The Alaska House Education Committee on Monday gave its unanimous support for a price transparency bill aimed at the University of Alaska.

If Senate Bill 13 becomes law, the state university system will be required to list the cost of course materials, including textbooks, in its course catalog.

“This bill has got a simple concept: We’re trying to give students as much information as possible to financially plan as they’re signing up for their classes,” said Sen. Robert Myers, R-North Pole and the sponsor of the bill.

The state Senate , and the education committee was its only stop before a vote of the full House.

“I think it’s a great idea. I want people to be as informed as possible to help them budget,” said Rep. Jamie Allard, R-Eagle River and co-chair of the education committee, after Monday’s vote.

SB 13 is modeled on in other states, Myers said.

In provided to the Legislature, the university system said it could implement the bill as part of an ongoing IT modernization program.

University officials cautioned that while they can absorb the financial cost, there will be a time cost as well.

“Requiring professors to focus on administrative tasks takes away from the core educational mission. New professors are particularly vulnerable to compliance,” the fiscal note stated.

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As a small illustration of her long, idiosyncratic writing career, Joy Hakim likes to tell the story of a chance encounter in an Oakland elevator.

On the way down after a speaking engagement, a woman handed her a slip of paper — it contained the phone number of her son’s private school. He and his classmates, she said, could really benefit from their school swapping out its traditional history textbooks for a set of Hakim’s.

Asked who she was, the woman admitted that she was a representative of one of the big publishing houses.

“I was appalled,” Hakim remembered. “But this is an industry where almost no one believes the books educate well — and scores prove that.” 

Hakim doesn’t know if the school ever switched over. But the episode underscores her uncomfortable place in an industry that has never quite embraced her. By turns raw, thrilling and eye-opening, her writing offers young people a look at history that they rarely get between the covers of mass-produced textbooks.

Her most well-known work, a 10-volume history of the United States that began appearing in the early 1990s, remains in print. And at age 93, she’s still in the fight: Her newest series on biology debuted in September, continuing her tradition of wrestling with complicated ideas and difficult historical and scientific questions. 

But even after three decades, she remains unsure that she’s made much of an impact as textbooks with bigger promotional budgets enjoy much wider readerships. 

That view is belied by her legions of admirers. Praised by leading historians like David McCullough and James McPherson, she also may be the only textbook author to reliably receive fan mail. At one of her kids’ houses sit cases of letters, testament to the gratitude of two generations of readers. 

, podcaster and author of , who has championed deep subject matter knowledge in all areas of study, called Hakim “a force of nature.”

“Most textbooks are either extremely dry or so encyclopedic in their attempts to cover the universe of topics that they’re highly superficial and therefore boring,” Wexler said. “Joy Hakim understands how to use the power of narrative to bring topics in history and science to life.”

Wexler predicted that if more schools adopted Hakim’s titles, reading scores would jump because her work offers both the knowledge and vocabulary kids need to succeed on tests. 

And as the nation grows increasingly polarized about history, Hakim’s work eschews easy categorization. It is championed by liberals for not glossing over our dark past — and by conservatives for offering rigorous, challenging texts and sophisticated arguments.

, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and a former New York City teacher, said Hakim’s history series “had a place of honor in my fifth-grade classroom and deserves a place of privilege in every school. It’s beyond her power to reverse the long-running and in American education, but she’s done her part to make real history accessible and interesting to those who seek it out, or who are engaged by it.”

Hakim’s books, he said, offer an important antidote to those that aim to trick kids into learning a little history via historical fiction or lightweight, fantasy-driven fare. “Hakim is winningly anachronistic by comparison: She takes history — and more pertinently her young readers — seriously.”

But she has often had to fight simply to be heard by school districts under adoption systems she sees as backwards. Teachers and students are hungering for good books, Hakim said, yet the adopted titles often stem from publishers’ long-standing relationships with state education bureaucrats, whom they lobby furiously. 

“I don’t think that they sell whether they’re good or crappy,” she said. “They sell because of this massive promotional effort that goes into them.”

‘I sat down and I started writing’ 

Hakim’s career as a writer for young people began simply, on a long car drive.

A one-time teacher and journalist — she taught in Baltimore for a spell and was both a business and editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk’s daily newspaper — by the 1980s, she was freelancing in Virginia Beach and raising three kids with her husband, a grain importer. She happened upon a notice for a hearing in Richmond, the capital, by a board looking for ways to improve school textbooks. At that pre-Internet time, it was a topic that aroused national attention. Hakim (pronounced HAKE-im) decided to check it out.

She expected to hear testimony from writers and editors. Instead, the publishers sent salespeople, who in her view stonewalled the proceedings by rhapsodizing about how beautifully designed and illustrated the books were.

“The whole thing was just a hoax,” she recalled. “The publishing industry was not serious about doing anything.”

Steaming, Hakim climbed back into her car and began the two-hour drive home. At some point, she thought to herself: Why not write her own history book?

“I sat down and I started writing,” she said.

Hakim didn’t stop for seven years, telling vivid personal stories of America’s founders, pioneers and others.

As she conceived it, the book aimed for a fifth-grade audience. To get direct feedback, she tapped a small group of 10-year-olds in her neighborhood, offering five dollars apiece to critique her manuscript. Hakim instructed the readers — mostly boys — to scrawl one of three reactions in the margins: G for Good, B for Boring and NC for Not Clear. 

Next, she invited classroom teachers to use the manuscripts in exchange for feedback. 

That one book ultimately became a 10-volume manuscript called . 

The books covered much of what she’d decided was important in American history — as she told one interviewer, from “people coming over the Bering Strait” to Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

And they offered children a thrilling narrative. In a chapter on Columbus’ voyages, she wrote that after surviving the treacherous waters of the Sargasso Sea, the explorer’s men wanted to turn back: “The sea seems endless. On October 9 they say they will go no farther. Columbus pleads for three more days of sailing. Then, he says, if they don’t see land they may cut off his head and sail home in peace.”

But for all the books’ originality, Hakim lacked a publisher. Eventually she met a literary agent who successfully garnered the attention of Oxford University Press.

, in a review titled, “Showing Children the Dark Side,” said Hakim “frees children from the grasp of hoary American myth nurtured by novelists and historians; without sermonizing, she allows them to glimpse the horrific underside of the once magical word ‘frontier.'” 

Hakim, for instance, was among the first writers for young people to address the 1839 Amistad rebellion, devoting an entire chapter to the slave uprising four years before the incident rose to prominence with the .

Historian David McCullough called the series “a big breath of fresh air and the best possible news for the youngsters who get to read these books.” 

Princeton University historian James McPherson said he was “impressed by the accuracy and the depth of her research,” telling one reviewer that Hakim’s books represented women and minorities in ways others hadn’t.

‘I have done something that’s quite different’

Like many authors, Hakim felt Oxford did little to publicize the series, leaving her to do much of the promotion herself. But in 1993, a family friend opened a key door: The composer BJ Leiderman, a long-ago classmate of one of her children, was by then writing for National Public Radio. He suggested to colleagues that they feature her, and soon Hakim found herself in front of a microphone at the network’s Norfolk affiliate. The result was a lengthy “Morning Edition” segment that helped introduce her to the world.

In the interview, she told host Bob Edwards, “The history books that are out there, most of them are committee-written, and committees can’t write. Committees have to be bland. So, I am doing something … that’s quite different.”

Looking back on the reception she got in 1993, Leiderman said Hakim was “progressive in the best sense of the word, searching out all different areas” to study.

All the same, he recalled, selling the books — sometimes on her own — struck him as a long, tough slog reminiscent of veteran rock stars playing small clubs to keep their music alive.

Despite the struggle — or perhaps because of it — “A History of US” soon became one of Oxford’s rock-solid titles, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, said Damon Zucca, the publisher’s director of content development and reference. The series has also received “the most fan mail from kids, parents, and teachers, who have been sending ardent missives about these books to Joy and to us for nearly thirty years now.”

But keeping them in classrooms has been a battle. Hakim recalled visiting Oakland schools a year after the district adopted her books, curious how they were being used. She couldn’t find them anywhere. “They’d all been replaced,” she said. A few teachers told her they’d saved their copies and were literally hiding them in closets to keep administrators in the dark. 

At one point, Hakim even sued after textbook giant Houghton Mifflin purchased the books’ distributor, D.C. Heath. Fearing it was a bid to bury the titles, she pursued an antitrust violation. Civics-geek alert: The case eventually landed before the federal bench of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who 14 years later would rise to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Hakim eventually got the books out from under the big publisher’s purview. Now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Eventually, “A History of US” gave rise to a companion with all-star voice talent including Morgan Freeman, Julia Roberts and Robert Redford. But by then Hakim was on to something new: a three-book series about the history of science, from Aristotle to Einstein.

Then as now, Hakim’s most fervent buyers are often private school teachers and homeschooling parents who are free to use materials that appeal to them. She also holds a kind of magnetic appeal to cultural conservatives like Lynne Cheney who have derided public school readings they view as mushy and politically correct.

Yet conservatives have also protested Hakim’s books. In one case, Texas parents organized a letter-writing campaign, telling state officials that the books were unpatriotic.

They’ve been banned at least twice, as far as Hakim knows — once quite recently after a parent complained that they were too liberal. She jokes that the honor puts her in good company. 

Asked how she’d categorize herself, Hakim doesn’t hesitate. “I’m just a teacher,“ she said. “My books talk. I’m in a conversation with these kids and I respect their intelligence — and they understand that.”

‘This is a tough chapter’

Ask about her workflow and Hakim will tell you that she is blessed with — or cursed by — a journalist’s penchant for accuracy, which often prolongs her creative process. In the case of the science books, she finished the last one — on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and the origins of quantum mechanics — and her new publisher had submitted it for peer review, when she received an unsolicited email from an unfamiliar name with an mit.edu address.

It was from renowned physics professor , also editor of the American Journal of Physics. He’d read a piece in TIME magazine about her plan to write about Einstein and offered to read the manuscript.

Hakim sent him the first four chapters. A few days later, Taylor wrote back asking if someone had actually reviewed them.

He and Hakim met a few times and, in Taylor’s words, “got to know — and respect — each other.” In all, they spent the next year-and-a-half revising the book, to the chagrin of Smithsonian Books. “They were not happy with me,” Hakim recalled. “But I’m so happy that I did it.”

In the book’s introduction, Hakim wrote of the “private tutorial with one of the greatest physics teachers this country has produced,” adding, “Sometimes my head hurt with all the stretching.”

The book won several best-of-the-year awards, which she credits largely to Taylor’s influence. For his part, Taylor told ����Ӱ�� that Hakim “made great contributions to high school science teaching” and deserves wider recognition. 

As with the history series, the science books found a devoted audience as Hakim challenged young readers to grasp hard topics and complex ideas. In a chapter explaining Galileo’s writings on relativity, Hakim urged them to “catch your breath, relax and be prepared to stretch your mind.” 

In the chapter, she described how an observer on shore, watching a ball fall from the mast of a moving ship, sees it move in an arc, while an observer on deck sees it travel in a straight line. Acknowledging that the idea seemed outlandish, she warned: “This is a tough chapter; stick with it; the ideas here are important.”

Indeed, when journalist and scholar Alexander Stille set out to capture the essence of Hakim’s history books in 1998, he concluded, “Instead of talking down to children in simplified language, her books invite children to make an effort.” He that “a grandmother from Virginia” could produce books superior to those of most publishing houses.

‘The world has changed’

Now, nearly 20 years after the science texts first appeared, Hakim is out with a new series for teens about the history of biology.

gave the first volume a coveted starred review, calling it “thoroughly engrossing and highly recommended.” 

The second book is due out in April, part of a planned four-volume series. Published by MITeen Press, the last two books won’t appear until 2025 and 2026 respectively, but Hakim jokes that at her age she may not live to see it in readers’ hands.

She has asked her publisher to pick up the pace.

At the same time, she remains unsatisfied about her previous work: Three decades after “A History of US” began appearing on shelves, Hakim says the series could use a refresh. 

“I wrote it 30 years ago, so some of it is really dated,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. For one thing, she wants to recast the role of women, a topic she didn’t adequately address in the 1990s, mostly due to her own blind spot. An avowed feminist, she now sees she didn’t step back enough and appreciate the importance of the women’s movement. 

“Thirty years ago, we were different people than we are today,” she said. “The world has changed.” 

Yet, oddly, little has changed in Hakim’s career. Her husband is gone and the “grandmother from Virginia” is now a great-grandmother, but she still feels like a disruptor and an outsider, angry that we don’t have “better books” in schools. After millions of words on the page and cases of fan mail, she admits that she has barely struck a blow in the nation’s larger battle with historical illiteracy.

The textbook industry that she set out to disrupt in the 1980s is still dominated by a handful of publishers — actually, consolidation has , not more, choices. Together, they still produce what she considers bland, formulaic books that are making the nation’s reading crisis worse, not better.

“I’ve worked all these years and I’m not sure what I’ve achieved,” she concluded. “I’ve sold some books, but I haven’t changed the field.”

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee joined nine other Democratic state and territorial governors Friday in signing a letter to nine school textbook publishers calling on them to resist censorship, especially when it comes to U.S. history.

The effort was led by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who is head of the Democratic Governors Association.

“We are deeply troubled by the news of some textbook publishers yielding to the unreasonable demands of certain government representatives calling for the censorship of school educational materials, specifically textbooks,” .

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“We write to you out of concern that those who are charged with supporting the education of this country’s students, such as yourselves, may be tempted to water down critical information to appeal to the lowest common denominator. We urge any company who has not yet given in to this pressure to hold the line for our democracy.”

McKee’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The move came a little less than a month after Florida authorities worked with textbook companies to “correct” 66 social studies textbooks previously declared to contain “inaccurate material, errors and other information that was not aligned with Florida Law,”

The scrubbing came after only 19 of 101 submitted textbooks were approved by the state education department for use in Florida schools. The objections from the department included:

• One textbook encouraged critical discussions at home around athletes “taking a knee” during performances of the National Anthem.
• The removal of a passage from a middle school textbook calling regarding the murder of Geroge Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, calling it an “unsolicited topic.”
• Removal of the word “socialism” from a section on economics where the system was described as a way to keep things “nice and even.”

Other governors who signed the letter included: Maura Healey, of Massachusetts; John Carney, of Delaware; J.B. Pritzker, of Illinois; Wes Moore, of Maryland; Michelle Lujan Grisham, of New Mexico; Jay Inslee, of Washington; Albert Bryan, of the U.S. Virgin Islands; and Kathy Hochul, of New York.

The letter was sent to the Association of American Publishers, which represents the leading book, journal, and education publishers in the United States and the following publishers:

Cengage Learning, Goodheart-Wilcox, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill Education, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, Savvas Learning Co., Scholastic, and Teachers Curriculum Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

Pearson declined to comment.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com. Follow Rhode Island Current on and .

For the last decade Teague O’Shea has been in and out of college. Now, at 42 years old, he is trying again. Furthering his education was important to O’Shea, who had been working as an apprentice electrician for his local water district, but the rising cost of college made him question its worth.

“California is a really expensive place to live and I’m already paying for college,” O’Shea said. “I’m paying $463 for three classes and I’m like, ‘That’s fine.’ But I can’t imagine going full time and paying more. I can’t imagine having to spend more money on books — I would not be happy.”

O’Shea is working towards his associate’s degree in the Water Systems Technology program, which prepares students for careers in wastewater management or drinking water distribution and treatment. In the program, at least one major cost is covered: O’Shea’s courses all use free non-copyrighted materials created by the college itself. That takes some of the pressure off O’Shea, he said, so he can focus on his goal of becoming a certified water plant manager. 

“I feel like I’m being prepared to re-enter the industry,” he said. 

California college students spend on average $938 per year on textbooks and materials, according to the , roughly half of that is on textbooks alone.

One idea under consideration by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office is to fund community colleges to produce their own textbooks. The system must decide how to spend $115 million in state funds set aside to reduce the burden of textbook costs. Every community college will receive $20,000 to design zero-textbook-cost programs and an additional $180,000 to implement them. Some colleges will also get larger, competitive grants. 

Colleges could spend the money on anything from publishing their own textbooks to using free, publicly available textbooks — known as “open educational resources” — created by professors at other schools. They could also simply give some students money to buy traditional textbooks.

“So we really see textbooks as almost a symptom to a bigger issue around students’ financial stability, right? Especially the students we serve that come into our colleges, many of them are already at a deficit without sufficient financial resources,” said Rebecca Ruan-O’Shaughnessy, vice chancellor for educational services and support at the Chancellor’s Office. 

Many community colleges already have some classes that use open educational resources, often marked in course catalogs as “zero textbook cost.” Yet those courses often fill up fast, Ruan-O’Shaughnessy said, and students aren’t always aware they are being offered. 

Overall, open educational resources have so far failed to build the same level of traction that traditional publishers have. Even at College of the Canyons, one of the colleges most invested in the approach, only 35% of professors use open educational resources. And while many colleges give some eligible students grants for textbooks, they usually have to jump through administrative hoops to get them.

Ruan-O’Shaughnessy said the Chancellor’s Office wants to gather data about zero-textbook-cost courses across the state’s 115 community colleges, identify successes that have so far been isolated to individual campuses or regions, and create a long-term, sustainable model.

Jerry Vakshylyak, a student at Mission College in Santa Clara serving on the California Community Colleges’ newly created textbook-costs task force, still remembers having to spend $300 for a French textbook two semesters back. 

“It was just absolutely insane for an online copy for that French textbook,” said Vakshylyak. He now makes sure to enroll in classes with zero-textbook-cost options. “I’m in mostly ZTC courses, primarily because of how much of a burden it could be with textbook costs,” said Vakshylyak.

Vakshylak said that kind of help should be available to all students.

“The statewide approach will help standardize and streamline the process for students to get into class with low instructional materials cost,” he said. 

Students have found creative ways to access academic materials. Since 2009, the website Z-library has been a hub for free scholarly journals and full college textbooks. But last year, the federal government shut it down, alleging copyright infringement. The online library is now back up but makes users log in where they are redirected to a personal domain. 

East Los Angeles College student Rene Jimenez rents his textbooks, which he said saves him hundreds of dollars each semester. “Renting makes so much sense when you’re getting your general requirements done because you rarely need the textbooks for other classes,” Jimenez said. “It’s way cheaper most of the time, so it alleviates some financial stress, which is important when everything these days is so, so expensive.”

Some advocates say the recent focus on materials cost is an opportunity for a larger shift in the textbook business, and that colleges across the system should create their own cache of materials and textbooks that best serve the students that need them. 

“It’s just a different way of thinking about how we use information resources and education, thinking about it more as part of the infrastructure on which we teach and learn, as opposed to products that you purchase from a publisher,” said Nicole Allen, who as a student organized a campaign around textbook costs before becoming head of communications at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a nonprofit pushing for more open educational resources. “And, I think that mindset shift is a really big opportunity in California.” 

A  every dollar invested in open educational resources saves students $10 to $20. One of the benefits of investing in open educational resources is the continued use of them after the initial investment, Allen said. 

“There’s such a compelling case for investment in these types of resources. Because if you can build them, you can use them,” said Allen. “And others can use them, too, unlike traditional textbooks where if you buy a one-year subscription to a digital textbook, you have to buy that subscription again the next year, and the next year and the next year.” 

Tyler Reed, senior director of communications at McGraw Hill, one of the largest textbook publishers in the nation, says the onus is on all involved in higher education to deliver course materials with value that students can afford. 

“We believe there is room in the higher education ecosystem for all course materials options, including open educational resources. Let’s give institutions, instructors and students the broadest range of choices,” Reed said in a statement to CalMatters.

College of the Canyons has created a new department to focus on finding, adapting, authoring and publishing open educational resources. Current and former students are employed by the college to blend and splice free online texts into cohesive works to meet their needs, said James Glapa-Grossklag, the college’s dean of educational technology, learning resources and distance learning. 

Additionally, if faculty members decide they need to write new material to fit the needs of their class, College of the Canyons will provide a stipend. 

The campus has seen some success with this model. But adoption has been slowed by the fact that the college offers a lot of specialized disciplines, such as occupational therapy, welding and auto mechanics, for which no online educational resources currently exist, Glapa-Grossklag said. 

“There is definitely a rift between the humanities and STEM majors,” said Kyra Karatsu, a College of the Canyons graduate working on the project. “There’s all these resources for majors like communications or history. But when you start to look at classes like math, or even chemistry, there’s not a lot of resources there.”

One reason is the lock that the traditional textbook industry has on the market in those disciplines, said Mark Healy, the open educational resources coordinator for the Foothill-DeAnza Community College District, another early adopter of free textbooks. Math textbook publishers often bundle together online textbooks with other resources like online testing, he said, charging students hundreds of dollars for access codes that must be renewed if they take the class again.

Healy, who is also a psychology professor, has made all his classes zero-textbook-cost. “It’s really great to tell students that they don’t have to pay anything beyond tuition to take the class,” he said. 

Story and González are fellows with the , a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. This story and other higher education coverage are supported by the College Futures Foundation.

This story was originally published by .

At a meeting Friday, the Texas State Board of Education officially refused to recommend three health textbooks, including two books mentioned in this report. Board members voted along party lines to reject the middle school textbooks from LessonBee, Inc. and Human Kinetics that include sex education, with opposition citing content about masturbation and abortion, insufficient attention to abstinence or a lack of constituent support. A third health textbook for elementary school failed on a 6-6 tie. 

The culture wars keep coming in Texas, and the latest one involves sex, textbooks, and the LGBTQ experience. 

On Tuesday the State Board of Education will decide whether proposed textbooks that include content on gender identity and sexual orientation will make their way into the backpacks and laptops of children in Texas and across the country. 

Both sides are gearing up, the latest in a series of polarizing fights in Texas schools, which recently included school mask mandates, teaching about systemic racism and library books with sexual content. Just last week, Governor Greg Abbott wanted against educators offering “pornographic” books to students after pointing out two .

Now, after last year’s approval of new state standards for health classes, the board must approve new textbooks—and that’s where the new battlefront is.    

“Gay people can get married today; you can’t fire LGBTQ people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” said Dan Quinn, a spokesman for Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning social justice group. 

While much has changed in the last few decades, he fears, “textbook adoptions in Texas have not.”

Conservative activists and parents have issues with all five of the health textbooks the board must approve, but are particularly focused on two for middle schoolers, saying they go too far by “normalizing” sexual activity, questioning gender identity and going beyond the new state standards. 

State law now requires parents to opt-in their children to lessons on sex education. Parents groups, like the Tarrant County Chapter of Moms for Liberty, a right-leaning organization focused on preserving parental rights, argue they want to be the ones instilling morals about sex to their children. They say the new textbooks would rob them of that right. 

“The attitude of devaluing family and oversexualizing education is detrimental to children, even adults, as well as harmful to society,” said Mary Lowe, Moms for Liberty Tarrant County chair.

This base has been galvanized. Loud groups of parents are fuming about what their children are being taught about systemic racism and, using that frustration as a road map, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race by making critical race theory and schools key issues in his campaign.  

Red meat topics like inappropriate sexual content in schools are ripe for conservative Texas Republican politics ahead of the crowded March 1 GOP primary elections, said Rice University political science professor Mark Jones. 

In addition, political attacks like Abbott’s fit the narrative that liberal school boards are dropping the ball when it comes to educating the country, he added. And those are the people Abbott wants to show up at the primary election, he said.  

“It’s not what do average Texans think. It’s what does the average Republican primary voter think,” said Jones. When it comes to teaching about sex, he said, it’s “that nothing should be taught or the bare minimum.” 

Textbooks and Standards

Up until last year, the state’s teaching standards for health and sex ed hadn’t changed since 1997. After more than a year of public hearings and panels, the State Board of Education updated the standards in 2020, with the most significant change requiring seventh and eighth-grade students , including condoms and other forms of contraception. The new standards go into effect in August 2022. 

Progressive advocates urged board members to add topics like abortion, consent, gender identity and sexual orientation to the mandatory curriculum, but the heavily conservative 15-member board declined.

When it comes to high school, sex education is optional. Many schools don’t offer sex ed at all. State law requires those that do teach sex ed present abstinence as the preferred choice to all sexual activity, encouraging abstinence until marriage. 

A teacher can go further and offer an “abstinence plus” curriculum, but must devote more attention to abstinence from sexual activity than any other behavior.  

On Tuesday, the elected board will take an initial vote to recommend textbooks school districts could buy that cover the new standards. A final vote is expected Friday. 

How the final vote will play out is unclear. Several conservative members of the board who voted on the standards in 2020 have since left the policy-making body, replaced by Republicans who skew toward the center. Advocates for comprehensive sex education hope the shift will mean the two textbooks that teach beyond the standards will be approved as is.

Textbook publishers are not bound to those standards and will try to provide content they believe makes their books attractive to school districts in Texas and across the country. While waning, with more than five million students in Texas public schools, the lone star state makes up a giant share of the national textbook market and continues to have outsize influence on content. 

But parents like Lowe and advocates like Mary Elizabeth Castle believe the books violate the standards.

“The fact that so much public input and agreement among the board went into the standards, it would be transparent and the right thing to do to have the books aligned with the standards,” said Castle, senior policy advisor for Texas Values, an organization dedicated to preserving conservative family values.

While parents can yank their students out of sex ed instruction, groups like Texas Values last year convinced the board to keep LGBTQ content out of the standards and is frustrated it’s still showing up in textbooks.

In the textbook by Human Kinetics, Castle said the text uses two students engaging in sexual activity as an example in a lesson, and in another case has students question whether their gender identity is similar to the one they are assigned at birth. The other textbook, by LessonBee, Inc., includes a text message conversation about ejaculation and arousal.

Advocates for stronger sex ed say the textbooks are needed because students want medically accurate and age-appropriate information about sex.

“We want young people to be able to engage in sexual activity if and when they feel comfortable to do so, when they feel they have all the information they need to make that decision for themselves and for their future,” said Gabrielle Doyle, state partnership coordinator for Sex Ed for Social Change, a group in favor of the textbooks.

Texas Leads in Repeated Teen Births 

What to teach students in school, particularly when it comes to sex, is a touchy subject in Texas. The state has some of the highest . A baby is born to a teen mother every 23 minutes in Texas, according to Jen Biundo, director of policy and data at the Texas Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. And Texas is the top state in the country for repeated teen births. 

Texas has historically opted to promote abstinence among teenagers to reduce teen pregnancies. 

Despite whether more in-depth teaching about sex ed could be beneficial, Jones, the political science professor, said Republicans have little political incentive to encourage it. 

As a Republican, said Jones, “you’re not going to win any votes in an election by pushing a more progressive agenda on sex ed.”