agenda piece by piece. The April first reading showed exactly how this works in practice — 20 percent of the amendments adopted came from Democrats alone, only for those same members to vote against the final document anyway.
Let that sink in. They shaped the document, then rejected it. That is not good-faith governance. That is sabotage.
Why would any Republican give an inch to members acting in deliberate bad faith — members who will vote no regardless of how many concessions they extract? The answer is: they shouldn’t. Not one inch.
Every country in the world teaches its children to understand and love their nation. Ours has more to love than any other. That doesn’t mean whitewashing our failures — our history includes real wrongs, and students should learn them. The American story is, at its core, the story of a nation in relentless pursuit of a ‘more perfect union’. No country has a better track record of confronting its flaws and expanding its promise.
As Congressman Brandon Gill from Denton put it: if other cultures are as exceptional as America, where are the other Americas? It’s a simple question with a telling absence of answers.
With 10 Republicans and 5 Democrats on the SBOE, the math is there. The Republicans have the votes to pass standards that will actually serve Texas children — standards that teach them what this country is, where it came from, and why it’s worth preserving. The only way this fails is if Republican members allow themselves to be picked off one by one through amendments dressed up as compromise.
They know the game. Now they need to play it.
Hold the line.
