Texas board votes to keep Moses, Hillary Clinton in new curriculum

AUSTIN, Texas — The State Board of Education has voted to keep Hillary Clinton, Helen Keller and several other historical figures in the Texas social studies curriculum.

The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, are baseline curriculum standards public school teachers use to create lesson plans and prepare for testing. After meeting Tuesday and Wednesday, the 15-member state board made several changes to the TEKS for social studies as part of an effort to “streamline” the curriculum.

Clinton, Keller and several other historical figures on the chopping block were ultimately kept in the history standards, as was the biblical figure Moses, who is currently in the U.S. government curriculum. Many others, meanwhile, were cut and several teaching requirements amended, including standards relating to the Civil War and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The board took a preliminary vote to approve these changes Wednesday afternoon, and will take a final vote on the entire curriculum Friday. At this time, this streamlined curriculum would go into effect in the 2019 school year.

The board undertook this curriculum streamlining effort to save teachers time and provide them more flexibility in the classroom. Students are resorting to rote memorization instead of real learning, the board said, and one way to tackle this would be to cut down on what they’re required to learn.

To do this, volunteer working groups were convened to find places to cut and tweak the curriculum. They designed a rubric to grade each of the people included in the kindergarten through high school social studies curriculum, scored each using these metrics and recommended those with low scores for deletion. The board then took up these suggested changes in September, voting to eliminate Clinton, Keller and dozens of other historical figures.

Since then, the story has gone viral, with the majority Republican board accused of allowing its politics to influence what kids are taught in classrooms.

On Tuesday evening, the board discussed that backlash. State board member Erika Beltran made the suggestion to keep Clinton in the high school U.S. history curriculum, where she’s suggested to be taught as one of several “significant political and social leaders” of the modern era.