A Floridian who briefly led one of the nation’s largest school districts will captain Fort Worth ISD while it is under state control.

Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath appointed longtime Florida educator Peter B. Licata as FWISD’s new leader. Licata, who served as Broward County Public Schools superintendent for less than a year, is now charged with driving rapid academic gains for FWISD’s nearly 68,000 students.

He is Fort Worth’s fourth superintendent in as many years and comes to a district facing similar challenges he faced in Florida.

Alongside the new superintendent, Morath named nine managers who essentially replaced the district’s locally elected trustees. The managers assume governing authority over the district’s nearly $1 billion budget, buildings and what children learn.

Licata served as superintendent of the 236,263-student Broward County Public Schools for 10 months starting in 2023. He resigned and stepped away from day-to-day leadership over health concerns.

Licata spent nearly three decades working in Florida schools, primarily in Palm Beach County, where he rose from classroom teacher and coach to principal and district leader.

After taking the Broward job, he described his approach to equal opportunity as ensuring students receive additional support without lowering academic expectations.

“You can’t raise the floor by lowering the ceiling,” he said in .

Broward students saw modest increases in proficiency rates during Licata’s tenure during the 2023-24 school year. His superintendency occurred alongside  that measures progress at the beginning, middle and end of the year.

Palm Beach saw its proficiency rates stay relatively flat between 2015 and 2023 — the time he was in central administration, according to data from the Florida Department of Education.

He served as that district’s regional superintendent overseeing dozens of schools and was part of the leadership focused on improving academic outcomes across a large, diverse student population. Palm Beach County Schools serves roughly 185,000 students.

Hispanic students make up 38.5% of Palm Beach’s enrollment, while Black students make up 28.1% and white students 27%.

Broward County’s enrollment was nearly 40% Latino, 38% Black and 15% white.

Nearly two-thirds of Fort Worth ISD students are Latino, with Black students at 18.6% and white students at 11.3%.

English language learners comprise 18.2% of the Palm Beach district and 14% in Broward. In Fort Worth, they account for 42% of students.

Nearly 4 in 5 FWISD students are from low-income families. Just over half of Broward students are low income, while Palm Beach has 66%.

Licata emphasized student achievement in public statements throughout his career, often pointing to measurable goals — such as improving district academic accountability ratings and expanding access to advanced coursework.

Fort Worth ISD has been on a downward academic trajectory since 2016, when 57% of students were proficient across all subjects — and within striking distance of the state’s rate. In 2025, 34% of students were proficient across all subjects, a 4 percentage-point gain from the previous year.

Licata holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami, a master’s degree from Barry University and a doctorate in global leadership from Lynn University.

His tenure in Broward County was short and unfolded in a district already dealing with instability.

The Broward School Board hired him in summer 2023 after a national search, looking for steadier leadership in a district that had cycled through superintendents and public conflict in the years before his arrival.

Board members approved a three-year contract with a $350,000 base salary and up to $20,000 in performance bonuses tied to academics and progress on the school system’s long-delayed bond program.

His contract negotiations drew public debate. Broward board members rejected Licata’s request for a higher bar to remove him without cause, kept the termination threshold at a simple majority and required him to move from Palm Beach County into Broward.

Licata took over the nation’s sixth-largest school district promising to help Broward regain an A rating from the state and bring steadier leadership to the system.

Less than a year later, in April 2024, he announced his retirement, citing health reasons. He said he reached the decision after discussions with his doctors, his wife and his four adult children.

After Licata announced his plans, the Broward trustees voted the same day to replace him immediately with a deputy superintendent. The speed of that transition drew scrutiny in South Florida as some felt the move was staged and others criticized the lack of transparency, .

Trustees ultimately rejected a consulting arrangement with Licata and reduced his salary for his final weeks before his employment ended July 1, 2024.

His exit came as Broward was dealing with possible campus closures tied to long-term enrollment declines, charter school funding disputes and broader questions about district governance and finances, .

His appointment in Fort Worth comes at a similar moment of transition.

Morath ordered the takeover of Fort Worth ISD in October after one campus received five consecutive failing academic ratings under the state’s accountability system.

As superintendent, Licata will lead the district under state oversight, working alongside the managers and conservator appointed by the commissioner.

That role carries significant authority — and pressure.

The new superintendent is tasked with improving academic outcomes across Fort Worth schools, where reading and math performance have lagged behind state averages for years.

Licata steps into a district where roughly one-third of students read on grade level and slightly more than a quarter meet expectations in math, according to recent state testing data.

Fort Worth ISD faces much uncertainty as parents, teachers and community leaders raise concerns over potential employee turnover, changes to instruction and the loss of local control as the state assumes authority over the district.

At the same time, some education and business leaders say the state intervention could bring needed urgency and focus to improving student outcomes.

Licata has not previously worked in Texas schools.

Jacob Sanchez is education editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at jacob.sanchez@fortworthreport.org or .

Matthew Sgroi is an education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at matthew.sgroi@fortworthreport.org or .

The Texas Education Agency is replacing the elected school boards of the Beaumont, Connally and Lake Worth school districts, Education Commissioner Mike Morath announced Thursday. 

State law allows Morath to either close a campus or appoint new leadership if at least one school in the district receives five consecutive failing grades in Texas’ academic accountability system. Each of the districts met that threshold. 

Pending appeals, the commissioner plans to replace each district’s school board with a state-selected board of managers. Morath will also appoint a conservator with governing authority over current district and campus leaders during the transition, which typically takes several months to complete. 

The education agency will solicit applications from local community members interested in joining each district’s board of managers. Morath will also appoint superintendents to lead the districts. 

The takeovers add to the growing list of districts subject to state interventions, which also includes two of Texas’ largest: Fort Worth and Houston. The Fort Worth school board has said it plans to appeal the commissioner’s decision, which was in October. 

The education agency said in August that five school districts were at of intervention after enduring five consecutive years of unsatisfactory ratings. Since then, it has announced plans to take over four of them: Fort Worth, Lake Worth, Connally and Beaumont. Morath has not said whether he plans to intervene in the fifth district, Wichita Falls. 

Each of the schools that triggered takeovers in the Beaumont, Connally and Lake Worth districts educates a majority Black and Hispanic student population, and the overwhelming majority of their children come from low-income families.

Lake Worth’s Marilyn Miller Language Academy triggered the intervention in that district. In letters informing the districts about the takeovers, Morath noted that during the latest round of accountability ratings, all but one of Lake Worth’s six campuses earned failing grades. Meanwhile, five campuses have received unacceptable ratings for more than a year, while only 22% of students are meeting grade level across all subjects. 

Lake Worth school district leaders were acutely aware of the challenges facing the school district leading up to the takeover, said Superintendent Mark Ramirez, who was hired this year. Ramirez said the district has focused on addressing the challenges facing each campus, which should serve as a foundation for the incoming board of managers to build upon. 

“Our preparation ensures zero instructional loss for our children,” Ramirez said. 

The Connally district had two campuses that met the state’s takeover threshold: Connally Junior High and Connally Elementary. Since the 2022-23 school year, the number of campuses with academically unacceptable scores in the district has doubled, Morath noted. Only 24% of students in the district are meeting grade level. The junior high improved from an F to a D in the most recent ratings. 

In a statement, the Connally district thanked the efforts of Superintendent Jill Bottelberghe in boosting academic performance in recent years but acknowledged the need for improvements. 

“We recognize that there is still work that needs to be done,” the statement said. “It is our hope that the appointed Board of Managers will work to not only improve our district’s academic performance, but also serve our community with the same passion and sincerity as our Board of Trustees has.”

ML King Middle School and Fehl-Price Elementary in the Beaumont district have also endured five consecutive years of failing grades. The commissioner cited data showing that the elementary school has never earned an acceptable rating, while the middle school has gone 11 years without one. The district has seven campuses with unacceptable ratings for more than a year and has not earned an overall acceptable rating since 2019. Thirty percent of students in the district are meeting grade level. 

Thomas Sigee Sr., president of the Beaumont school board, said the district had sought to help its struggling campuses — including by with charter schools — but ultimately could not lift them up to state standards. He questioned why the commissioner opted to take over the entire district instead of shutting down the schools. 

“We could have closed the schools for a year and facilitated those students to other campuses and go forward,” Sigee said. “I didn’t want the takeover because I knew it would spread chaos in our community.” 

If the decision is finalized, it would mark the second time the state has placed the Beaumont district under its oversight. The education agency did so from 2014-2020 due to financial mismanagement. 

Each of the three districts will have opportunities later this month to attend an informal hearing with the commissioner to make their appeals. If Morath stands by his decision to intervene, they can then formally appeal to the State Office of Administrative Hearings. 

Takeovers were once rare in Texas, but they have grown more common in the last decade, thanks to that made it easier for the state to step in after five consecutive F grades. It also expanded the commissioner’s ability to initiate special investigations, which could lead to an intervention. 

That A-F grading system is on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, a standardized exam that lawmakers voted this year to replace in 2027. 

Before 2015, El Paso experienced the only academic takeover in Texas, due to a widespread . Since the law’s passage, the education agency has officially taken over three districts because of low academic performance: Marlin, Shepherd and Houston. 

Morath and state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles believe the Houston ISD intervention was warranted, and they tout as evidence the improved test scores in the two years since it started. Students have improved in every tested subject. None of the district’s campuses received an F on the state’s accountability ratings in the 2024-25 school year, a drastic improvement from the 56 underperforming campuses in 2022-23. 

But the intervention has also run into strong criticism. Teacher departures have . Thousands of students have . And improved test scores have that the district has accomplished its gains, in part, because of a hyperfocus on testing and moving students into less rigorous math and science classes.

Stephen Simpson, Jess Huff and Alex Nguyen contributed to this report.

This first appeared on .

The Texas Education Agency is taking over the Fort Worth Independent School District — a district with more than 70,000 students — because a campus with just over 300 sixth graders repeatedly failed to meet state academic standards.

While Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade ultimately set off the state’s ability to intervene, the threat of a state takeover has been looming over the district for nearly two decades — with the first dating back to 2008. The district has a history of struggling to bring students’ grades up across the city, especially at campuses in low-income neighborhoods with large Black and brown populations.

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TEA Commissioner Mike Morath his decision to remove all decision-making power from elected Fort Worth ISD school board members. Soon, the state will replace them with a board of managers and a superintendent handpicked by Morath. The new set of appointed leaders will wield substantial power. They will preside over one of North Texas’ biggest school districts — around — and their responsibilities will range from deciding how to spend the district’s $1 billion budget to hiring the directors who will lead day-to-day operations such as bus transportation and campus maintenance.

The district has been on the upswing academically in the last two years. But TEA, under state law, can take over a school district when a school receives a failing grade on the state agency’s A-F accountability rating system for five consecutive years, and Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade received its The ratings, which were , had been held back because several school districts to block their release.

But long before the sixth-grade campus reached the threshold for a takeover, conversations of state intervention in Fort Worth had swirled around the community.

In 2008, Meadowbrook Middle School, a campus composed of around 60% Hispanic students and 35% Black students, had missed federal academic standards for years, which nearly led to a state takeover under the now-defunct No Child Left Behind Act.

In the years that followed, the district averted two other threats of an intervention. John T. White and Maude Logan elementaries endured a streak of failing grades and nearly met the takeover threshold before seeing improved scores.

Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade, which the district , was located in Glencrest, a with a median household income the national average. The campus, which drew in refugee and immigrant newcomers, struggled with academic performance for years.

“There has to be ownership for that,” Fort Worth ISD Superintendent Karen Molinar said in a recent interview with The Texas Tribune. “It’s not about a physical building or a statute. The kids were on a campus that was continuously underperforming, and we allowed it for multiple years.”

The campus was one of the Fort Worth district’s lowest-performing, though the struggle to lift students up to state standards has affected the entire district. In 2023, 44% of Fort Worth ISD students could read on grade level. That year, all grade levels with the exception of sixth grade .

But the district has begun to see improvements: Test scores in all of Fort Worth ISD last year. This year, the number of F-rated campuses plummeted from 31 to 11. And the roughly 135 schools overall have earned a C rating the last two years. The education agency considers that an “acceptable performance,” meaning the district serves many students well but needs to provide additional support to others.

Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, founder of parent activist group Parent Shield Fort Worth, said some of the credit for the improvements belongs to Molinar, the superintendent, who started her role in an interim capacity late last year and was officially appointed .

“This is her first year being able to make some changes to the district, and I do feel like she’s doing a pretty good job,” Dorsey-Hollins said.

After Molinar came on board, Ken Kuhl, a parent on the Fort Worth Council of PTAs, said the district has .

The district has sought to introduce more alignment across the district, from creating an infrastructure for educators to gameplan lessons together and attain feedback on their teaching methods, to rolling out what the education agency considers high-quality instructional materials aligned with state standards, to overhauling seven under-resourced campuses with a goal of attracting more effective instructors.

But none of those efforts stopped a takeover.

With a district as large as Fort Worth’s, disparities between schools’ performance run deep. Kuhl wonders if the district previously celebrated success at high-performing campuses “at the expense of” their academically struggling peers. The Fort Worth community, Kuhl said, would have liked to see the district address its shortcomings sooner.

Molinar said the state takeover was preventable, and the superintendent pointed blame at the district for the current situation.

“I can be upset and say it’s not fair and be upset with the commissioner,” she said. “But I’m more upset that we have not been more aggressive for my students.”

Many advocates and families believe the Texas Legislature’s decisions on have played an outsized role in districts’ academic struggles. Hundreds of districts are operating at a budget deficit, meaning they are increasing class sizes, cutting instructional staff and shutting down programs that help drive positive student outcomes. The Fort Worth district had a earlier this year.

The Legislature for six years did not add to schools’ base level funding, a critical pot of money that provides districts with flexibility to pay rising operational expenses and boost the salaries of teachers, which . During this year’s lawmaking session, the state approved nearly , though many district leaders have that the increase falls billions short of catching them up with inflation and that it lacks the spending flexibility they need to tackle all of their campuses’ needs.

Meanwhile, Texas’ education agency has been flexing its power to take over schools in recent years, notably in the Houston, La Joya and South San Antonio districts. Fort Worth’s intervention marks the 11th since 2000 and will be the second largest, following the 2023 takeover in Houston. Four other districts — Lake Worth, Beaumont, Connally and Wichita — are .

Academic takeovers are largely driven by results on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, which lawmakers, educators and families have long criticized. They say the test consumes meaningful instructional time, places too much pressure on students and does not adequately measure how much children are learning. The Legislature earlier this year that will phase out the exam by the 2027-28 academic year and replace it with three shorter tests.

If a campus does not meet state academic standards for five consecutive years, the state can order the closure of the school or appoint a board of managers to run the district. Fort Worth ISD opted to close Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade, but Morath said to the school board that the campus had already reached the threshold for intervention and that the closure “did not address the district’s underlying systemic deficiencies that caused the chronic underperformance.”

The state agency’s ability to take over any district because of one struggling campus has been a point of controversy in Texas that has only grown more intense since the state intervened in Houston.

Morath and state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles say that takeover was warranted, and they tout improved test scores in the two years since it started. No Houston ISD campuses received an F on the state’s accountability ratings in the 2024-25 school year, a drastic improvement from the the district had in 2022-23.

But the intervention has also run into strong criticism. Teacher departures have . Thousands of students have . And improved test scores have that the district has accomplished that feat, in part, because of a hyperfocus on testing and moving students into less rigorous math and science classes.

The direction of Fort Worth’s intervention will also depend heavily on the superintendent Morath chooses to lead it. It’s unclear exactly when he will make the decision, though the commissioner has noted that he will consider Molinar for the job.

Dorsey-Hollins said she’s hopeful for the intervention. The parent of two students in the district called on Morath to appoint people who are “open to hearing from the community and actually showing that growth is being made, letting that be the North Star for the takeover and for this change.”

“I feel like this is a possibility of a fresh start for our district,” she said. “Knowing that we’re going to have an appointed board that is hyper-focused on student achievement, this could change the trajectory for our city and for our kids.”

This first appeared on .

The Texas Education Agency will remove the Fort Worth Independent School District’s elected board members and may appoint a new superintendent to oversee its operations, Commissioner Mike Morath announced Thursday morning.

The decision to assume control of the North Texas district follows months of speculation about how the state would respond to one of the Fort Worth campuses not meeting Texas’ academic accountability standards for five consecutive years. The district closed the sixth-grade campus at the end of the 2023-24 school year, but Morath in the spring that state law still required him to intervene. 

Dallas’ local news station first reported news about the takeover Wednesday evening. 

In a statement Wednesday night, the district said it was aware of media reports about state action but would wait for an official announcement before sharing information with families.

“Our focus remains on our students by providing uninterrupted learning,” the statement read. “We are grateful to our educators and staff for their continuous commitment to our students and families.”

State takeovers of districts can only be initiated if one of its schools receives a failing grade from the TEA for five consecutive years, and allows the replacement of elected school board members with state appointees. The state can also direct districts to shut down the failing schools rather than replace the school boards with a board of managers.

While Fort Worth ISD shut down Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade before the TEA gave it its fifth F rating, Morath said in a March letter that it would not halt potential state action.

Fort Worth ISD was among school districts at risk of a state takeover, a record number in Texas. Beaumont, Connally, Lake Worth and Wichita Falls independent school districts have all amassed five consecutive failing grades at one or more of its campuses. Morath visited Lake Worth ISD on , where Marilyn Miller Language Academy received five consecutive F ratings.

A state takeover of the North Texas district would be the second largest in the state, and Morath three of its schools in August as the TEA considered a takeover. 

With the state taking control of Fort Worth ISD, there have been 11 state takeovers of districts in Texas since 2000, including Houston Independent School District, which is the state’s largest. That takeover began in 2023 and was to 2027 in June. 

This first appeared on .

But the staff, hoping to avoid debates over families’ religious beliefs, has chopped roughly 30 sections out of the curriculum, including a kindergarten lesson on the Golden Rule featuring Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and several excerpts about a Christian prayer the governor of Plymouth Colony said at the first Thanksgiving.  

The district’s elementary teachers “went through the materials looking for things that may be controversial,” said Superintendent Joe Craig. They didn’t feel those parts of the curriculum “were in line with what we wanted the lesson to focus on.” 

Fairfield’s process reflects the kind of that many districts have taken toward — the state-developed materials that prominently feature the Bible and Christianity. With feedback from 300 teachers, Fort Worth, the fifth largest district in the state, adopted the phonics portion of the curriculum, but turned down the units with religious material. Some districts ordered just a few books, likely for , while the Houston and Dallas districts opted to keep what they currently use.

Texas has spent roughly $100 million — and counting — to develop and promote its own reading curriculum. But some observers say they wouldn’t be surprised if districts aren’t rushing to pick it up, considering the State Board of Education approved it by a one-vote margin. 

“They may be reluctant to bring that same controversy into their districts, especially in communities with families of diverse religious backgrounds,” said Eve Myers, a consultant with Strive Public Policy Resources, a political consulting and lobbying firm that is tracking adoption of the program. “It’s potentially a distraction from their focus on the budget, student achievement, school safety and all the other pressing issues they must address.”

Texas has over 1,200 districts and about 600 charter schools with elementary grades. Of the state’s 20 largest districts, only Conroe, north of Houston, intends to use the program this fall. A shows that between May and late July, 144 districts and charters, mostly mid-sized or small, ordered the materials. 

State board members have asked for the total number of districts using Bluebonnet. “That’s the question we would all like to know,” said Pam Little, a board member who voted against the reading program last November.  

Other districts could be using the online version of the materials, but whether students would have actual books, and spend less time on screens, was a major debate last year during the board’s consideration of the program.

State leaders and conservative advocates say the religious content reflects a classical and appropriate way to teach literacy skills along with history and culture. Others like the emphasis on cursive writing and challenging vocabulary. In an interview with ����Ӱ�� last year, State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath said a phonics-based curriculum that also builds students’ background knowledge can help the state recover from in reading skills due to the pandemic.

But the program sparked a statewide debate over whether political leaders are forcing Christianity into public schools. Bluebonnet makes its debut in the classroom at the same time schools will be required, under a new state law, to display the 10 Commandments. Gov. Greg Abbott also signed in June that allows districts to offer a daily, voluntary period of time to pray and read the Bible or other religious texts. Under a similar 2023 law, districts can hire chaplains to volunteer as counselors, but aren’t participating.  

“There is definitely a disconnect between the radical far right agenda … and what school boards who are accountable to local families and students are actually going to do,” said Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Interfaith Alliance, a national group that advocates for church-state separation. Texas, he said, is “taking away the rights of clergy and parents to lead religious instruction.”

‘Hard on the teacher’

In the 73,000-student Conroe school district, Dayren Carlisle, a curriculum director, said leaders picked Bluebonnet because teachers were previously working with a patchwork of materials. They often spent “arduous hours preparing for reading and writing instruction,” she told ����Ӱ�� in an email. Bluebonnet provides a coherent set of lessons that meet state standards, she said.

But parent Christine Yates advocated against it. 

“I don’t think religious-based instruction belongs in any type of public school setting,” said Yates, whose children will be in second and fourth grade this fall. Her family doesn’t attend church and she’s concerned that the lessons dealing with faith are just “borrowing trouble.” 

Becky Sherrill, a former Conroe teacher, sympathizes with educators who will have to navigate parent’s requests to opt their children out of the lessons. It’s a right that many parents might be more likely to exercise this fall because of a June U.S. Supreme Court opinion in favor of religious families who want their children exempted from hearing stories with LGBTQ themes.

“It’s hard on the teacher. It’s already so hard at Christmas or even with birthdays,” Sherrill said, referring to Jehovah’s Witnesses she has had as students. “You can’t give some kids cupcakes because they don’t celebrate birthdays.”

She’s already homeschooling her middle school son and has pulled her daughter, a fifth grader, out of the district as well, largely because of Bluebonnet and the 10 Commandments law. 

At a May board meeting, Carlisle explained to the board how teachers will field requests from parents who want to opt their children out of the lessons. 

“If a parent were to complain about this… we would have to find a completely different text,” she said. 

But that didn’t sit well with Tiffany Baumann Nelson, one of three , who call themselves Mama Bears, elected in 2022.

“There is no religion in this curriculum,” she argued. “They’re all historical references, and so in my opinion, there should be no alternative or modifications.”

Whether districts are removing biblical material or parents are opting their children out of the lessons, Little, the state board member, worries students could miss literacy skills they are supposed to learn. 

“Say an East Asian religious parent has decided they don’t want their child to have [a Bible story]. Is that child going to miss skill development?” she asked. Accommodating parents’ requests will also be a burden on district staff. “What is the cost involved in the manpower time for these districts to go through and eliminate the religious content? There was no need for the controversy that the religious content is going to start.” 

‘Reviewed it and loved it’

The state board narrowly approved the new program last fall after the Texas Education Agency spent roughly $84 million to adapt an existing reading curriculum, from the company Amplify. Renamed Bluebonnet, after the state flower, the Texas version includes highlights of Jesus’ ministry and offers an evangelical view of early American history. Lessons for example, include the , an art history unit based on the creation story from Genesis and scriptural references to the motto on the . 

The agency, which would not provide a list of all districts that have ordered the program, paid multiple companies and content experts to craft and review the lessons, including the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation. Hillsdale College, a Christian school in Michigan, volunteered to work on units related to America’s founding, and a Christian media company, co-founded by Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel, contributed illustrations. But Texas officials refused to identify who wrote the biblical passages. 

In response to backlash, officials added more references to Islam and Hinduism and removed some texts that were offensive to Jews, but the final version still references Christianity more than other religions.

“We reviewed it and loved it,” said Cindi Castilla, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, a conservative organization. She pushed for state board approval of the curriculum last year, saying that there is “richness in biblical literature” and that Bible stories teach children character traits and the origins of the legal system. 

Since then, she examined the final version with retired educators who have experience teaching a classical curriculum and thinks it will strengthen students’ cursive and phonics skills. That’s why Gina Eubank wishes her grandchildren’s school districts — Katy, near Houston, and Belton, near Waco — had adopted the materials. 

“I watched … fourth- and sixth-grade honor students write a thank you note and was shocked by what I saw — the lack of legible handwriting and the horrific spelling,” she said.

‘Promote, market and advertise’

Districts on the fence about Bluebonnet can reconsider their decision next year. To make it more enticing, lawmakers added financial incentives — up to $60 per student for districts that use state-approved materials. That was likely one reason why the 27,000-student Lubbock schools adopted it, said Clinton Gill, a former math and science teacher in the district who now works for the Texas State Teachers Association.

At the same time, he thinks district leaders assume students will stand a better chance of performing well on the state test if officials match it up to a curriculum the state developed. Adopting Bluebonnet “also helps the district not have to hire staff to write curriculum when they get it from the state for free.”

The per-student bonus isn’t the only way the state aims to ensure Bluebonnet becomes the preferred choice. In December, the month after the board approved it, the Texas Education Agency quickly made Bluebonnet available to order. Materials from other publishers weren’t available until May.

“It seems that Bluebonnet Learning had an advantage,” Little told Morath, the commissioner, during . She said she heard complaints from publishers over the issue.

Morath called the delay a “one-time exacerbated problem” because the state had to add new language to contracts with publishers before making their materials available to districts. While the time lapse should be shorter next year, he said there would always be some gap.

In the current , lawmakers authorized Morath to contract with businesses to “promote, market and advertise” Bluebonnet. A provides $243 million to districts to help with implementation costs, like coaching for teachers. 

Last year’s budget included $10 million for regional education service centers to do similar work for districts adopting Bluebonnet. The centers are expected to for increasing the number of districts using the materials in their region to stay eligible for future funding. 

Some leaders in the state say that top-down pressure could alter the relationship the centers have traditionally had with school systems in their regions. They help districts, especially smaller ones with fewer central office staff, stay in compliance with state regulations or work on school improvement. 

The service centers have always been a “hub of knowledge,” said Martha Salazar-Zamora, superintendent of the Tomball Independent School District, north of Houston. Expecting districts to sell Bluebonnet, she said, “has been more of a strategic push.”

She doesn’t doubt that Bluebonnet will boost reading scores for some students, but Tomball is already rated a in the state’s accountability system.  Another reason why she didn’t consider the program is because a Spanish version is not yet available. Her district, where about 35% of students are , has a Spanish-English .

“I love anything that helps kids,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s the right tool for every district.”

Espired, a partnership with Florida investor Brad Saft, sells right-leaning , from Fighting Indoctrination and The Truth about Climate Change to an updated guide on this year’s election, including the against President-elect Donald Trump.  Last week, Trump tapped Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister who hosts a on a Christian network, to serve as .

But the company also sells , with animated Old and New Testament stories, like Noah’s ark and the Resurrection. The series features colorful illustrations drawn in the identical style as those in the Texas curriculum. A kindergarten lesson’s image of , for example, and two more on the are lifted wholesale from covers of the company’s books.

Saft, a Princeton graduate and , did not answer emails or messages on social media. Chad Gallagher, an eSpired spokesman and former Huckabee adviser, declined to provide more details on how the company contributed to the program, but called eSpired the “leading provider of curriculum to states searching for unbiased history” and “lessons that explain the literary and historical value of the Bible.”

Saft and Inspired by Education LLC, an alternate name for the company, were on a list of subcontractors for the curriculum that the Texas Education Agency shared with ����Ӱ�� in May. Contacted earlier this month, officials did not respond to questions about how much the state paid eSpired or the degree of influence the company had over the lessons.

The connection to Huckabee’s business venture, also known as EverBright Media, comes as the State Board of Education is set to vote Monday on whether to add the program, called Bluebonnet Learning, to a list of approved reading programs. The state is heavily the program at a time when some districts are . The board’s blessing means districts would be eligible for extra funding — up to $60 per student —  if they adopt the program.

“Districts’ hands are tied because they are in desperate need of additional funding, yet the state of Texas is trying to force them to use this curriculum as the only way to get additional funding,” said Clinton Gill, a specialist with the Texas State Teachers Association and a former teacher in Lubbock, one of the districts that piloted an early version of the program. The state, he said, should involve teachers in developing the curriculum, “not some company with a political agenda.”

The curriculum has won praise from GOP leaders, classical education proponents and who want the Bible to be more prominent in public schools. But the first draft, unveiled in late May, drew sharp criticism from those who said the authors disregarded other religions and introduced topics of faith more appropriate for church and home.

The state has since corrected many factual errors, but the bias toward Christianity remains, according to several experts. Education Commissioner Mike Morath will need eight board members in favor of Bluebonnet for it to be added to the list, but the vote is expected to be tight. 

“This is one of the hardest votes I’ve ever had to make in 22 years on the State Board of Education. I have lost sleep over it,” said Republican Pat Hardy, who was defeated in this year’s election. This week’s series of meetings are her last on the board. “I’ve literally heard from hundreds of people on both sides.”

Last week, Texas Values, a nonprofit that promotes “biblical, Judeo-Christian values” in public policy, held a ” event to promote the curriculum in Allen, Texas, part of Board Member Evelyn Brooks’ Fort Worth-area district. She’s among the conservative Republicans opposed to the program, and has called for more transparency over who wrote the lessons. 

Officials won’t identify who wrote the biblical material. Because a contract for the work fell under a pandemic disaster declaration, the state waived typical requirements that would have shed light on what those companies did and how much they were paid. 

Mary Elizabeth Castle, government relations director at Texas Values, said the curriculum has been unfairly accused of teaching about faith “in a devotional way” and only educates students to “understand the hundreds of idioms that we use in everyday language that actually come from the Bible.” 

Texas Values also of the curriculum to speak at Monday’s public hearing before the vote.

But opponents see Bluebonnet as part of a GOP-led movement to steer public schools to the right — one that is expected to accelerate under the incoming Trump administration. More than 15,000 opponents of the Bible-themed lessons have signed , organized by Faithful America, an online network of Christians, with about 200,000 members nationwide. 

“We’re pushing back on the folks who are ignoring the teachings of Jesus because they are seeking political power for themselves,” said Karli Wallace Thompson, the group’s digital campaigns director. “There’s nothing in the Gospel that tells us we need to go out and force our neighbors to worship the way that we do.”

‘Sacred story’

The state made noticeable efforts to respond to many of the public’s concerns, according to biblical scholars who have reviewed the changes. Revisions in include a brief introduction to the prophet Muhammad, who was completely neglected originally, a chart displaying variations on the Golden Rule from six religions and a slightly shorter description of Jesus’s ministry.

But officials seemed to prioritize accuracy over making the curriculum more religiously balanced, said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University who has reviewed the newest version.

“Some of the many embarrassing gaffes and factual errors are now gone,” he said. 

The original first grade American Independence unit, for example, incorrectly described the Liberty Bell as a “symbol designed to celebrate our freedom from being controlled by the British and our freedom to pray,” even though it was cast before the revolution. Now the lesson reads: “Many people believe the Liberty Bell was designed to celebrate the traditions of religious freedom and self-government in the colony of Pennsylvania.”

The on Jesus’s life and early Christianity no longer says that Christians hid in the catacombs to worship, that scholars have debunked. The unit also excludes the miracle of the disciples’ overflowing fishing nets, reducing the lesson on Jesus from eight pages to seven. 

But it still cites Josephus, a first century historian, who reported that Jesus’ disciples said that he “appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive.” Biblical scholars largely , which they say was probably added by priests during the Middle Ages in an effort to prove that Jesus was the son of God. 

The state eliminated what Texas Jews said was an offensive activity in which students would play dice to mimic how Haman, a Persian functionary in the biblical story of Queen Esther, cast lots to decide when to kill the Jews.  

But while there is somewhat more attention to Judaism in the edited version, the bias toward Christianity is still “clear and indisputable,” Chancey said. 

If the board signs off on this version and districts adopt it, elementary school children “will learn the main contours of the Christian sacred story“ — from Creation to the work of the Apostle Paul, he said. “No other tradition gets similar treatment.”

Other modifications acknowledge that Christians have used their faith to justify discrimination and violence throughout history.  A fourth grade lesson originally titled “If You Were a Crusader” has been renamed “The Journey of a Crusader” and the fact that in addition to capturing Jerusalem from the Muslims, crusaders “were given permission to persecute and kill non-Christians.”

A fifth grade lesson now explains that Martin Luther King Jr. directed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to clergymen who supported segregation. “It was unfortunately also true that many people of the time supported those laws, including Christians like these clergymen,” the text reads. Critics of the original version said glossing over that point gave students an inaccurate portrayal of the Civil Rights movement.

Critical examinations of some of Christianity’s darker chapters are a welcome addition to the curriculum, said David Brockman, a religious studies scholar at Rice University who has both versions. But a third grade lesson still says Spanish conquistadors’ merely “shared” their Christian faith with indigenous tribes and doesn’t delve into slavery, forced labor and other harsh methods used to convert them.

The updates don’t “correct the overall problem of soft pedaling Christian involvement with violence and oppression in the past,” he said.

Presenting students with America’s virtues as well as its faults was important to Steve Meeker, a retired middle school world geography teacher from the Montgomery Independent School District, north of Houston, who was hired to review earlier drafts of the curriculum. 

He provided feedback on a second grade unit that discusses how an evangelical religious movement called the Great Awakening  influenced the Founding Fathers’ views on slavery. The text quotes a letter in which Thomas Jefferson expressed that he “ardently” wanted to see slavery abolished. But while children would learn that George Washington made plans in his will to free his slaves, Meeker feels there’s still too little attention to the founders’ role as slave owners.

Jefferson might have wished for the end of slavery, but “he certainly didn’t act on it,” Meeker said. “He owned more than 600 slaves and is only recorded as having freed ten of them.”

Meeker, who also teaches a class at his church on the , appreciates the overall attention to familiarizing students with the Bible. Over his 42 years of teaching, he noticed that students were increasingly puzzled by everyday sayings like “my brother’s keeper” and the “handwriting is on the wall.” But he also noted that lessons about Jesus might make non-Christians uncomfortable. 

‘Exciting and engaging’

Some supporters of the state’s program are concerned that the intense debate over the biblical material has overshadowed other aspects of the curriculum, which, Morath says, is meant to improve students’ vocabulary and background knowledge. 

The state’s lessons will give students “great exposure” to Texas history with material that reinforces content from science and social studies, said Courtnie Bagley, education director at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. The state also hired her to work on lessons about geology and the state’s oil and gas industry.

“I could see how engaging and enjoyable it would be for a kid to read in second grade about the and Dolly Madison rescuing all the artifacts in the White House,” she said. “Those are exciting and engaging stories.”

The state, meanwhile, continues to expend vast resources to get the materials in teachers’ hands. According to grant documents, the agency is spending $50 million on printing and another $10 million to train districts how to implement the curriculum. That’s on top of the $103 million the state has already spent on the program. 

Work on the project began in 2020, when it paid Amplify, a leading curriculum provider, $19 million in federal relief funds for its program. Based on the work of educator E.D. Hirsch, the lessons teach basic reading skills as well as content from art, history and science.

But Morath viewed that purchase as just a starting point and began commissioning lessons, like the one on Queen Esther, based on the Bible.  

In 2022, the agency signed an $84 million contract with Boston-based Public Consulting Group, which includes a . That company then subcontracted with a mix of curriculum developers and experts to modify the program with more Texas-related content and Bible-based lessons.

Espired and Saft, Huckabee’s business partner, were among them. The company markets primarily to a homeschooling audience, with ads on and . But in the first months of the pandemic, the , under former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, paid $245,000 for its and distributed it to schools.

Gallagher declined to comment on whether the company has completed work for other state education agencies, but said, “ESpired has many clients for their curriculum development services because parents are generally not satisfied with much of the existing materials and curriculum that has traditionally been available.”

Learn Our History, another series of eSpired guides, “helps kids learn all about American history from a positive, patriotic and faith-based standpoint,” Huckabee said in a . Like the Texas program, it emphasizes the role of in the nation’s founding.

The company, however, also has some , with several complaints to the about recurring charges for products that parents said they never purchased or guides they never received.

“I’m a pretty savvy consumer who doesn’t usually get bamboozled by the fine print,” parent Shannon Ashley after ordering the company’s COVID guide. “I knew I never actually gave them permission to regularly charge my card, and they never actually threw that fine print in there.”

An advisory board member for the , which seeks to pass legislation based on “biblical principles,” Huckabee has who argue the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. His 2020 book, , warns of the “dangers of corruption advocated by liberal politicians.”

Before serving as governor from 1996 to 2007, Huckabee was a pastor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He ran for president in 2008, but has also led tour groups to Israel, where “I have been visiting since 1973 when I was a teenager,” he . Huckabee, who there is “no such thing as a West Bank” and has expressed for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would lead efforts to bring an end to the war in Gaza, Trump said in a .

‘Rules of the game’ 

Texas’ move to write its own curriculum has also left traditional publishers, like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Savvas, wondering how competing against a state agency will affect their business — and whether districts will drop their materials in favor of a program that comes with strong financial incentives.

“Publishers have always sought after the Texas market because obviously it’s very large, with over 5 million students,” said Eve Myers, a consultant for HillCo Partners, a lobbying and government relations firm whose clients include publishers. “The biggest question is, ‘What are the rules of the game now?’ ”

Curriculum companies also frequently make their authors available to districts to train teachers and explain the research behind their product, Meyers said. 

But so far, the state has refused to identify the authors who transformed Amplify’s program into Bluebonnet. And even with the recent edits, some board members, like Brooks, say it’s too soon to know if it will improve students’ reading performance. In a , she blamed “grassroots leaders who say ‘You have a Bible story in the curriculum, so it must be good.’ ” 

“There’s no time to say how effective it is,” she said. “It’s being rewritten and revised in real time.”

A coalition of more than 70 Texas school districts has called on the Texas Education Agency to delay full implementation of a new data reporting system they say has led to thousands of unresolved errors that could pose grave consequences to their funding and accountability.

School district leaders to the agency’s commissioner, Mike Morath, on Sept. 13 after dozens of them began sharing their concerns with one another about the transition to the new system used to collect student, staff, and financial data, which more than 300 districts piloted last school year. State officials use the information to determine whether schools are meeting performance standards and how much funding they receive each year. The Texas Tribune districts’ concerns about the change last week.

In the letter obtained by the Tribune, the superintendents say they have not been able to verify the accuracy of the thousands of data points entering the new system created by . They warn that, based on their experiences during the pilot, the system is not ready to go live. School district leaders also request the agency “take the necessary steps to provide a safety net for districts this year” and delay the implementation until the system is fully vetted.

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“The unfunded mandate to transition to the Ed-Fi system in the 2024-25 school year when no one is ready has dire consequences for districts in terms of funding, accountability, and reporting,” the letter states.

The Texas Education Agency did not respond to a request for comment on the letter, which offers the first comprehensive look at how widespread the problems with the upgrades are. More school districts have signed onto the letter since it was first sent.

Each of Texas’ more than 1,200 school districts is required to to the state, including information on attendance, enrollment, students who receive special education, children experiencing homelessness and the number of kids who have completed a college preparatory course.

The state launched the new system at the start of this school year. The goal was to make it easier for school districts and the state to share data and reduce the amount of manual labor required from school staff. Districts were supportive of the proposed changes.

Before the upgrade, school districts would submit data directly to the state after working with software vendors that would ensure the education agency didn’t have any problems interpreting the information. Under the new arrangement, the software vendors are now responsible for transmitting the data to the state, a change that school officials say leaves them without a chance to fact-check the information before it goes out.

They also say a litany of errors and inaccuracies surfaced during the pilot program. In some instances, thousands of student records — from enrollment figures to the number of students in certain programs — did not show up correctly.

“Understand the position we’re in as a school district trying to work on this,” said Stephen McCanless, Cleveland school district superintendent, “along with all the other requirements and mandates that districts work on for the state and for the federal government during an entire school year.”

Still, agency officials expressed confidence this month that districts will have ample time to resolve any errors between now and the fall reporting deadline on Dec. 12. The agency noted that districts have until Jan. 16 — just days after winter break — to resubmit any data needing corrections. The agency also said it has resolved more than a thousand tickets submitted by school officials reporting problems with the new system.

But, to date, school district officials say their staff don’t know how to solve some errors, nor are they clear on what steps the state has taken to resolve them. And state agency officials have not directly answered what would happen if the problems go beyond the deadlines.

“The amount of time to investigate even one error can be extremely lengthy,” said Lori Rapp, superintendent of the Lewisville school district, which helped prepare the letter.

Many school districts recently told the Tribune that they are still in support of the system. But they say they need more time.

“The accuracy of the information is so critical because it has so many implications across the system, with first and foremost being funding,” said Richardson school district Superintendent Tabitha Branum, who also signed the letter. “In the previous system, we had tools to help us do that. With this new system, right now, those tools don’t exist.”

In addition to their calls to extend the pilot program, school district leaders are also calling for the state to provide more training to ensure their staff are prepared for the transition; to hire an independent firm to conduct an audit of the data submitted in the new system; and to provide transparency on data security with the system upgrade.

“The potential consequences for the state’s data accuracy and districts’ financial health,” the letter says, “are too large to overlook.”

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

And because of the pandemic, they say they don’t have to. 

A state official told ����Ӱ�� that the work — an $84 million contract the state signed in March 2022 — falls under a Gov. Greg Abbott issued to speed up delivery of masks, vaccines and other critical supplies during the height of the pandemic. That means the paper trail that typically follows people who contract with the state, including work and payment reports, doesn’t exist in this case, the official said. 

Some members of the state board of education, which will vote on the curriculum in November, are accusing education Commissioner Mike Morath and his staff of a lack of transparency.

“I did not get a lot of my questions answered when it came to who wrote the curriculum,” said Evelyn Brooks, a Republican board member whose district includes the Fort Worth suburbs. She’s one of at least three members who asked officials at the Texas Education Agency for more details. “It’s hard and it shouldn’t be. Someone knows this information.” 

Morath said the overhaul will bring classical education to over 2 million K-5 students in Texas. The model is designed to strengthen kids’ reading skills while also teaching them culture, art and history, including the Bible’s influence. Interviewed in early May, the commissioner would only say that “hundreds of people” worked on the project.

But that doesn’t satisfy board members who say the curriculum borders on proselytizing and promotes a distinctly evangelical view of American history.

A teacher’s guide for a third-grade lesson on ancient Rome, for example, devotes eight pages to the life and ministry of Jesus — presenting many of the events as historical facts, scholars say. But the Islamic prophet Muhammad isn’t named anywhere. A kindergarten lesson on “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” draws parallels to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. And an art appreciation lesson walks 5-year-olds through the creation story from the Book of Genesis.

“Who are the people that sat down in this fancy room and said this is the knowledge that every Texas student should have?” asked Staci Childs, a Democrat who represents the Houston area. She said she understands teaching the importance of religion in American history, but thinks the balance is off. “I just don’t think that it’s fair to have that many biblical references in the text in public schools across the state.” 

The comments come a day before a Friday deadline for the public to or suggest corrections to the curriculum.

Texas won’t force districts to use the materials, but is offering up to $60 per student — a total of $540 million — to any that adopt the program. That’s an incentive many are unlikely to turn down at a time school systems are and calling for to offset them. 

The controversy is occurring against the backdrop of GOP support for teaching the Bible in several states, including Texas’s neighbors. A new Louisiana law requires schools to hang the 10 Commandments in classrooms, while Oklahoma state Superintendent Ryan Walters is that educators use the Bible for instruction.

But no state has invested as much time and money as Texas in connecting its curriculum to Judeo-Christian messages.

As ����Ӱ�� first reported in May, Morath signed a contract for K-5 reading and K-12 math materials with the Boston-based Public Consulting Group. In turn, the organization subcontracted with curriculum writers and experts, including officials at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation and .

At Hillsdale, Kathleen O’Toole, who leads work with charter schools affiliated with the Christian college, said her team only “offered resources on a few units having to do with early American history.” The college performed the work for free, she said.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation declined to comment on its role. 

The contract Morath signed with the Public Consulting Group requires the company to submit monthly progress reports “documenting all subcontractor payments.” But when ����Ӱ�� requested the documents in June under the state’s , Sherry Mansell, a coordinator in the general counsel’s office, said the state dropped the requirement because of the governor’s pandemic emergency order. The absence of those spending reports “understandably could cause some confusion,” Mansell wrote in an email. In a follow-up, she said the agency is “ensuring we receive the goods and services as specified in our contract.”

The Public Consulting Group did not respond to phone calls or emails. 

When Mansell said no reports were available, ����Ӱ�� asked an education agency spokesman to identify who wrote the new lessons and how much they were paid.

He didn’t respond until asked again Tuesday night. This time, he replied “absolutely” when asked if the public had a right to know the information and emailed a series of zip files containing over 100 pages of Public Consulting Group invoices for the past three years. None of them contained details about the religious lessons’ authorship. Reached again Wednesday, the spokesman declined to address the matter further.

‘Political considerations’

If board members are expected to approve the materials in November, Brooks said, they should know who wrote them.

She isn’t the only Republican on the board with reservations. Pat Hardy, a longtime GOP board member, said the state developed the new materials to placate the far-right wing of the party, which has pushed hard in recent years to expand Christianity’s presence in public schools. 

“They’re going to appeal to the Christian nationalists with their Bible stories. They’re just trying to gather votes,” said Hardy, who to a candidate who accused her of not being conservative enough. Nonetheless, she’ll remain in office for the vote on the curriculum in November. 

The Republican members’ views could hold sway on a board where they retain 10 of the 15 seats. Morath needs at least eight members to vote yes on the proposed curriculum for it to pass. 

Other Republicans on the board were less outspoken. Tom Maynard, whose district includes Austin, said there are “definite positives” in the curriculum as well as some needed “cleanup,” but didn’t offer specifics. Keven Ellis and L.J. Francis said they would save their comments until after a September meeting when the board will review the materials.

Questions about who wrote the biblical lessons are especially salient “when the curriculum is so shocking,” Democratic Rep. James Talarico, a seminary student and former teacher, told ����Ӱ��. Talarico has been critical of the materials’ minimal attention to other world religions.

At a House education committee hearing Monday, he grilled Morath about whether “political considerations” influenced the overhaul. Talarico specifically named , vice chair of the board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and an oil magnate who has donated millions of dollars to conservative candidates — from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to running for the state legislature. 

“Is the Texas Public Policy Foundation an expert in curriculum design?” Talarico asked the commissioner. He also noted that the state unveiled the material four days after the Texas GOP adopted calling for required Bible instruction in public schools. “Are those two related?” he asked.

Morath dismissed the suggestion. The agency sought expertise from a “pretty broad swath of individuals,” he said. Those included experts in Texas history, which figures prominently in the curriculum. Lessons with engaging stories, including from ancient texts like the Bible, can improve students’ vocabulary and comprehension skills, he told the lawmakers. He shared data from Lubbock, one of the districts that piloted early versions of the curriculum, where the percentage of third graders meeting expectations increased from 36% in 2019 to 47% this year. 

But Talarico questioned whether teachers are adequately trained to respond to student’s questions about religious topics raised in the curriculum like the Resurrection of Jesus and the Eucharist.

“When you’re talking about faith and you’re talking about theology, you’re working with fire,” he said. “These are serious topics. To me, this seems not only reckless, it seems that it could do great harm to students, whether they’re Christian or not.”

Republicans on the committee said their constituents have been “craving” such lessons. 

Rep. Matt Schaefer rejected Talarico’s concerns that students of other faiths might feel left out. Other major world religions, like Islam and Hinduism, he said, “did not have an equal impact on the founding belief systems of our country.” 

Biblical experts who have analyzed the new lessons, however, find inaccuracies and say some of the material is misleading. 

The Texas Freedom Network, which describes itself as a “watchdog for monitoring far-right issues,” released an of the curriculum Thursday, saying several lessons give students a distorted view of history.

The authors of the curriculum “smuggled” in lengthy passages on Christianity when a sentence or two would have been sufficient, David R. Brockman, a religious studies scholar at Rice University and the report’s lead author, said in an interview. He pointed, for example, to a reading from the Book of Matthew on the Last Supper as part of a fifth grade study of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.

“I really wanted to keep an open mind,” he said, adding that the emphasis on the Bible makes sense when teaching students about Western civilization, but doesn’t help them learn to live in a diverse society. “Are they looking purely backward or are they looking forward? Texas students are not going to be living in 1787.”

Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said he submitted over 80 comments to the state. Some focus on a second grade lesson about , which talks about her faith in God, prayer and protecting the Jewish people’s freedom to worship.

The curriculum authors edited biblical material “to their liking to make it more religious,” he said. “The Book of Esther never mentions God, prayer or worship — not even once.” 

His analysis of at least four other lessons that include Bible verses showed the authors exclusively relied on the New International Version of the text, a he called a “distinctively evangelical translation” that was “made by evangelical scholars for evangelical Christians.”

A spokesman for the education agency did not address specific criticisms but said officials would examine potential inaccuracies revealed in the comments.

‘Will it teach students to read?’

Pam Little, another Republican board member, said her constituents are split “about 50-50” over the significance of the biblical material. Some conservative parents, she said, are upset “because they don’t feel like public schools are the place to teach Christianity.”

But others, she said, are more concerned with whether the lessons will improve student performance. This year’s elementary test scores show there’s still a long way to go. The results were , with declines in third and fifth grade and an increase in fourth. 

The real question is “Will it teach students to read?” Little said. “For some reason, we seem to be having problems in Texas with that.”

Rep. James Talarico had concerns.

The third-term legislator from Round Rock, near Austin, pointed Morath to a lesson on the Sermon on the Mount — Jesus’s instruction to “do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

The text makes only passing reference to similar messages in and , and never mentions that taught a version of the Golden Rule 600 years earlier. 

“I think it’s pretty egregious and will shock a lot of Texans,” Talarico said of the curriculum.

If it seems strange that four paragraphs about an ancient text in for kindergartners arouses such passions, welcome to the latest Texas-sized controversy about Christianity in the classroom.

Talarico is not just a Democrat in a deeply red state, but a former middle school English teacher and a seminary student studying to be a Presbyterian minister. Morath, he said, agreed the new material doesn’t grant “equal time“ to other religions. “I thought that was a fundamental flaw in this curriculum. He did not.”

As parents, academics and activists begin to pore over the thousands of pages the education department released, Morath’s acknowledgement sheds light on the state’s approach. 

The new curriculum is based on the increasingly popular notion of “classical education,” which stresses the primacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition in shaping Western literature and U.S. history. As ����Ӱ�� first reported last week, the project won praise from conservatives and parents who want students to get more rigorous reading material. Connecting coursework to ancient texts, including the Bible, offers students a cultural vocabulary they’ll need to tackle more complex assignments in middle and high school, Morath said.

He downplayed the religious material as a “small piece” of the curriculum, and called the biblical lessons

But a review by ����Ӱ�� shows that biblical figures and stories are central to multiple lessons across the 62 K-5 units. The curriculum not only gives short shrift to other religions — Muhammad appears to have escaped mention, despite his role in shaping a faith practiced by half a million Texans — but scholars who have examined the material say it offers a decidedly Christian interpretation of history, particularly the story of America’s founding and civil rights struggles.  

A textual guide for a third-grade unit on recommends teachers play “Silent Night” or “Away in the Manger” as they begin a lesson on the life of Jesus — from his birth and ministry to Crucifixion and Resurrection. In addition to a smattering of New Testament vocabulary (“messiah,” “disciple”) students get what appears to be a factual account from Josephus, a first century historian, on Christ’s death: Jesus’s disciples reported that he “appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive.”

But scholars overwhelmingly the authenticity of this account, which they say was likely added by medieval clerics more than a thousand years later in an attempt to prove Christ’s deity.

“To use this as historical proof, which is exactly how it is presented in this lesson, is quite unwarranted and specious,” said L. Michael White, a biblical scholar at the University of Texas-Austin.

In keeping with classical education’s focus on religious allusions, that lesson sets the stage for a fifth grade study of C.S. Lewis’s The celebrated fantasy tells the story of four siblings who evacuate to the English countryside during World War II. They emerge through a magical armoire to encounter Aslan, a noble lion who later sacrifices himself for one of the children and returns from the dead. 

The teacher’s guide calls it a “biblical allegory.” 

“Explain how the Old Testament of the Bible had many prophecies about a future savior that are written as fulfilled in the New Testament by Jesus,” the note says. “There are also prophecies in the New Testament by Jesus. There are prophecies in the Bible about a future where Jesus returns to the world to make wrong right.”

Those instructions alarm one prominent education figure. In the early 1990s, Sandy Kress helped develop an accountability system for Texas schools that inspired No Child Left Behind, the landmark federal education law. Kress, who is Jewish, later advised George W. Bush when the former governor became president.

“I would argue this is teaching Christianity,” said Kress. His school reform days behind him, Kress now teaches and funds projects that encourage between Christians and Jews.

Morath’s staff called on Kress for guidance on the curriculum last year, and on his advice, recruited his rabbi to review earlier drafts of the material. Kress told ����Ӱ�� that he wants further revisions and is hopeful the state will consider them.

“Can Christians do this in a way that is respectful of other faiths … without feeling the need to prove Christian doctrine? That’s the test for them,” Kress said. “Whether they pass the test or not will prove whether this is an honorable exercise and whether it would be able to survive a constitutional challenge.”

State officials declined to comment on their dealings with Kress and Talarico. In a statement, Morath said the biblical material in the curriculum “does not include religious lessons as one would find in a religious school.” He added that the content reflects “various religious traditions” and that “students will learn about aspects of most major world religions.”

But in response to criticism, education officials promised to add “language from the First Amendment” on the need for a clear separation between church and state to its lessons on American history.

The public has to comment on the proposed curriculum, which goes to the state Board of Education for approval in November. The stakes are high. If adopted, the curriculum would instantly become not only the nation’s largest classical education model, but the biggest infusion of Judeo-Christian teachings into the public education system in decades. The state is encouraging districts to adopt the material by offering incentives of up to $60 per student.

To Morath, the new curriculum offers schools their best chance at raising reading scores in a state that saw during the pandemic. In addition to phonics-based instruction in the early grades, the curriculum draws from history, science and the arts to boost students’ knowledge of the world. While the biblical material has drawn the most attention, there are many units that have no religious references and highlight famous Texans, like civil rights leader and Black-Native American aviator . Students learn best, Morath said, when they get early and repeated exposure to a subject.

“When you’re designing elementary reading materials, you have to pick topics and stick with them for a few weeks,” he told ����Ӱ��. In districts that have piloted some of the material over the past three years, “the vocabulary complexity is night and day different” than some of the more simplistic reading lessons teachers used before, he said.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush Texas on offering districts “rich content based on the science of reading and not outdated practices,” while and classical education advocates brushed off concerns that the materials have too many biblical references.  

The Texas curriculum “strikes me as a rather mild step in the right direction,” said John Peterson, a humanities professor at the University of Dallas. For years, he said, “anything passingly biblical [has been] treated as a form of pornography, something filthy and shameful, and only to be consumed in private.”

‘Zero reference points’

Jeremy Tate knows firsthand how difficult it can be to engage students who lack a basic knowledge of the Bible. When he taught Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to 10th graders in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, they had “zero reference points” for the collection of stories told by medieval pilgrims on their way to Canterbury Cathedral.

Some students didn’t have any knowledge of the Bible, let alone “anything about a pilgrimage, a relic or any of the language that was so much a part of the vernacular,” said Tate, now CEO of the , an alternative college entrance exam.

He’s concerned, however, about the classical movement being “politically hijacked” by Republicans trying to appeal to conservative Christians.

“In some ways, it’s an impossible battle,” he said. “We’re living through a moment where very few people can think outside of political categories.”

As if to underscore that point, the new curriculum arrived just four days after the state’s Republican party unified behind calling for mandatory “instruction on the Bible, servant leadership, and Christian self-governance.” Delegates also want students to study an from Thomas Jefferson that use to argue that church-state separation is a myth. 

‘Cultural heritage’

That approach contrasts with Morath’s more measured admonitions to those who reviewed the materials. The commissioner’s charge to a 10-member advisory board at their first meeting last summer was to “make sure we were on the side of literature as opposed to a worshipful treatment of that material,” said Marvin McNeese Jr., an adviser who teaches at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston, an orthodox school that he said takes a “traditional interpretation of the Bible.”

The volunteers included some recognizable names, like former GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson, who served as a cabinet member during the Trump administration, and Danica McKellar, and mathematician who has been outspoken about her faith.

McNeese said he spent about 40 hours between August and February reviewing lessons and doesn’t see a problem with its Judeo-Christian emphasis. 

“It’s because of our own cultural heritage,” he said. “All the stories that I read directly explain something that students may very well come across. I mean, we have laws named Good Samaritan laws.”

Under federal law, schools can teach the Bible as literature, but not in a devotional way. Mandatory Bible readings and prayer were common in many public schools until a series of in the early 1960s ended those practices. The court, however, allows voluntary prayer and under its current conservative majority has increasingly tilted in favor of religious expression. 

Conflicts about biblical material in public school have recently erupted over Bible verses in a Florida and in an that posted a New Testament verse on a hallway wall. But experts say the scope of Texas’s undertaking increases the potential for trouble.   

The Bible references in the new curriculum start in kindergarten, when children draw pictures inspired by the creation story in the Book of Genesis. By fifth grade, students studying poetry ponder what King David meant in Psalm 23 when he wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd.” In between are familiar Bible stories about the wisdom of King Solomon, the prodigal son and Paul’s conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus.

The Texas lessons frequently say “according to the Bible” or “as the Bible explains,” but Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, dismissed those as “meager efforts” at objectivity. “The literalistic way they present Bible stories encourages very young children to simply take them at face value,” he said. 

He pointed to a fifth grade lesson on Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in which teachers read a passage from the Book of Matthew for added context. Students, he said, are bound to be left with questions. 

“How did Jesus know someone would betray him? What does Jesus mean when [the teacher] says the bread is his body and the cup is his blood?” Chancey asked. “Is the teacher ready to explain all the different versions of Eucharistic theology found in different forms of Christianity?”

Many of those teachers have probably never received training on how to discuss religion in a public school classroom, said Kate Soules, founder and director of the Religion and Education Collaborative, which focuses on how schools talk about matters of faith. Teachers might be better off focusing on the literary value of Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” than prompting students to think Aslan, the lion, represents Jesus, she said. Teachers could “very quickly end up in violation of the First Amendment.”

The tone and focus is a concerted departure from the curriculum Amplify, a leading publisher, offered the state in 2020 under a $19 million contract. In over 40 pages, that version gives to Christianity, Islam and Judaism. A separate unit features on Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism.

The state, however, rejected those sections, said Amplify officials, who later balked when Texas asked for additional biblical content. As ����Ӱ�� previously reported, the company opted not to bid on a contract for the next phase of the project. 

Experts say the current curriculum is notable not only for its emphasis on Christianity, but for what it omits. 

A first grade lesson on American independence, Chancey said, paints an idealistic picture of religious liberty by asserting different denominations “thrived in the colonies.” In reality, pilgrims were often intolerant of . 

The program devotes ample space to the evangelism of the colonists during a period of religious revival known as the Great Awakening. But ����Ӱ��’s review found no material on the considerable influence of thinkers from the Enlightenment, a concurrent intellectual movement that inspired the writings of early American thinkers on individual rights and church-state separation. 

‘Both sides of that debate’

That stained glass lens extends to the Civil Rights era. In both second and fifth grade, the text emphasizes the Christian faith of Black leaders as key to the movement to end segregation. But there’s no mention of who used the Bible to justify racism and Jim Crow laws, like Henry Lyon Jr., who that God “started separation of the races.”

“If you just portray that religious leaders were against segregation, that’s extremely misleading,” Chancey said. “You had religious leaders on both sides of that debate.” 

An assignment on points fifth graders to Martin Luther King Jr.’s biblical allusions, including the persecution of early Christians and Jews who refused to worship false idols. But it ignores King’s intended audience — “white moderate” preachers “who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation.” 

“Dr. King’s focus was the incompatibility of racial segregation with Judeo-Christian values and the Christian faith,” said Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit focused on equity. 

Pierce has a divinity degree, leads a Sunday school class and teaches political theology at Duke University. His family tree extends back through the founding of the Black Pentecostal Church in the early 1900s. “It does not get much more fundamental than that,” he quipped.

But he’s also a civil rights attorney. In reviewing excerpts from the curriculum for ����Ӱ��, Pierce found himself turning to to Virginia lawmakers in 1785. Madison wrote that while Christians fought for their own religious liberty, they could not “deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” 

Those who support the Texas curriculum are “pushing a warped version of Judeo-Christian principles,” Pierce said. “It is quite troubling that these supporters either intentionally or naively want to bring divisive issues within the Christian Church into our public schools.”   

To share tips on Texas’s proposed reading curriculum, contact Linda Jacobson at lrjacobson@proton.me.

From the story of Queen Esther — who convinced her husband, the Persian king, to spare the Jews — to the depiction of Christ’s last supper, the material is designed to draw connections between classroom content and religious texts.

“If you’re reading classic works of American literature, there are often religious allusions in that literature,” state education Commissioner Mike Morath told ����Ӱ��. “Any changes being made are to reinforce the kind of background knowledge on these seminal works of the American cultural experience.” 

With the potential to reach over 2 million K–5 students in the nation’s second-largest state, the update marks a big step in a movement embraced by conservatives to root young people’s education in what they consider traditional values. But it’s bound to raise questions about the potential for religious indoctrination in a state that has been a battleground for such disputes. Last year, for example, Texas passed a law allowing to work as school counselors.

“It is reasonable to devote some attention to [the Bible], and state education standards across the nation often require such attention,” said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The problem, of course, is that sometimes the legitimate reason of cultural literacy is used as a smokescreen to hide religious and ideological agendas.”

In an interview with a Christian talk show, GOP , who describes himself as a “,” praised the curriculum changes, saying they will “get us back to teaching, not necessarily the Bible per se, but the stories from the Bible.”

The release comes four days after the state Republican party calling on the legislature and the state Board of Education to require instruction on the Bible. Texas education department officials declined to comment on the platform and have emphasized that the new curriculum includes material from other faiths.

While largely hidden from public view, the redesign sparked behind-the-scenes debate long before its release. When a leading curriculum publisher balked at the state’s request to infuse its offerings with biblical content, Texas officials turned to other vendors. They include conservative Christian in Michigan and the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, which an unsuccessful to require the 10 Commandments in every classroom, according to a list obtained by ����Ӱ��.

‘Great works of literature’

Going far beyond typical reading and writing fundamentals, the new lessons draw on history, science and the arts — “what many people call this classical model of education,” Morath said.

To understand “,” a book about a Jewish family hiding in Denmark during World War II, he said students should understand more about “Jewish cultural practices” and “the vilification of this ethnic minority.” 

A unit on “Fighting for a Cause,” one of several that officials shared with ����Ӱ��, includes the Old Testament story of Esther and how she and her cousin Mordecai “fought for what they knew was right and made a difference that not only affected the Jews of Persia but also Jewish people today.”

The mentions range in size from a page on Esther to a few paragraphs about Samuel Adams at the Continental Congress. His plea to fellow delegates to pray together, despite religious differences, is offered as a first-grade vocabulary lesson on the word “compromise.” 

Fifth graders are asked to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “.” Written after his 1963 arrest for leading a , King compared his act of civil disobedience to the “refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar” in the Book of Daniel.

“If you don’t know who Nebuchadnezzar is, you don’t know what [King’s] talking about,” Morath said. “How do you make sure that you can unlock in the minds of our kids their ability to wrestle with … ideas that have surfaced in great works of literature?” 

Not just literature, but art. A lesson on “The Last Supper,” da Vinci’s Renaissance masterpiece, points fifth graders to the New Testament. 

“The Bible explains that Jesus knew that after this meal, he would be arrested, put on trial, and killed,” the text reads. “Let’s read the story in the book of Matthew to see for ourselves what unfolded during the supper.”

While drawing parallels to religious texts, Morath said the lessons would respect bright lines regarding the separation of church and state.

“This is still a curriculum for public school and we’ve designed it to be appropriate in that setting,” he said. 

New religious-related material in a proposed Texas elementary school reading program includes Old Testament references to the Liberty Bell, an exploration of the meaning of the Jewish holiday Purim and the story of Christ’s last supper. (Texas Education Agency)

The role of Amplify

The redesign builds on a $19 million m delivered during the pandemic by Amplify, a based in New York.

Roughly 400 districts have used their materials since 2021. Some teachers give them high marks for building students’ and comprehension. But not everyone has been pleased. Last year, Morath who decried its emphasis on and minimal attention to Christianity.

“There’s one mention of Jesus, that he was a teacher a couple thousand years ago,” said Jamie Haynes, who runs a on “concerning” curriculum and library books. “The only other time we can find God, our God — the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — is in the American unit.” 

The issue of how — and whether — to incorporate religious content was fraught long before the curriculum reached school districts.

State officials asked Amplify to provide a lesson on the story of Esther and suggested a unit on Exodus, said Alexandra Walsh, the company’s chief product officer.

While it had previously tweaked its curriculum for other states, Walsh said the company had never been asked to add biblical material. And when it suggested inserting content from other world religions, the state rejected the idea, said Amplify spokeswoman Kristine Frech.

“There was not much appetite for a variety of wisdom texts,” she said. “There was much more of an appetite for the tie to traditional Christian texts.”

The company opted against bidding on a contract to provide additional revisions. In a statement, Texas education officials dismissed Amplify’s charge that they turned down material from other religions as “completely false” and stressed that the finished product “includes representation from multiple faiths.” But the state declined to specify how many of the new lessons have religious themes or derive from Judeo-Christian sources.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Morath pointed to a World War II lesson that focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s upon witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The words, featured prominently in the recent Oscar-winning film, derive from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture.   

Kindergarteners studying the Golden Rule would learn that the idea comes from the “Christian Bible,” according to the text, but that similar principles can be found in the “ancient books” of Islam and Hinduism. Another section on the Renaissance highlights Muslim settlers in Spain and their contributions to philosophy, poetry and astronomy.

‘Biblical literacy’

After Amplify bowed out, the state an $84 million contract to the Boston-based Public Consulting Group to revise the curriculum.

For the reading program, the company worked closely with several authors who specialize in , including its role in westward expansion and launching the national space program, according to a list of vendors provided by the state.

But it also leaned on conservative organizations steeped in the culture wars. Contracts went to two officials at the Texas Public Policy Foundation: Courtnie Bagley, the think tank’s education director, and Thomas Lindsay, a higher education director and vocal opponent of . The foundation, which called the 10 Commandments bill an “important step in bringing faith-based values back to the forefront of our society,” declined to comment on their contributions. Public Consulting Group officials also did not respond to questions. 

Hillsdale, another vendor, is a major player in advancing classical education. It authored the , a civics and history model that emphasizes American exceptionalism and is a favorite of conservatives opposed to lessons on institutional racism. When the Florida Department of Education dozens of math textbooks in 2020, citing content influenced by critical race theory, a analysis showed two Hillsdale representatives objected to the proposed materials.

The state did not respond to questions on the role Hilldale and the Texas Public Policy Foundation played in the new curriculum. Hillsdale officials said they provided their feedback free of charge. 

“Hillsdale never profits from its work in K-12, nor does it accept one penny from federal, state or local taxpayers,” said spokeswoman Emily Davis. She added, “Religion is taught for the sake of cultural literacy, not to promote a particular religion.” 

Originally the province of well-heeled private or parochial schools, classical education has blossomed in recent years both as a response to pandemic lockdowns and what some parents view as progressive trends in traditional public schools. The philosophy is rooted in the liberal arts and historical texts, with a sharp focus on the Greek and Roman foundations of Western civilization.

The movement entertains healthy debate about the role of religion, but most practitioners agree that giving students a strong body of knowledge requires the use of primary sources, including the Bible.

“They’re going to need to have some biblical literacy, if only to interpret John Milton, or Dante or Shakespeare,” said Robert Jackson, a senior research fellow with the at Florida’s Flagler College.

‘Devotional in nature’

In Texas, the proposed changes would go far beyond any previous attempt to inject biblical content into its classrooms.

A allows school districts to offer high school electives on the Bible. Demand has been extremely low, however. According to the Texas Education Agency, just over 1,200 of the state’s 1.7 million took the course this year.

But even with their limited scope and popularity, the courses offer ample fodder for skeptics. Writing for the Texas Freedom Network, a religious liberty and civil rights organization, Chancey, the Southern Methodist professor, the courses to be “explicitly devotional in nature.” Despite requirements for teachers to complete special training and maintain “religious neutrality,” Chancey wrote that the Protestant Bible was the preferred text in these courses, while Catholic, Hebrew and Eastern Orthodox Bibles were “presented as deviations from the norm.” In several districts, the courses were taught by local ministers.

The state is now working with a much larger canvas: not a mere elective, but an entire elementary reading curriculum, with a potential audience of millions of students.

Officials are quick to point out that adoption of the new program is voluntary. But a potential $60 per-student it is offering for participation may make it difficult for school systems to refuse.

The updated materials are now open for public review and are scheduled to go before the state Board of Education for approval this fall. Aicha Davis, a Democrat on the Republican-led board, predicted “they would totally support something like that.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that this is happening,” she said.

There was an eleventh-hour proposal on that night’s agenda, but no vote took place. Instead, the meeting dissolved into a fracas, as trustees screamed at one another, members of the audience screamed at the board and police wrestled people out of the room. The board adjourned without addressing the looming deadline.

It was the fourth month in office for newly elected trustee Sue Deigaard, a longtime education advocate and the parent of two Houston ISD graduates. Now, almost exactly five years later, as the state appoints a board of managers to take over the sprawling school system, her feelings are … complicated.

The law in question — which Deigaard, like most Texans, refers to by its legislative file number, House Bill 1842 — was the brainchild of a Houston-area lawmaker frustrated by years of district inattention to the impoverished schools in his portion of the city. In 2015, a bipartisan majority voted to require the state to step in and take over when a district has had one or more “F” schools for five years. 

Lawmakers later amended the law to let districts stave off state intervention by closing the schools or giving control of them to a nonprofit partner such as a university, city government or charter school network. 

Because they can provoke vociferous opposition, school closures are among the most difficult decisions an elected board can make. And the prospect of charter school partnerships was anathema to the district’s teachers union. As Deigaard notes in this 74 Interview, the result was that small but impassioned groups of people shouted down every proposal for a local solution.

A few months after the Houston board adjourned without taking any action to head off sanctions, Texas officials announced they were investigating complaints that board members — not including Deigaard — had engaged in irregularities involving contracts and that a majority had violated state law by meeting in secret to work out a plan to replace interim Superintendent Grenita Latham. The results of the investigation also justified a state takeover, Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath said.

In 2019, the board sued the agency, claiming it had no authority to install a board of managers. In January 2023, the state Supreme Court lifted an injunction that had stopped Morath from moving forward. Dominated by new members, the Houston board voted to stop pursuing the lawsuit. Many of those who had opposed the changes were quick to claim that the ensuing takeover, which is slated to take place June 1, was a politicized move against a blue-city district by a Republican governor bent on privatization.

Deigaard will stay on after Morath appoints the nine-member board of managers, though she will be stripped of her official powers. current board members will be asked to serve as advisers to the appointees. The state will eventually return control to elected board members.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Set the stage for us. You ran for a seat on a school board that had been embroiled in one high-profile controversy after another for years. You must have both a titanium spine and a vision for transformation in Houston ISD.

I wanted to try to take the politics out of it. I wanted to transform what our public education system looks like. We have a system that was created in the middle of the 20th century, in a very different time societally, economically. That system was not designed to be effective and equitable for all kids. It was intentionally designed not to. And all we keep doing is trying to tinker around the edges — in a time where our society and our economy are incredibly different. 

It’s not like I entered the lion’s den having never visited before. I had been going to board meetings. I knew who the players were. I knew we were coming through this tumultuous time. I knew we were still transitioning to a new superintendent. 

Of the nine board members, three of us were new that January. Six weeks after we were sworn in, new superintendent Richard Carranza announced he was leaving to go to New York. In June, we rejected a proposed budget in the hopes that the [district] administration would bring us back something better. They didn’t. We ended up voting to adopt the exact same proposal. We were going to have our own district form of government shutdown, because we wouldn’t be able to pay the bills. 

At that point, it was just chaos. 

House Bill 1842 was looming. Houston ISD leaders knew, starting in the spring of 2015, that we were at risk of sanctions in the fall of 2018. In 2017, the legislature had passed a policy giving districts two options to avoid those sanctions: improve the campus in question or close it. By 2018, we had a third option, and that was to find a partner. 

A lot of districts around the state, like San Antonio, saw the writing on the wall and took action. Dr. Grenita Lathan, our chief academic officer at the time, had a very well thought-out plan how to address our chronically underperforming campuses — not just the ones that were going to trigger sanctions, but the ones that were on the runway coming up to the trigger point. 

There were community meetings to help impacted schools understand what the recommendations were going to be, but they basically got shut down by a small, vocal community of people who didn’t like whatever the recommendation was for a given school. They didn’t want their school consolidated. They didn’t want to close it, didn’t want to partner. So none of it ever happened.

We were eventually presented with a potential partner for the schools that were going to trigger sanctions later that year. We never voted on it. The meeting got out of control. People were arrested. We made . And we did nothing. We were the only district in the state, to my knowledge, that did nothing. 

I remember talking, when we first triggered the law in 2019, to somebody who had testified in favor of House Bill 1842 in 2015. He said, “Well, we never imagined that this would happen in HISD.” I said, “Because you thought they’d give us a path out?” And he said, “No, because I thought you guys would do what you needed to do to avoid it.”

We had the opportunity, and we didn’t. We interfered with the leaders that we entrusted to bring us good recommendations. We shut it down.

Do you think the things Lathan proposed would have made a difference?

If the board had supported Grenita despite the noise, and if there were real and meaningful community engagement. Grenita and her team could have worked with these communities: “Hey, we’re going to do a closure, or a restart. What do you want school to look like? What are your hopes and dreams for your children?” I think if the board had stood behind her on that, our story today would be very, very different. Student achievement would have increased. And I don’t think we would be in a position where we’d have a board of managers coming in. 

When the board decided not to endorse the plan that the interim superintendent brought forward, was there an alternate plan? 

You’re presuming nine people, plus at that point in time a superintendent, were all having constructive conversations together about a plan? I don’t think you should make that presumption. 

I was actually called the day [after the fractious April 2018 meeting] by somebody else who asked whether, if they come back next week with a partnership with another organization, would I support it? I said, I’m not going to vote for that. There needs to be a bigger, more comprehensive student-centered plan here.

This is about improving the learning outcomes for students in a way that is equitable. My objective wasn’t to save the board.

Between 2018 and now, were there more efforts to come up with an improvement plan, or was the idea to just wait for the suit to work its way through the courts?

We’ve had a lot of inconsistency in administrative leadership. We had a longstanding superintendent, Terry Grier, who left two years before I got on the board. We had an interim for a few months. We had Richard Carranza. We had Grenita as interim superintendent for 3½ years after that. We have all the battles between different factions of the board, including the ] and appointed somebody else one day, triggering a special accreditation investigation with the state. We came finally to the other side of that and hired Millard House, who’s now been here for a year and a half. At this point, me and Elizabeth Santos are the senior board members, and we’ve only been here for five years. 

So you don’t have a lot of continuity. Which in one way was good, because in 2020, when we had four new board members and I was board chair, I’m like, we’re going to double down on governance and build a foundation and figure out where we’re trying to go so that when we hire somebody to take us there, we’ve got a plan. 

We have board members who wanted to see large-scale, systemic changes in our incredibly large, diverse and complex system. Who can see the opportunities that exist, can see where inequities exist. Your board and your superintendent don’t have to agree on everything, right? I actually think you have to have diversity of thought. But you have to have everybody centered around a core set of beliefs and values on where you’re trying to go. And we have that on paper. But I don’t feel that we’ve ever as a board been partners in that work, and certainly not our superintendent.

We just got stuck. We’re grounded in this governance model, but we weren’t seeing things come from the administration that were really challenging the status quo of what an education system can and should look like for children — and almost a quarter of a way through the 21st century. 

There’s some irony there. You had an interim superintendent who had put deep thought into systemic change and a board that wouldn’t sign off. And then you ended up with a board that wanted change but an administration that wouldn’t advance a plan. When the Texas Supreme Court decided to lift the injunction, the board had the option of continuing with the suit, as unlikely as victory seemed. But you voted not to do that. 

I’m going to say this for me, because I don’t want to speak for my colleagues on this. There’s a saying: When the elephants fight, the grass suffers. We have been in an adversarial relationship with our state agency in some ways since before I was on the board, before we even triggered 1842.

I think there was a realization that we were unlikely to win. We could either move forward in a collaborative, student-centered way or we could continue to fight. For me personally, I made a commitment to always put students first. I don’t believe that the outcome would change if we persist in this legal battle. It prolongs a period of instability for our kids.

What matters most is, how do we make sure kids are learning and growing with the least amount of disruption we possibly could have? I’ve always believed that with all of what our district has gone through in the past five years, there has to be something better for kids on the other side of it all. And how do we get to that better other side as quickly and harmlessly as we possibly can? If it’s even possible.

If the appointed board of managers and new superintendent are going to succeed, they’re going to need community support. And at the moment, there’s still a lot of shrieking.

Our public school system belongs to the public. We want the kids who have been left behind for far too long to no longer be left behind. That is a shared value between our current district governance team of 10, our board and superintendent, and our state [education] agency and therefore, presumably, . That’s a shared value.

The divergence is going to be how that is achieved. On a Saturday afternoon, not at rush hour, it takes an hour to drive from one side of Houston ISD to the other. When you go from east to west, you’re going from oil and gas plants, the shipping channel with tankers coming in and out and all of that, to the west side. That’s also oil and gas — but in shining office buildings. 

If this group can come in, understand the diversity of need and build true partnership and collaboration with communities in their pursuit of systemic changes, I think they’ll be successful. If they come in thinking they have all the answers and they’re just going to put all these things in place, nothing’s going to really be different for kids. 

It’s all about making decisions with families. That’s where the magic can happen. And we haven’t done that.

What happens to you now? You’re still an elected board member, but you don’t have any power as of June 1. Do you have ceremonial duties? 

I don’t know. I think so. Keep in mind our state agency has overseen the transition to a board of managers in other districts before. But we’re the biggest. This is not something that one new superintendent and nine appointed board members are going to be able to do on their own as quickly as they’re going to need to ramp up. They’re going to need help being introduced to the community as something other than, you know, agents of a conspiracy. 

When you have an elected board, you have people — especially if they’re viable to win — who have relationships and roots in a community. And who build more through the campaign process, through the different civic clubs they visit with, the doors they knock on and all of that. As you build these relationships, you build an understanding of the fabric of the community. 

The board of managers, they’re going from 0 to 100 while skipping that process. I think there could be value in taking a second tier of candidates [for the board of managers who do not get appointed] and creating some kind of community council that helps support that appointed board.

I do believe in democratically elected governance of public systems and public dollars. But I also know that at least in our state, long before HB 1842 came into existence, there was a process supported by both Republicans and Democrats. As a school board, you have independence from other governmental entities. But if, in cases of financial impropriety, legal malfeasance and student performance, if you’re not serving kids well, if you are engaging in behaviors that create a risk to children, then there’s going to be intervention. To make sure that kids are learning and growing and that the dollars that you were trusted with are actually being spent on the children’s learning and growth.

I don’t know that there’s an easier right thing in that equation. It’s an imperfect democracy. We’ve known that since it started over 200 years ago. It’s all about how you just keep striving for something better within those values. 

Don’t let me push you off a cliff here, but I want to know how this feels. 

Back up before we get to that, because you’re going to lose me after that. We’re so big. We’re not a suburban district with a bunch of giant one-size-fits-all schools. We know one-size-fits-all doesn’t work for all kids and it doesn’t work for all families. 

We also know that money matters, but money not spent effectively doesn’t change outcomes. The unfortunate thing about the [COVID recovery] dollars is we’re probably going to learn that in a really harsh way in the coming years. How we chose to spend it actually either made a difference for kids or didn’t. 

But we’re stuck in this conversation where it’s just about more money. We need to evolve to new school design. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for traditional models for students for whom that works, but in a district like ours, with the number of buildings and students we have, there is absolutely room to try things out and to scale what we know works. That was always my vision. 

One of the most poignant stories from my early days of being on the board — I have all these kids’ faces in my head from visiting schools — was this little second-grader eagerly raising his hand in class. But he didn’t even have a teacher of record, he had a long-term sub. Is he going to be okay? 

I was visiting our disciplinary alternative education program, and I asked the school leader, “What’s your biggest challenge?” He said, “The kids are here for a certain number of days, so the first challenge we have is some kids start to self-sabotage so they don’t have to go back to their home school. The other challenge is kids that get back to their home school and self-sabotage so they can come back.”

That’s kids telling us what they need, and we’re not listening. The families who have left our system for charter schools, private schools, to homeschool, they’ve done it because we’re not giving them something they want and need for their kids. And until we start talking to families in a real way, we’re not going to be able to build a holistic system that meets the needs of all kids, and we’re going to keep leaving kids behind. 

So how do I feel? Angry that I couldn’t achieve that. Disappointed that I couldn’t achieve that. We stole five years from kids. Five years where we could have given all our focus to the needs of students without the distraction of a lawsuit and all the impediments that instability has brought to our system. We should all be angry about that.