Education officials in Texas to vote on curriculum that would add Bible lessons to reading and language arts teachings

Officials in Texas are set to vote Tuesday on a new public school curriculum that incorporates lessons from the Bible as early as kindergarten, that provoked criticism from advocacy groups and families across the state.

Officials in Texas are set to vote Tuesday on a new public school curriculum that incorporates lessons from the Bible as early as kindergarten, that provoked criticism from advocacy groups and families across the state. The state Board of Education will vote on revisions to its K-5 reading and English language arts materials, part of Bluebonnet Learning, the Texas Education Agency-developed open education resources. The state-owned curriculum is optional. It stems from House Bill 1605, which offers a $40 per student annual incentive to schools that adopt the materials. The revised materials have been criticized as disproportionate, focusing on Christianity much more than other religions. In a kindergarten lesson about the “Golden Rule,” for instance, instructors are told to teach students about Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount from the Bible’s New Testament. The teacher guide for that lesson briefly mentions Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and other faiths but is strongly focused on the Christian Bible. A kindergarten unit about art appreciation also includes a section dedicated to the book of Genesis and artworks inspired by it. The unit briefly mentions Islam and Judaism but primarily focuses on the story from the Christian Bible. A first grade unit on “sharing stories” teaches “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” from the New Testament in the Christian Bible. The third grade unit on ancient Rome features a section dedicated to the life of Jesus and Christianity in the Roman Empire. And a poetry unit for fifth graders includes psalms from the Old Testament taught alongside poems from Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams. No other texts from religious books are included in the unit. The proposed materials “violate the separation of church and state and the academic freedom of our classroom, but also the sanctity of the teaching profession,” said Texas AFT, a union that represents over 60,000 public school educators and support staff across the state, in a news release. The materials contain “an unwelcome and unnecessary quantity of Bible references,” said the union.