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The Texas Board of Education gave final approval to changes to the state’s high school social studies curriculum, a controversial move that will impact how students are taught about Islam and Christianity.
The amended social studies curriculum, which covers U.S. history, government and world geography, comes after dozens of people gave public testimony, with most expressing their opposition to the finalized version.
The board approved language asserting that “radical Islam” motivated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks rather than taking a more narrow focus on the terrorist groups involved in the attack.
The material also requires students to study early Islam through Prophet Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes,” the “normalization of slavery” and the taking of female captives as “harem slaves.”
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Several Democratic State Board of Education members pushed back against the wording, but the Republican-majority board still approved that section and the other changes on Friday.
Muslim groups and students, as well as multiple curriculum experts, also spoke out against the new changes.
“I feel attacked, as if my religion doesn’t belong,” Habiiba Quresh, a 15-year-old Muslim student, told the board, according to The Texas Tribune. “I shouldn’t have to defend my religion in the middle of history class because of one sentence someone on this board wrote.”
At least three of the board-appointed curriculum experts also warned against the new language.
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Andrea Hutchison, a social studies curriculum coordinator for Prosper ISD, argued the material did not “hold up to close historical scrutiny,” according to the outlet. Robert Koons, a philosophy professor at UT-Austin, said most nonreligious scholars find the source of the claims “not very reliable,” adding that he would warn against including material that is “not based on well-established secular sources.”
The Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the board’s decision to “single out and denigrate Islam, minimize the brutal realities of slavery and segregation, and entirely erase Palestinian history is an affront to our system of education and the First Amendment.”
“No credible scholar of history validates the bigoted caricatures of Islam this curriculum teaches,” CAIR Texas and CAIR Action Texas said in a joint statement. “Even the board’s own appointed experts warned it doesn’t hold up to historical scrutiny, yet the board voted against removing it. Texas students of every background deserve an education that tells the truth about their history and their neighbors’ history, not propaganda that teaches them to see each other as threats or erases them from the story altogether.”
State Board of Education Chair Aaron Kinsey pushed back on criticism of the revised standards, saying opponents had “sensationalize[d] all these topics and [made] them seem more divisive than they actually are.” He added that board members “worked through, democratically, how to make those choices on behalf of our constituents” and said he believed they “did an exceptional job overall.
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But Republican school board member Julie Pickren boasted about the material’s final approval, according to Fox 7.
“This social studies law that got us here, I’ve been working on for over 10 years with the House and the Senate, the Texas House and Texas Senate … and so this is such a huge accomplishment; this vote kind of bookends 12 years of life’s work,” Pickren said.
The approved curriculum is expected to be phased into classrooms during the 2030-31 school year.