The 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District – a white mob killing hundreds of Black residents, burning 40 city blocks of homes, hospitals, and schools – had a different name in Oklahoma’s official record for nearly a century. It was called a “riot.” The distinction matters enormously because a riot implies two sides. A massacre does not. Now, Texas has voted to bring that older, softer label back into its classrooms.
In June 2026, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) made a series of sweeping changes to what will become the state’s new social studies curriculum. The board’s 10 Republican members voted to reshape how the next generation of Texas students learns about race, history, and America’s past. The changes are extensive, and some of them are precise enough to be striking: a single word here, a named figure removed there. The cumulative effect of what was added, subtracted, and reframed has become a focus of debate among educators, historians, and policymakers.
Among the most telling individual decisions: the board changed “Tulsa Race Massacre” to “Tulsa Race Riots,” an event in which a white mob killed Black residents, destroyed their homes, and looted their businesses after a Black teenager was falsely accused of assault. The term “massacre” was deliberately adopted in Oklahoma years ago by historians, lawmakers, and survivors who argued that calling it a “riot” misrepresented what actually happened. Critics of the Texas board’s decision likewise argue that reverting to “riot” does not correct the historical record but instead reframes it in a way that obscures the nature of the violence.
What Texas History Textbooks Will No Longer Teach
According to Community Impact’s reporting on the board’s June 23 vote, the SBOE cut some depictions of slavery and racism from its curriculum standards, including removing lessons that would have taught students about slave revolts and pulling back in-depth discussions of Jim Crow segregation policies. Jim Crow refers to the system of state and local laws that enforced racial segregation across the American South from roughly the 1870s through the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
Among those cuts, as the Texas Tribune reported, was a requirement that students learn about “the central role of the expansion of slavery” in the U.S. Civil War, and content specifying that “Africans were enslaved in the United States because of the color of their skin.” That second removal is particularly pointed. Stripping a sentence that explicitly connects race to American chattel slavery from a curriculum standard is not a neutral editorial trim.
The board’s nine appointed content advisors also removed standards that defined racial segregation as “keeping people apart based on the color of their skin” and specified that Africans endured slavery in the U.S. because of their race. That’s a definition – a plain factual statement of what segregation was – removed from what Texas students will be required to learn.
Board members did reinstate some content, including how Nat Turner’s Rebellion “heightened sectional tensions and deepened disagreements over slavery,” and how the expansion of slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. They also clarified that the Ku Klux Klan sought to intimidate and “limit the rights of African Americans in Texas during Reconstruction.” So the picture that emerged is not total erasure – but it is selective, and the selective removals follow a consistent pattern.
As the Texas Tribune noted, Republicans removed a mandate that students learn about Henry O. Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point. Republicans also eliminated a standard specifying that students should consider “the perspectives of groups whose voices are less represented in traditional historical accounts,” while adding a requirement that introduces the biblical story of Moses alongside the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman. Tubman, for historical context, was nicknamed “Moses” because of her role leading enslaved people to freedom – a connection that exists within American history, not just biblical allegory.
A Curriculum Built by Whom?
The process by which these standards were written has drawn as much criticism as the content itself.
In October 2025, the SBOE appointed nine content advisors to guide the revision process. The composition of that group reflected limited disciplinary breadth and professional qualifications, including only one active K-12 educator, while expertise in world history, economics, and geography were notably absent. These are the people whose recommendations shaped what millions of Texas students will eventually be taught.
The American Historical Association submitted a formal public comment raising serious concerns about the draft standards, concluding that the 2026 draft TEKS will not provide an effective foundation for K-12 history education in Texas public schools. The association found that the standards “introduce significant obstacles to student learning through omissions, distortions, and overemphasis on content coverage at the expense of historical thinking and disciplinary knowledge.”
The American Historical Association’s field guide on the revision urged its members to submit public comments and contact board members about “omissions and distortions that diminish students’ understanding of the past,” highlighting the board’s focus on Western history, limited mentions of the role of women and Black people in major historical events, and the exclusion of the word “racism” across grade levels.
The new standards also eliminate the existing sixth-grade world cultures course and deemphasize world history outside of the European tradition, according to the Texas Tribune’s reporting on the board’s June vote. That matters for students who live and will compete in a world that isn’t exclusively Western.
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The Gap Between What Students Know and What They’re Taught
There is already a measurable problem with how well American students understand the history these standards are now pulling back from.
According to Texas 2036, just 32% of Grade 8 students met grade-level expectations in social studies in 2026, up from 30% in 2025 but still below the 35% recorded in 2019. Two out of every three Texas eighth-graders are not performing at grade level in social studies. The proponents of these curriculum changes argue that new standards will improve those numbers. The evidence from the content of the changes does not obviously support that claim.
Nationally, the baseline is not encouraging either. A 2020 survey by the National Education Association found that only 8% of U.S. high school seniors could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. That same survey found that 97% of teachers agreed that learning about slavery is essential to understanding American history. The gap between what educators believe students need and what students actually know is already wide. Narrowing what’s required to be taught makes it wider.
The curriculum revisions are part of a broader national debate about politics and public education playing out in school boards across the country. The debate over who decides what students learn – and what gets left out – is intensifying at every level of government.
Who Funded the Standards?
The financial backing behind the curriculum revision is also worth knowing. According to publicly available 2024 tax filings, the Texas Public Policy Foundation – a conservative think tank based in Austin – awarded a $70,000 grant to the Texas Center at Schreiner University specifically for TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) standards development. The Texas Center’s director, Donald Frazier, was subsequently appointed as one of the nine content advisors guiding the very standards now being adopted. The grant predated both the formal launch of the TEKS review and Frazier’s appointment. Its existence was not publicly disclosed in the standards documents themselves.
Democrats on the board, in a letter signed by all five members, called for “a comprehensive and independent investigation” into the grant and any related agreements. Republican board members disputed the implication of any wrongdoing. The Texas Public Policy Foundation called the Democratic request “a delaying tactic.”
For months, educators, Democrats, and public education advocates criticized the social studies revamp as rushed. The timeline supports that description. From the appointment of content advisors in October 2025 to a preliminary vote on K-8 standards in June 2026 is less than nine months – fast, for a document that will govern what millions of children learn about American history.
What to Do Now
The SBOE expects to finalize and adopt high school social studies standards at its September 2026 meeting. With a lengthy instructional materials review and adoption process, new social studies standards would be phased in over several years, beginning with the 2030-2031 school year. That gives parents, teachers, and community members a window – but not a wide one.
If you have children in Texas public schools, the practical steps are specific. Attend your local school board meeting and ask which curriculum materials are being adopted ahead of the new standards. Request the full list of topics removed from your child’s grade-level standards and compare it to what they’re being assessed on. The STAAR (State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness) test still includes social studies for eighth graders – and the gap between what’s tested and what’s taught is already a documented problem.
For students outside Texas, the state’s curriculum decisions carry weight beyond its borders. Texas is one of the largest textbook markets in the country, serving more than 5.5 million public school students. Publishers have historically designed materials around Texas standards because of the volume of orders the state generates – a dynamic Education Week has covered extensively in its reporting on the national consequences of the Texas standards fight. What gets written into Texas history textbooks has a way of showing up in classrooms across the country, whether those states voted for it or not. The 2030 implementation date may feel abstract. The content of those books is being decided now.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
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