Who Writes What Students Learn
What is the true goal of American public education? Is it a pathway to democratic equality? Does it serve a social efficiency purpose? Or is it a means of social mobility for students? According to theorist David Labaree (1997), our education system has never settled this question, and the resulting tension is one with which educators — including the students in my graduate course on curriculum theory — must contend. These students name what they see using the vocabulary provided by Labaree’s framework, and they read their professional conditions as agents, not observers.
In Labaree’s framework, democratic equality views schooling as preparation for citizenship in a self-governing society, while social efficiency treats it as a mechanism for sorting students into the labor market. Social mobility, on the other hand, frames education as a private good—a credential that primarily benefits the individual who accumulates it. Because American public schooling has never chosen among these competing goals, Labaree argues that this ongoing tension is not a problem to be solved, but a tension educators must navigate.
The tension Labaree describes is now playing out in Austin, Texas, where the State Board of Education’s rewrite shows what curriculum adoption reflects. The Texas State Board of Education is rewriting the social studies standards for 5.5 million Texas students, and the rewrite is not a curriculum dispute. It is the public face of a long campaign to treat state standards as the most efficient lever for moving 5.5 million students into a conservative ideological frame, aligning what they learn with the policy preferences of a small donor class. The mechanism of that campaign — the funding chain that turns ideological preference into classroom content — is now documented in a $70,000 grant from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, disclosed in federal tax filings and first reported this month by The Texas Tribune.
The rewrite is part of a statutory update of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), the state standards that determine what public school students learn at each grade level. In September 2025, the State Board of Education approved a new social studies framework that emphasized Texas and United States history and de-emphasized world history and world cultures. A panel of nine content advisers, appointed by the board, drafted a list of historical topics under that framework. The board began debating the list in January 2026 and gave preliminary approval to the full package on April 10.
During the January 28 session, board member Staci Childs (D-Houston) challenged the draft’s clinical description of the Civil War. She proposed replacing the abstract phrase “slavery denied liberty and was the main cause of the Civil War” with language that humanized the cost of the institution: stating that slavery took away people’s freedom, treated Africans as property rather than human beings, and that the Civil War was fought to decide whether slavery would continue in the United States. Childs argued that the original draft was not only too abstract for second graders but also insulting to the descendants of the enslaved.
In response, board member Julie Pickren (R-Pearland) objected that this humanized framing was “too heavy” for seven-year-olds. To further dilute the focus on the African American experience, Pickren noted that white Europeans, Native Americans, and Chinese laborers had also endured forms of bondage. Despite this, the amendment passed eight to five, though five of the ten Republicans on the board voted against it.
All five Democrats on the board have since signed a letter calling for the process to be paused pending an independent investigation. This request was not granted. The preliminary package moved forward on schedule, and the standards will return to the board for final approval in June.
The list of historical topics was drafted by a panel of nine content advisers appointed by the state board in 2025. Almost none of the advisers have K-12 classroom experience in Texas, and several have public ties to conservative advocacy organizations. Critics of the process have noted that in previous TEKS revisions, Texas teachers led the development of the standards.
While the advisory panel assumed the lead role in the revision, panel board member Donald Frazier, a historian who directs the Texas Center at Schreiner University, was being paid by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) to help shape the rewrite, under a financial arrangement he had not disclosed to the full board. Its discovery in a 2024 federal tax filing prompted all five Democratic members to sign a letter requesting an independent investigation into his ties with the think tank. This request was effectively sidelined when Republican board chair Aaron Kinsey declined to schedule a discussion, allowing the preliminary vote to proceed as planned.
The grant documents do not reveal a scandal; they document an ordinary arrangement that typically operates without a paper trail, traceable in this case only because a 2024 federal tax filing made it so. A small number of ideologically aligned funders shape what millions of American children will be taught. They fund the research centers, which produce the content advice, which shapes the drafts state boards adopt. This chain is detectable only when a tax filing, a reporter, and a board minority make it so. The Texas rewrite illustrates the coordinated apparatus of the American Right, which uses think tanks, advisory panels, and state boards to manipulate public school curricula.
The Texas story is not an isolated case. As of spring 2022, 17 states had enacted policies restricting how K-12 public school teachers could address topics the statutes label ‘challenging concepts’ — race, gender, and the country’s complex past. Research from the RAND Corporation’s American Educator Panels found that roughly one in three U.S. public school teachers was working under such restrictions at the time (Woo, Lee, Prado Tuma, Kaufman, Lawrence, and Reed, 2023). By January 2023, follow-up RAND research reported that 51 percent of U.S. teachers were subject to state or local restrictions, and even teachers under no formal restriction reported limiting their classroom discussions of political and social issues (Woo, Diliberti, and Steiner, 2024).
This chain—stretching from a think-tank grant to a library shelf in a second-grade classroom—is s documented. The institutional pressure it produces has coincided with a rising sense of professional anxiety among educators, who increasingly rank the intrusion of external political opinions into the curriculum as a top source of job-related stress.
My course asks practicing educators to analyze their institutional roles within a framework that assumes the three goals of public schooling exist in productive tension. Labaree believes the tension is constitutive of the work; the educators in the seminar believe it too. They choose democratic equality as the goal that best describes the purpose of public schooling.
The Texas rewrite is teaching a different lesson. When one of the three goals has the backing of a financial and policy apparatus, the tension is resolved by administrative fiat. Instead of functioning as a framework of three competing purposes, this board tipped the scales to assert the dominance of one. Democratic equality survives as a decorative mission, the value teachers carry while the institutional machinery is hard-wired to ignore it. The educators in my course accurately read the tension between their professional commitments and such institutional constraints. A profession must now decide what it does when ideological interference becomes the primary condition of the work.
The State Board of Education is set to vote on the final social studies standards in June. While parents, educators, and historians continue to offer testimony and Democrats on the board voice their objections, the board remains on track to ratify a package that will define the educational landscape for 5.5 million Texas students starting in 2030.
Though the grant was disclosed and the conflict of interest identified, the request for an independent investigation was refused, allowing the vote to proceed unimpeded. Beyond the immediate curriculum, this outcome doesn't address the board’s procedural machinery. It fails to determine whether public disclosure is sufficient to alter future staffing or whether content advisers will continue to be recruited from the ideological ranks of their funders. Ultimately, the June decision ensures that these arrangements operate under strategic nondisclosure, becoming public knowledge only after the window for meaningful intervention has closed. This coordinated opacity reflects the broader critique of educational policy and market-driven reforms analyzed in Farahmandpur and Wimmer (2024).