"We surveyed teachers to come up with this list..." No you didn't.

One more quick note on Texas's proposed statewide required reading list.

CALL TO ACTION REMINDER:

The Texas State Board of Education will meet June 22 - June 26 to vote on final approval of the mandatory statewide reading list I wrote about here and here.

The good news? The board listened to parents, students, authors, and teachers and significantly cut down the list. If you emailed, called or testified in person, you helped make that happen!

But now the board needs to hear from Texans who want our kids to read texts that represent our diverse state and introduce students to the full array of world literature. Here’s how you can help:

1. Testify in person at the State Board of Education meeting on Monday, 6/22. (Sign up here before 5:00 on Friday, 6/19)

2. Email or call your SBOE representative. (ASAP)

---

This is a quick follow-up to my last post about the Texas State Board of Education’s very bad proposed reading list, which the board will debate before a final vote at their meeting in Austin next week.

I’m drafting my testimony for Monday’s public comment period¹ and preparing for questions/objections that board members might raise.

One claim the list’s defenders have trotted out is that the list was written with input from Texas teachers. This often comes in response to testimony from teachers (like me) who point out that we weren’t consulted in any meaningful way in the list’s creation.

Texas Public Policy Foundation—which has been way too influential in the creation of these new lists—recently argued that the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts “is attempting to override not just the members of the State Board of Education but the input of the broader community of English teachers. A total of 5,700 teachers were polled and over 10,000 titles were reviewed for age appropriateness, literary value, and TEKS alignment to form the initial literature draft list.”

The basis of that claim is a survey the Texas Education Agency made of teachers in early 2025 asking them what texts they teach in class. TPPF is right on one count: around 5700 teachers responded, and TEA turned their responses into a handy word cloud visual that they showed to the State Board in November and then …

… promptly ignored.

Seriously: Look at the word cloud above, and then compare that to the lists for grades 6-12 that the SBOE will vote on next week. Do you see Anthony Trollope’s The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne on that word cloud of teacher responses? No? What about Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan?

Do you see Ayn Rand’s “What is Capitalism"? Do you see Thomas Sowell? Do you see A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain? The Clever Teen’s Guide to the Russian Revolution?

Of course not.

The proposed required reading list 9th grade. Notice that only one of the nine texts listed (Animal Farm) was mentioned by Texas teachers as a commonly taught literary work.

There is a bit of overlap between the two lists. Elie Wiesel’s Night is on the SBOE’s 8th-grade list, Fahrenheit 451 made it onto their 11th-grade list. Animal Farm, The Giver, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet all made the cut. But no one is objecting to those texts. We’re objecting to all the weird stuff that somehow showed up.

In fact, if the State Board had built their list around what teachers say we already teach, we’d have a lot fewer objections.² The teacher list is much more diverse and representative, including texts like A Raisin in the Sun, Things Fall Apart, The House on Mango Street, Brown Girl Dreaming, and Beloved.³

Anyway, keep this in mind next week when board members (or their allies) try to claim that they built this list with teacher input. They didn’t.⁴

1. I hope you are, too! If you’re going to be there, send me a message, and I’ll make sure to look for you.

2. It’s also important to understand that teachers were not asked what they believed should be on a statewide mandated list. They were asked what they currently teach. Those are different questions, and it’s disingenuous to suggest that teachers answering one question had meaningful input on the other.

3. In fact, TEA did outline (somewhat) their process in relation to the teachers’ survey answers in their November presentation to the State Board. According to TEA, they started by creating a list of titles from “national, state, and successful education system lists.” Only then did they look at the Texas teacher surveys, and then compared those teacher responses to a list of titles that appeared multiple times on the list they had already created. I haven’t found the full results of TEA’s survey online yet or the full list of orgs from which they sourced their initial lists. If you have access to that information, please let me know! I would love to know how many Texas teachers are currently teaching Thomas Sowell.

4. Next week’s meeting is shaping up to be a big to-do. Board member Julie Pickren appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast trying to recruit people to testify in favor of the lists and the new Social Studies standards. (Pickren also called people testifying against the lists and Social Studies standards “a taxpayer-funded axis of evil.”) Christian Nationalist phone company Patriot Mobile is chartering a bus to bring supporters down, as well. But LOTS of folks have also let us know that they are coming to testify against the lists and the Social Studies standards.