Tarrant political organizer could cast deciding vote on curriculum with Bible-based lessons
The Texas State Board of Education is set to approve a reading curriculum for public elementary schools that includes lessons based on stories from the Bible, and a recently appointed interim board member from Tarrant County could cast the deciding vote on Friday.
Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Leslie Recine, a Republican political organizer from Pantego, on Nov. 1 to temporarily fill the State Board of Education District 13 seat vacated by Aicha Davis, a Democrat who won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives earlier this month.
Democrat Tiffany Clark, who ran unopposed for the Board of Education seat, will take office next year. Until then, Abbott’s pick will cast votes for the district.
Recine did not respond to a request for comment.
In a preliminary vote on Tuesday, Nov. 19, Recine voted to approve an elementary reading curriculum from a company called Bluebonnet Learning that includes lessons based on stories from the Bible, such as the Good Samaritan, Moses parting the Red Sea, the 10 commandments and the creation story.
The 15-member board voted 8-7 to give preliminary approval to the curriculum. A final vote is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 22.
Three of the board’s Republicans voted to reject the curriculum alongside the four Democratic members.
Clark called Abbott’s appointment of Recine “disappointing and frustrating,” noting that she could have been the “difference-maker” had she been in the seat to which she was elected.
“It’s definitely disappointing that our state leaders are choosing to play politics over what’s important for our students,” she said in an interview. “I didn’t have opponent. I was unopposed. So it’s not like he couldn’t have reached out to me and asked me to take on this this seat at that time.”
Supporters say that Bluebonnet Learning’s lessons will help K-5 students in Texas better understand U.S. history and the role that religion has played in it. Critics say the curriculum puts disproportionate emphasis on Christianity.
“The Bible has had a colossal impact on the Western world in art, history, and literature that cannot be ignored,” said Mary Elizabeth Castle, director of government relations for the Christian faith-based nonprofit Texas Values, in a press release. “Banning the Bible in the classroom would not just deny students their liberty but also take away an opportunity for a well-rounded education.”
Texas students have “the First Amendment right to learn about religious texts such as the Bible,” Castle said in an interview, adding that “there’s educational benefit that students can learn from one of the most widely quoted and most popular pieces of literature in history.”
While that impact is self-evident in Western art and literature, according to religious scholar David Brockman, the Bluebonnet Learning curriculum places too much focus on Christianity at the expense of other religions.
Brockman, who is a nonresident scholar with the Baker Institute of Public Policy at Rice University, pointed to works like Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and the works of American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne to illustrate that impact.
But the curriculum “verges on proselytizing Texas students,” he said, “under cover of the importance for understanding culture and literature and Western civilization.”
Teaching evangelical Christian versions of Bible stories in public schools will mean that students of other religious backgrounds and students from non-religious households will be underserved, he said.
“To push one particular version of Christianity, a kind of biblical version of Christianity, at the expense of others is to go against public schools’ mission of serving a diverse community,” he said.
But such a curriculum would also undermine the religious freedom that has allowed Christianity to flourish in the United States, Brockman said.
The separation of church and state “has arguably helped religion generally, including Christianity, to flourish in our nation,” he said. This separation created a “kind of free marketplace for religious ideas” that discouraged any one sect “having a monopoly over religion, as you might have with an established, official church.”
The Bluebonet Learning materials are strictly academic, Castle said, meant to help prepare elementary students to read and comprehend such pivotal works of English literature as John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham jail,” and the works of William Shakespeare.
“They’re not studying [the Bible] in a devotional way,” she said. “And in no way are these materials telling students to become Christians, and at times they don’t even talk about who God is or what a god is. They’re just studying these references as they relate to literature.”
The grade levels of the curriculum is also problematic to Brockman, who authored a report on the material for the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based nonprofit that supports religious freedom, individual liberty and public education in the state.
“They’re pushing a particular form of Biblical Christianity on these very impressionable students at an age when they can very easily be led away from the beliefs and values of their own parents, their own families or their own faith traditions,” he said. “That’s a clear violation of religious freedom.”
The curriculum “sends a signal to young people that Christianity is the only religion that’s really of any importance, that’s the only religion worth paying attention to,” he said, effectively turning non-Christian and non-religious students, parents and teachers into “outsiders in their own public schools.”
Republican board members Patricia Hardy, Evelyn Brooks and Pam Little joined their Democratic colleagues to vote against the Bluebonnet Learning materials in the preliminary vote.
In a post on X, Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican who represents District 11, said the curriculum is “not age-appropriate and does not follow evidence-based methods for teaching elementary students how to read.”
Despite her support for “biblical principles being included in school,” Hardy said the Bluebonnet Learning curriculum “fails to provide the high quality instruction that will improve our students’ academic outcomes.”
In a similar post on X, Little likewise said she supports biblical learning in public schools, but pointed to what for her were “serious flaws” in the material. She called the content “overwhelming” and too fast-paced for young students to practice reading and develop comprehension.
This story was originally published November 20, 2024 at 3:14 PM.
