The Texas Education Agency released new education materials this week, including a K-5 reading program designed with biblical references.
The materials still need approval from the state Board of Education, a decision expected in November, and if that happens, local school districts will be able to decide for themselves if they want to use them starting in August 2025. However, the new instruction materials come with a monetary incentive, giving districts an additional $60 per pupil if they use them.
Aicha Davis, a Democrat on the Board of Education run by Republicans, anticipated the materials will be approved, according to education news site the 74, saying, “they would totally support something like that.”
Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) released a statement in support of the new program.
“The materials will also allow our students to better understand the connection of history, art, community, literature, and religion on pivotal events like the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement, and the American Revolution,” Abbott said.
The new program comes as lawmakers in many states are trying to find ways to accommodate religious people who send their children to public school, and return curriculums to be more in line with classical education standards. It also follows a vote just days prior to the release of the program, during which the Republican Party of Texas passed a platform calling on the state Board of Education to require teaching of the Bible in school.
The new materials may face legal challenges regarding separation of church and state, but proponents of the program say they are legally padded by the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin, which allowed public money to fund religious charter schools, as well as a 2007 Texas law that allowed high schools to offer elective classes on the Bible.
References to the Bible will be made throughout the reading program in a move Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath said will help improve reading scores in a state where slightly over half of students are reading at grade level.
“If you’re reading classic works of American literature, there are often religious allusions in that literature,” Morath told the 74. “Any changes being made are to reinforce the kind of background knowledge on these seminal works of the American cultural experience.”
One such biblical reference uses Leonardo da Vinci’s Renaissance painting The Last Supper to guide fifth graders to the New Testament as the primary source for understanding Jesus’s crucifixion.
“The Bible explains that Jesus knew that after this meal, he would be arrested, put on trial, and killed,” the materials state. “Let’s read the story in the book of Matthew to see for ourselves what unfolded during the supper.”
Another reference includes the story of Esther in the Old Testament, where she and 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.”
Under the new materials, first graders would be taught the vocabulary word “compromise” using Samuel Adams’s plea at the Continental Congress asking those of different faiths to pray together, while fifth graders would be read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he compares his civil disobedience to the Book of Daniel and the “refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar.”
Robert Jackson of Flagler College’s Institute for Classical Education said students are “going to need to have some biblical literacy, if only to interpret John Milton, or Dante or Shakespeare.”
The program has brought with it concerns from those who do not want religious references in public school, and some believe it is a back-end way to present the Bible to students whose families may not want them to have access to such material. Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, however, said on a radio talk show that the new standards will “get us back to teaching, not necessarily the Bible per se, but the stories from the Bible.”
“As a Christian, I think it is OK [to teach the Bible] as long as you’re normalizing the introduction of all religions and all types of mythologies so students have a varied and robust and true depiction of the materials in the text of our past,” Staci Childs, a Democrat on the Board of Education, told the Texas Tribune. “To only infuse Bible verses and teachings of the Bible is completely insensitive to all the different types of students we have in Texas and a disrespect to the faiths they may acknowledge.”
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Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian liberal arts school in Michigan that has a program advising public and private schools on classical education, helped write the new program along with the Texas Public Policy Foundation. According to the 74, Amplify, a curriculum vendor in New York, opted out of supplying the curriculum after it claimed the new standards included only biblical material but not texts from other religions. The Board of Education denies those claims and says that the new materials do include other religions.
The materials include lessons on Jewish religious celebrations, as well as a unit about the Indian poet Kshemendra, who studied Hinduism and Buddhism.