# Texas Textbook Wars The recurring battles over the curriculum standards set by the [[Texas State Board of Education]] — fights that matter far beyond Texas because the state is the country's largest textbook buyer, giving its content decisions outsized national reach. The textbook wars are [[Christian Nationalism]] and the culture war operating at the level of what children are taught. ## Why Texas Sets the National Curriculum The [[Texas State Board of Education]] (SBOE) is an elected fifteen-member body that adopts the state's curriculum standards and approves textbooks. Because Texas buys textbooks in enormous bulk, publishers have long tailored their national editions to satisfy Texas requirements rather than produce separate versions — the "as Texas goes, so goes the nation" dynamic. A handful of elected board members, some with strong ideological agendas, have thus shaped what students across the country read. ## The 2010 Standards Fight The defining battle came in 2010, when a conservative bloc led by board chair Don McLeroy — a Bryan dentist — rewrote the social-studies standards. Among the changes: replacing "capitalism" with "free enterprise," downgrading Thomas Jefferson within a list of Enlightenment thinkers (over his association with separation of church and state), elevating conservative figures, and trimming some references to civil-rights and minority history. [[David Barton]], founder of [[WallBuilders]] and a promoter of the claim that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation, served as an expert adviser to the board — pushing the Christian-nation framing into the standards. The 2010 revision made the SBOE a national symbol of the [[Religious Right]]'s influence over public education. ## Later Battles The fights continued. In 2018 the board voted to cut Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller from the standards in a "streamlining" that drew national ridicule; it kept Moses as an influence on the nation's founding, and after backlash reinstated Keller and other cut figures later that year. In 2022, a work group's early draft of elementary standards described slavery as "involuntary relocation" — language the board rejected at its August 2022 meeting after public outcry. ## RWKB Significance The Texas Textbook Wars show the [[Christian Nationalism]] and [[Dominionism]] project operating through curriculum — the quiet, structural end of the culture war, where the fight is over the historical narrative itself. It is directly connected to the founding-mythology stakes of the [[Texas Revolution]] (how slavery's role gets taught) and to [[The Lost Cause]] framing of the Confederacy. Texas is the laboratory; the whole country reads the results. ## See Also - [[Texas State Board of Education]] - [[David Barton]] - [[WallBuilders]] - [[Christian Nationalism]] - [[Dominionism]] - [[Religious Right]] - [[The Lost Cause]] - [[Texas Revolution]] - [[Texas History Hub]]