Great news! The State Board of Education voted this September to teach students history in grades 3-8. You would think that Texas schools are teaching history now, but, sadly, you would be mistaken: the current Texas framework only contains two years of actual history content in Kindergarten through 8th grade.
One would think that a leading organization in Texas Social Studies instruction, the Texas Council for the Social Studies, would be cheering this reform. Unfortunately, TXCSS has embraced Leftist ideology and actually worked against quality education for Texas students.
TXCSS has a long record of promoting left-wing ideas. The TXCSS journal, The Social Studies Texan, includes articles such as “How to Teach about Undocumented Immigration Using Children’s Books” and “Building Social and Emotional Intelligence through Social Studies Instruction,” which urge teachers to “reach beyond their content knowledge.”
My favorite article, though, was “Teaching Ethnic Studies Through the Overton Window,” a piece that somehow managed to be as cunning as it was oblivious to its own hypocrisy. This essay serves as an apologia to the organs and instruments of race-communism, including ethnic studies courses, Critical Race Theory, and The 1619 Project. It described how these programs were consciously used to engineer social acceptance of leftist ideas on race while simultaneously claiming that anyone who opposed these programs were conspiracy theorists.
TXCSS is clever enough to bury their more extreme positions in their paywalled journal, but their national parent organization, the National Council for the Social Studies, is less covert. One of their position statements is a “land acknowledgement” that asserts that the United States exists on “stolen land.” This statement urges teachers to “challenge Eurocentrism” and “affirm indigenous knowledges” while asserting that unauthorized depictions of Native American culture, like school mascots or costumes, “contribute to continued settler colonization and racism toward indigenous peoples” and give non-indigenous students a “false sense of superiority.”
Another position statement supports “Racial Literacy,” which is exactly what you think it is. You know the script by now: America is racist. White people are inherently racist. America was built on slavery. The role of the teacher is to make sure their students know how everything is racist.
It is worth noting that TXCSS and NCSS are supported mostly by membership dues paid by school districts. Your tax dollars are being used to push for this indoctrination in schools.
As further proof of the ideological coordination occurring throughout America, TXCSS and NCSS are coordinating their speakers this year. Both have booked Hasan Kwame Jeffries as their keynote speaker at their conferences in October and December. Mr. Jeffries has made a career out of racial grievance, including partnering with the shakedown racket the Southern Poverty Law Center. Mr. Jeffries has referred to President Trump as the “cracker in chief” and celebrated the BLM riots as “the beginning of a new revolution.”
So, what does this mean for Texas? Sadly, the TXCSS is deeply entrenched in the process for reforming the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS. In 2022, the State Board of Education tried to review and reform the Social Studies TEKS, but the process was halted after numerous instances of left-wing ideology in the TEKS draft were exposed. TXCSS certainly had a place at the table in that cycle, with at least four prominent TXCSS members (including 3 former presidents!) acting as either a content advisor or workgroup member.
The 2022 TEKS draft:
- Promoted violent black separatist movements as being morally equivalent to the peaceful Civil Rights Movement.
- Omitted attempts and partial successes to eliminate slavery prior to the Civil War.
- Spoke of several currently active left-wing organizations in glowing terms with no similar discussion of conservative groups.
- Spoke of positive contributions made by other religions and cultures, such as Islam, but neglected to recollect any positive contributions by Christianity.
- Omitted any mention of slavery before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.
- Omitted any discussion of federalism, focusing only on the role of the national government.
- Omitted discussion of the constitutions of the states as a major influence on the U.S. Constitution.
- Omitted mentions of the principle of separation of powers.
But 2022 is ancient history. What happened this year? When the SBOE were considering a new framework for the Social Studies TEKS revision, what bold vision for the future did TXCSS propose?
It proposed basically the same framework.
TXCSS has two primary motivations for keeping the Social Studies curriculum the same. First, because the constituency of TXCSS is largely made up of Social Studies teachers and related positions, there is a built-in resistance to changes that require teachers to learn a new framework or material.
Secondly, Leftist ideology thrives on vague, unstructured standards. Loose standards means that pet causes of the Left, like mass immigration, can be easily smuggled into the curriculum. The World Cultures course of the current and proposed TXCSS model is the best example of this: a course that asks students to “study people, places, and societies of the contemporary world” with no real content requirements.
With these motivations, it’s easy to see why TXCSS opposed the robust framework that the State Board of Education eventually adopted. The TXCSS fought to keep a frame work in which teachers would not need to learn any new content, and the only new course would be World History, which, as a one-year survey designed for 5th graders, would be very surface level. The vacuous World Cultures course would be retained, and the other four years would remain U.S. and Texas history in essentially the same sequence.
The Texas Council for the Social Studies promotes left-wing ideology in the classroom, participated in an abomination of an attempt at TEKS revision in 2022, and lobbied for the SBOE to retain the current failed Social Studies framework. It is past time to say they do not belong at the table for the current TEKS revision and tax dollars should no longer subsidize their activities in any way.
