Is Texas Getting a Mandatory Literacy Curriculum?

Texas may soon require all of its 5.5 million public school students to read the same books—and take state tests based on them.

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State reading tests purport to test abstract reading comprehension skills, influencing classroom instruction to focus on the skills rather than on any particular topics or texts. That approach doesn’t actually boost comprehension. It also disadvantages students who are already disadvantaged by depriving them of the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand complex text.

One reason states stick to this failed model is that districts and schools generally have the freedom to adopt whatever literacy curriculum they want, or at least choose from a set of options. So even if state officials wanted to ground a reading test in specific content, there’s no common content for them to work from.

There’s been one exception. In my last post I described Louisiana’s experiment with a reading test based on texts in its state-created literacy curriculum, available for free to districts in the state (or anyone else, for that matter). The state was able to conduct this experiment only because so many districts there had opted to use its curriculum.

In my post, I lamented that Louisiana’s pilot had been nipped in the bud and expressed my hope that another state would try something like it. But given the obstacles, I was dubious that any of them would.

Imagine my surprise when, shortly after the post was published, I discovered that Texas may be embarking on an even more radical path.

A “List of Texts” or a Curriculum?

Here’s what has happened, as far as I can piece it together: Several years ago, the Texas legislature passed a law, HB1605, requiring the State Board of Education to “specify a list of required vocabulary and at least one literary work to be taught in each grade level.” (Emphasis added.) The Texas Education Agency was tasked with formulating a list for the Board to approve.

Instead of proposing just one or two works for each grade level, as the language of the legislation seemed to envision, TEA came up with lots of them. In first grade, for example, there are 34 “works” to be covered, primarily through teacher read-alouds. Fifth-graders would be expected to read 17 works and eleventh-graders 23.

And this is just the first step in a larger plan, as outlined by TEA in a submission to the SBOE. If the SBOE adopts the list of literary works—a decision that will be made in April—it will then adopt a vocabulary list “driven in part by the selected literary works.” After that, publishers will have two and half years to prepare “textbooks in support of the literary works,” to be purchased by school systems along with the works themselves. Finally, “state assessments … will be updated to include passages from the literary works.” According to TEA’s timeline, all of this will be in place by the 2030-31 school year.

In other words, this isn’t just a “reading list.” TEA is essentially proposing a required English literature curriculum for all public schools throughout the state, backed up by testing that will ensure the texts get taught.

This is a breathtaking departure from the U.S. tradition of local control of curriculum. No state has a required curriculum, or even a required list of books.

And Texas is—or was—such a fierce local-control state that several years ago TEA officials told me they had no data on which curricula districts in the state were using. The reason? Merely asking that question would be seen as infringing on local autonomy, they said.¹

So one question is how this radical shift, if it’s approved, will be received by districts and schools that are used to having freedom of choice.

Whole Books and Anchor Texts

There are other potential problems with TEA’s proposal, but first let’s consider its positive aspects.

As I explained in my previous post, the evidence indicates that if standardized tests are grounded in specific texts, teachers will focus their instruction on ensuring students can understand and analyze those texts rather than on having them practice a skill like making inferences, using texts on random topics. That shift in practice is far more likely to boost reading comprehension, especially for students from less educated families.

Another promising feature of TEA’s proposal is that it centers on whole books. That runs counter to a nationwide trend toward relying on brief texts and excerpts at all grade levels. There are a number of reasons for that trend, but one is, again, standardized tests.

If educators believe the tests measure abstract skills, they’ll naturally find it more efficient to use a brief passage to teach the skills. As one teacher explained to a parent I know, when explaining his choice to use excerpts rather than a whole book, “the skills are the same.” Another factor is that the passages on the tests are often excerpts. The theory is that teaching with excerpts will equip kids to do well on the tests.

In fact, though, relying on brief passages fails to build reading stamina and cultivate the patience needed to make it through a whole book. Plus, it makes it less likely students will gain knowledge from their reading. It’s also a lot less engaging to read an excerpt, a fact that may be contributing to the recent steep decline in reading for pleasure.

Something else to admire about TEA’s proposal is that in grades six through twelve, a whole book will serve as an “anchor” for other briefer texts that relate to it, including nonfiction and poetry. That’s a great way to build students’ knowledge and to make a literary work more meaningful by providing context.

In seventh grade, for example, one “anchor text” would be Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. It’s grouped with a nonfiction book about Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, the poem “Blessed is the Match” by Jewish resistance fighter Hannah Szenes, and (somewhat less logically) George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew congregation at Newport, Rhode Island.²

Some will fault the list for a lack of diversity, but many of the books are rich, challenging texts that are well worth reading. Third graders would get Charlotte’s Web, seventh graders A Wrinkle in Time, high school students The Great Gatsby and Hamlet.

And there are texts on the list that might surprise those who believe that Texas’s Republican administration wants to bury the darker aspects of the nation’s history. Works by Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., are there, including the entirety of Douglass’s “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Religion and Politics

Still, as with Texas’s existing state-created elementary literacy curriculum, Bluebonnet Learning, there’s evidence of a particular political and religious orientation in the proposed reading list that is likely to spark controversy.³

The aspect of the reading list that has drawn the most attention is its inclusion of stories and material from the Bible. Some of these have been taken directly from Bluebonnet: Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son in first grade, for example, and Paul’s conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus in third. The lists for middle and high school include “The Definition of Love” from 1 Corinthians and 17 chapters from the Book of Job, among many other passages from the Old and New Testaments.

State officials have argued that these passages are included to build students’ cultural knowledge, thereby improving their reading comprehension. They have a point: many texts in our society are strewn with allusions to concepts like the prodigal son and the travails of Job, and individuals unfamiliar with them are at a disadvantage. But as I argued in a previous post, the way that Bible stories are handled in the Bluebonnet curriculum sometimes crosses the line into indoctrination.

The political messages built into the reading list have drawn less notice, perhaps because they’re more subtle. But they’re apparent, especially in the works attached to the anchor texts.

I can see why Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is paired with Pericles’ Funeral Oration, but the inclusion of Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for President Reagan might raise some eyebrows.⁴ A historical novel for sixth graders set during the Civil War is grouped not only with a book on Lincoln and the text of the Gettysburg Address but also with a nineteenth-century poem that draws a moral equivalence between Union and Confederate soldiers.

There are messages communicated by omission as well. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is supplemented with four texts: Federalist Papers No. 78, Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, excerpts from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown.” An accompanying explanation says that these texts are intended to build background knowledge of topics like “judicial independence and checks & balances” and “American Puritanism.” But there’s no attempt to build knowledge of the rabid anti-communism of the McCarthy Era, which is the context in which the play was written and for which it is generally assumed to be an allegory.

Controversy and Uncertainty

Of course, much would depend on how these texts are taught. A survey of Texas teachers’ attitudes toward the religious components of Bluebonnet Learning revealed differing approaches. “I am a non-Christian being forced to give sermons in class,” one teacher complained. Another said, “I wasn’t thrilled with the additions, but I had to put myself in the mindset of ‘It’s a story from a religion. I’m not teaching it as fact.’”

Still, given the experience with Bluebonnet, there’s likely to be controversy no matter how individual teachers approach the material. Texas may show up as deep red on an electoral map, but its population is not monolithic. There are liberal Democrats there and many non-Christians, including over 400,000 Muslims. Even some Christians appear unhappy with the injection of religion into public schools.

Perhaps as a result, as of last summer, fewer than 200 of Texas’s 1200 school districts had adopted the curriculum, despite a financial incentive of up to $60 per student to do so. Of the state’s 100 largest districts, only 17 have signed up. Some districts that have adopted the curriculum have excised the religious content, fearing parental pushback. Others have had to deal with requests from parents to opt their children out of lessons, creating bureaucratic headaches.

It’s far from clear at this point what will happen with this proposed list and the plan for an associated curriculum and testing. At an SBOE meeting on January 28, the Board delayed an initial vote on the list after overwhelming opposition from members of the public who complained about “a lack of diverse authors and the religious texts,” among other things. One Board member has offered an alternative list with fewer biblical texts. The Board will take up both lists at its meeting in April.

Is This the Best Approach?

I find myself conflicted about all of this. I do believe that a statewide curriculum and state tests aligned to it could dramatically improve outcomes for students, and to that extent I applaud Texas’s efforts. But, like the Bluebonnet curriculum, the reading list as it stands now sometimes crosses the line between knowledge-building and indoctrination.

Even if the reading list’s sharp edges are softened, I’m dubious that in the U.S. context of strong local control, any state-imposed curriculum will receive a warm welcome. Carrots are likely to work a lot better than sticks in this area, and Louisiana’s experience shows that a lot can be accomplished with carrots. Using a combination of financial incentives and professional learning about what kind of instruction is most likely to be effective, Louisiana got 80 percent of its districts to voluntarily adopt its knowledge-building literacy curriculum.

From a testing perspective, though, the problem is that even in Louisiana, not all districts use the same curriculum. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, to ground a statewide test in any particular texts or content.

There’s no perfect solution to this problem, but I think a lighter touch than the TEA proposal is likely to work better. One possibility, which I suggested in my previous post, is to ground the passages on reading tests in existing state social studies and science standards. Many of those standards aren’t particularly coherent, especially in the area of social studies, but at least there’s some specified content.

That won’t address the lack-of-whole-books problem. But states could do what the Texas legislature apparently intended: promulgate a list of one or two required literary works per grade level, to be read in their entirety. Ideally, state tests would include questions tied to those books to ensure they get taught. But it would be just a list—not an entire curriculum. And the books should be works that reflect a general consensus about what literature to cover in school.

Department of Media Oversimplification

This post is already long, but I can’t resist mentioning two recent depressing examples of a longstanding phenomenon: the tendency of the media, when covering literacy issues, to reduce everything to “phonics.”

The first comes in the form of a weird headline in The 74 about a recent study of reading comprehension instruction: “In Some Urban Districts, Science of Reading Limits ‘Robust Comprehension.’” The subheading was, if anything, even worse, “Rather than promoting deeper literacy skills,” it read, “the phonics-based approach ‘may unintentionally encourage teachers to focus on surface-level goals.’” (Stephen Chiger also has some problems with the headline.)

This is a total distortion of what the study actually said (and if you want to know what it did say, you can read my post on it). The headline, and to some extent the story itself, repeated the familiar trope that the “science of reading” equals “phonics.” In fact there’s a lot of science related to reading, and particularly reading comprehension, that has nothing to do with phonics.

The article characterized the districts in the study as “using materials rooted in the popular phonics-based literacy approach”—meaning the “science of reading”—but the curricula are in fact aimed at building the kind of knowledge that enables comprehension. Two of the three curricula also have phonics components, but one does not. The point of the study was that teachers were focusing too much on discrete comprehension skills—apparently because of testing pressure—not phonics.

The other example of oversimplification is less egregious but appeared in a more prominent publication, the New Yorker. Titled “Dyslexia and the Reading Wars,” it was fine as far as it went, but—like so many other reports on reading—it implied that if schools would just teach phonics systematically, all our reading problems would be solved.

Spoiler alert: they won’t. If you want to know more, read Matthew Levey’s excellent piece describing what’s missing from the New Yorker article and why the media need to paint a fuller picture of the literacy crisis.

1. TEA has argued that its proposed list includes fewer works than are taught on average for each grade level, giving districts and schools freedom to include other texts. But it’s far from clear districts will see that as preserving local autonomy, as TEA claims.

2. The letter is apparently included to build “background knowledge” on “foundational American ideals of religious liberty and tolerance.”

3. One unanswered question is why Texas is apparently aiming to replace Bluebonnet, which was approved only two years ago, with a different literacy curriculum. The state has reportedly spent at least $100 million to develop and promote Bluebonnet.

4. The accompanying text explains that it’s there to provide “historical context of Reagan’s presidency,” but what Reagan’s presidency has to do with Julius Caesar remains unclear.