September 2030 — if everything goes according to plan — millions of elementary and middle school students in Texas will begin a new school year with a completely different curriculum. Less diverse in terms of race and culture. Less world history, unless it is European history. And more Bible — not as an elective religious course, but as mandatory content in standard reading comprehension classes.
This did not happen overnight. And it is not just a Texas issue.
When public school curriculum is designed around a specific religious tradition, the question 'Where is my child in this story?' is no longer abstract.
What Is Actually Being Erased?
According to Houston Public Media, the Texas State Board of Education — with a Republican majority — provisionally approved a redesigned social science curriculum and mandatory reading list for all public schools in the state. The final vote was scheduled for Friday.
What is being removed is clearer than what is being added. According to Texas Tribune, the Board eliminated the sixth-grade world cultures course — one of the few opportunities for Texas students to learn about non-Western civilizations. The new curriculum minimizes world history outside the European tradition and focuses more on Texas and the United States. More importantly: standards that required students to understand "the impact of race and ethnicity on society" and "analyze different patterns of treatment of minority groups" — both have been removed from the social studies curriculum.
This is a deliberate choice, not an editorial oversight. Conservative advocacy groups — led by the Texas Public Policy Foundation — view these changes as the "final battle" to eliminate what they call content that "makes students hate their country." That is the language of culture war, not educational reform.
The mandatory reading list follows the same direction. According to CBS News, the list requires students from first through twelfth grade — meaning 5.4 million kindergarten through twelfth-grade students — to read biblical stories such as Jonah and the whale, the Damascus road, the Eight Beatitudes, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Third grade will study the story of Paul's conversion to Christianity. Twelfth grade will study the Book of Job.
This is not the first time Texas has incorporated religious content into the public system. In 2023, the state became the first state to allow chaplains to operate in public schools. Last year, a mandate to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms went into effect, though about two dozen school districts have removed them due to legal concerns.
When Curriculum Is a Political Decision — Made Before the Vote
There is one overlooked but crucial detail in this entire story, and it comes from The 74: more than a year before the Board of Education voted, State Education Commissioner Mike Morath signed a 67 million dollar contract with consulting firm MGT Impact Solutions headquartered in Tampa to develop social science teaching materials — based on draft standards that had not yet been approved. This contract was not submitted to the state legislature as required by law until April 2026.
In other words: the curriculum was ordered before public debate occurred. The Board's vote, by that logic, was essentially just a procedural formality legitimizing a decision that had already been made in the shadows — using 67 million dollars in taxpayer money. An AFT Texas Teachers Union policy expert called this a situation of "the cart before the horse" — meaning the process was completely reversed.
Some Board members — including Republicans — acknowledged they did not know about this contract. That is not simply a lack of transparency; it is a disabling of the oversight role of elected bodies.
The work process was also alarmingly chaotic. According to Texas Tribune, meetings stretched until 2 a.m., during which the Board accidentally deleted the requirement for students to study the American Revolution in the high school U.S. history curriculum — and had to reinsert it the next day. A major state's historic curriculum changes were made in a state of exhaustion, at midnight.
The Muslim Record: When Bias Becomes Policy
For months, the Texas Muslim community has spoken out at Board meetings, accusing the process of being heavily influenced by Islamophobia. Actual data supports that allegation.
Back in April, the Board removed a standard requiring students to learn about Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy — contributions that can be verified by academic history. Instead, at a hearing, Republican state Senator Bob Hall declared: "Islam is not a religion. It is a totalitarian theocratic institution." When asked whether he had ever visited a country with a Muslim-majority population, he said he had not.
This is where the Texas story touches directly on the Vietnamese-American community — especially in Houston, which has the second-largest Vietnamese community in the United States. Many Vietnamese-American families in Texas are Catholic or Buddhist, not evangelical Protestant. They migrated here carrying memories of a country where the state interfered with religious faith — and not always in ways favorable to them. When public school curriculum is designed around a specific religious tradition, the question "Where is my child in this story?" is not abstract.
Rabbi Josh Fixler of Congregation Emanu El in Houston testified before the Board that this reading list is a "conversion tool that has no place in public schools." According to CBS News, he emphasized the boundary between teaching about religion and teaching religion — and argued that the list forces teachers to cross that boundary. That is a legal argument, not just a religious viewpoint — and it has basis in U.S. Supreme Court precedent on the First Amendment.
The Academic Problem: Simplified History Is False History
Beyond the religious debate, historians have also spoken out about the academic quality of the new curriculum. According to Texas Tribune, educators criticize that the curriculum prioritizes memorization over critical thinking, oversimplifies rather than ensuring accuracy. Some historians have pointed out factual errors in the standards texts — including mischaracterizations of the forced removal of Native American peoples.
This is an issue that transcends political boundaries. Public school graduates in Texas will enter college, enter the workforce, and live in a world where the ability to understand different cultures is an economic skill, not just a civic virtue. If the curriculum teaches students that human history is fundamentally a story of Europe and Christianity — with everything else as footnotes — then that is not education, but the systematic cultivation of blindness.
Texas has about one-tenth of the total public school enrollment in the United States, according to CBS News. That means Texas typically determines what textbook publishers include in their materials — and those materials are then sold across the country. Texas's influence on national textbook content is a real mechanism, recognized for decades. When Texas changes standards, the entire nation feels it.
The Friday Vote and What Comes Next
The final vote took place on Friday, June 27, 2026. But not all changes arrive at once: according to Texas Tribune, the Board delayed changes for high school — including U.S. history, world history, geography, and government — due to concerns about insufficient time to refine them. These courses may be brought forward at the September 2026 meeting or at a special session.
If approved on Friday, the K-8 changes and reading list will take effect starting in the 2030-2031 school year. Four years sounds long, but it is not: school districts must plan teacher training, select materials, and adjust budgets — while the 67 million dollar contract with MGT Impact Solutions has already been running for over a year.
Legally, court challenges are almost certain to follow. Whether the reading list violates the First Amendment — the clause on separation of church and state — is a question that at least some federal judges will have to answer. Lawsuits related to the Ten Commandments in Texas have shown that road is not smooth.
For Vietnamese-American families in Houston and large school districts like HISD — where students have diverse religious, racial, and cultural backgrounds — the practical question is whether schools will have adequate resources and will to teach Bible content in a way that does not harm children who do not share that background. The honest answer is: no one knows. And that is the problem.
Ultimately, what this debate really raises is not whether the Bible should be read in schools — but who has the right to decide which stories are told to children, and who gets left out of that narrative. In a state where the population is increasingly diverse — where Latino, Asian-American, Muslim, and Jewish communities all pay taxes to fund the public school system — the answer the Board of Education has provided this week is: that is the right of the Republican majority. Nothing more, nothing less.
Read the original reports at the source links below.