AHA Submits Comment Raising Serious Concerns About Proposed Texas Social Studies Standards

The AHA has submitted a public comment to the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) expressing serious concerns about the draft 2026 Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards for K-12 social studies. The comment argues that the standards prescribe an overwhelming amount of content at the expense of historical thinking and disciplinary understanding, while also distorting history through significant omissions and misrepresentations. The AHA urges the SBOE to devote the time, expertise, and resources necessary for meaningful revision, even if that delays final adoption. For more information about the revision process, see the AHA’s Texas Social Studies TEKS Revision Field Guide.

The comment can be read in full below.

The American Historical Association has reviewed the draft 2026 Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for Social Studies and registers serious concerns about the structure, content, and pedagogical approach of the standards as currently proposed.

The AHA is the largest professional organization for historians in the United States. Operating under a congressional charter “for the promotion of historical studies,” our association has long offered guidance on local, state, and federal education policy. In partnership with the National Council for the Social Studies and a coalition of other organizations, the AHA helped develop and publish the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework in 2013. Our Criteria for Standards in History/Social Studies/Social Sciences (1997, rev. 2024) emphasizes rigorous scholarship, broad public engagement, and the importance of transparency in standards revision. As part of a larger research project on the US history curriculum in Texas and nationwide, AHA staff have appraised academic standards in all 50 states, taking steps where appropriate to support effective revision and advise state education agencies on best practices. The AHA’s evaluations are guided by the belief that every child deserves a history-rich education.

In the professional judgement of our reviewers, the 2026 draft TEKS will not provide an effective foundation for K–12 history education in Texas public schools. As written, the standards introduce significant obstacles to student learning through omissions, distortions, and overemphasis on content coverage at the expense of historical thinking and disciplinary knowledge. Collectively, these shortcomings risk reducing students’ preparation for higher education, the workforce, informed civic participation, and success in an increasingly interconnected world.

The concerns outlined below are too extensive to summarize succinctly and cannot be addressed through purely superficial amendments. The State Board of Education has a responsibility to invest the time, expertise, and resources necessary to undertake meaningful revisions, even if doing so delays a vote on final adoption.

Summary of Key Concerns

1. An unbalanced and narrowly conceived approach to world history. Texas Education Code requires instruction in “world history,” yet this draft repeatedly invokes “Western Civilization” to justify disproportionate emphasis on a single strand of European intellectual history at the expense of the broader human experience. Even the high school world history course is framed as being “rooted in the Western tradition,” and marginalizes or excludes major historical developments in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and China, as well as global interconnections. The result is a partial and distorted account of the past that leaves students less prepared to understand—and succeed in—an interconnected modern world.
2. Distorting the American founding to advance contemporary ideological commitments over evidence-based history. Throughout the draft, particularly in standards addressing the American Revolution, founding documents, and religion students are directed toward predetermined conclusions rather than careful evaluation of historical evidence and scholarly interpretation. For example, standards in both grade 1 (1.c.5G) and high school US history (USH.d.3E) distort the American Revolution by emphasizing the “Black Robe Regiment” as a major factor in the movement for independence, despite the phrase itself being an anachronism with little grounding in historical sources and modern political associations
3. An overload of content that undermines historical thinking. The proposed standards are so densely packed with required content that they leave insufficient time for students to analyze primary sources, evaluate evidence, construct arguments, and develop core historical thinking skills. Grades 2, 5, 7, and 8 and in high school courses such as World Geography, Government, and Sociology currently contain more content than can reasonably be taught within a school year. This concern is especially acute in grade 8, where statewide testing raises the stakes for students, educators, and school districts alike.
4. Failure to support college and career readiness. The draft does not meet widely recognized expectations for success after high school graduation, including Texas’s own statutory requirements for college and workforce preparation. Most standards ask students to “identify,” “describe,” or “explain” predetermined conclusions about the past, as if by rote, instead of learning to analyze evidence, consider multiple perspectives, or reach independent conclusions. Even in high school US History (USH.d.3C, D, and E), students are expected to repeat disconnected claims about the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents rather than engage deeply with these critically important sources. Glaring gaps in standards for geography, civics, economics, and other disciplines exacerbate the draft’s limited focus on historical thinking.
5. Uneven and incomplete attention to Texas history. The middle school Texas history standards are more rigorous than portions of the high school sequence. This results in an excessive volume of required detail that risks crowding out deeper historical understanding. The overall narrative in the working draft focuses almost exclusively on Anglo-Texan experiences to the detriment of a full range of perspectives, such as Tejanos before, during, and after the Texas Revolution. Furthermore, the draft consistently neglects opportunities to connect Texas to broader national and international themes, such as environmental history, industry, and economic development. This is one of many instances where the SBOE ignored valuable input and suggestions from TEKS working groups to the detriment of the resulting draft.
6. The drastic increase in the amount of content covered at multiple grade levels makes the draft’s irresponsible errors, omissions, and distortions especially consequential, narrowing students’ opportunities to develop a fuller understanding of the past.
   1. Women’s history is consistently marginalized. The draft standards for grades 3 and 4 do not mention women at all. It is inexcusable for courses meant to convey the entirety of human experience from prehistory to the year 1500 to ignore half the world’s population. To exacerbate matters, engagement with women’s historical experiences and contributions remains limited throughout the broader sequence as a whole.
   2. Dozens of errors suggest that those directing this process have prioritized haste over accuracy. There was no “Texas Constitution of 1824” (6.c.4C), although the Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States enacted in that year did apply to Coahuila y Tejas. Before the April meeting, historians pointed out an array of issues, ranging from minor to profound, including confusing the Sun King “Louis XIV” (WH.d.17B) with Louis XVI (executed by French revolutionaries), referring to the nonexistent “Battle of the Tours” (WH.d.8G), and unaccountably ignoring the Vietnam War in a standard on the Cold War in world history (WH.d.26). Yet, these examples and many more remain in the supposedly clean and carefully reviewed draft under review.
   3. Black historical agency is diminished. The treatment of slavery, abolitionism, and civil rights often minimize the actions and contributions of Black men and women. For example, coverage of abolitionism in the early republic (grade 6, standards 2C and 2D) references only John Woolman (deceased 1772), Thomas Jefferson, and the 1807 slave trade act while ignoring Black leaders and activists who challenged slavery , including Prince Hall, Elizabeth Freeman, Richard Allen, Quock Walker, David Walker, and many others. Likewise, the only mention of the Haitian Revolution (WH.d.17C) is as a peripheral consequence of the Napoleonic Wars rather than a transformative moment shaped by enslaved people pursuing freedom. The removal of the sole reference to Martin Luther King, Jr., from high school US history at the April meeting further narrows opportunities to explore Black leadership in the civil rights movement.
   4. No history of civic engagement. The draft fails to comply with the statutory requirement that TEKS develop students’ understanding of “the history, quality, traditions, and features of civic engagement in the United States.” Beyond voting rights and formal institutions, students will receive little exposure to how Americans have historically participated in public life through organizing, advocacy, reform movements, public debate, and civic action. Repeated engagement with disagreement, negotiation, and collective action is essential to understanding civic life in a participatory constitutional republic.
   5. An overly simplistic account of economic development. The draft often repeats broad affirmations of free enterprise while giving less attention to competition, changing historical conditions, and the consequences of economic choices. The standards often juxtapose economic ideas across periods without sufficient attention to historical context, offering students few opportunities to examine debates among founders, labor organizers, industrialists, and generations of political reformers. For example, grade 8 TEKS standards position Texas workers who fought for rights as opponents of free enterprise (8.c.11F) rather than as part of a broader historical conversation about rights, growth, and economic change.
   6. Oversimplified portrayals of religion in US history. The standards frequently present religious life in ways that overlook the diversity of beliefs, denominations, and traditions that have shaped the United States since its founding. Students would benefit from greater attention to religious pluralism, disagreement, and change over time.
   7. Oversimplified portrayals of religion in world history. By collapsing distinctions between Christianity and “the West,” the standards risk obscuring the spiritual beliefs and practices of people across and around the Mediterranean world while limiting student understanding of Christianity as a global religion. Coverage of other other world religions remains limited and often lacks historical context.
   8. Adherence to outdated and discredited interpretations at odds with scholarly consensus. In its framing of the American revolutionary crisis, this draft consistently emphasizes “salutary neglect” (5.c.6A; USH.d.3A), despite the fact that professional historians of the period abandoned this interpretative framework decades ago. Similarly, the bizarre decision to attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to “moral decay” (WH.d.4F) runs counter to more than two centuries of new scholarship, missing a potent opportunity to introduce new scientific and archaeological discoveries that have transformed how historians understand the Mediterranean world in late antiquity.
   9. Insufficient attention to global contexts and connections. The draft underemphasizes the movement of people, ideas, goods, and institutions across the world. As such, the standards fail to introduce basic concepts (e.g. latitude and longitude), major developments (e.g. labor organizing and global migration), and broad swathes of history (e.g. precolonial Africa, decolonization, the Mughal empire) necessary to understand changing human experiences over time.
   10. The history of racism is absent. The draft fails to address the development and economic significance of racialized, heritable chattel slavery in the 17th- and 18th-century Atlantic world. Indeed, the term “racism” appears only twice in the entire draft, both instances occurring in the high school elective African American Studies course.
7. The draft overemphasizes continuity at the expense of historical change. The standards should be revised to highlight historical change and transformation rather than presenting continuity as the dominant pattern across disparate periods. Change over time is among the most fundamental concepts in historical study, yet the draft frequently downplays turning points and moments of rupture that shape the development of the US and the modern world. This tendency appears, for instance, in sections across multiple courses that address the New Deal, where the lasting expansion of the federal government receives limited attention, as well as in standards related to the 19th Amendment, the Progressive Era, and the Civil Rights Movement. Without sufficient attention to context, causality, and historical change, students risk developing a flattened understanding of the past that obscures how institutions, ideas, and societies adapt and transform. The result is an odd, distorted, and specious treatment of discrete events in the past with insufficient attention to context. It leaves the overall impression that though events keep occurring, the world might actually be quite similar to the way it was 250 years ago or two thousand years ago.
8. The K-8 framework constrains depth and hinders historical thinking. While the notion of cumulative learning through a chronological sequence was acceptable to a slim majority of the SBOE members when they adopted the K-8 framework earlier in the TEKS revision process, the limitations and failures of this draft demonstrate the limitations of applying this structure dogmatically with a content-heavy approach. The rapid (and often inconsistent) progression through historical periods leaves insufficient time for students to develop historical thinking skills, analyze evidence, or engage deeply with major themes and developments. Rather than allowing teachers to prioritize significance, make connections across time, or revisit themes through spiraled learning, the framework encourages broad coverage at the expense of depth and understanding. The result is uneven and difficult to teach effectively. The SBOE should convene at least one additional round of workgroups with educators and subject matter experts to refine the framework and better align it with how students learn history.
9. SBOE and TEA have offered no evidence that these draft TEKS will improve student outcomes. Running counter to best practices in social studies education, the approach adopted here is risky and experimental. Implementation cost estimates exceed $1 billion. Texas parents and policymakers should be asking questions about why the SBOE is rushing through this process without careful consideration of the expected educational outcomes of their chosen approach.

Conclusion

The draft 2026 social studies TEKS that emerged from first reading in April 2026 contains substantial problems of structure, content, historical framing, and implementation. As currently written, the standards are incomplete, riddled with inaccuracies, and so overburdened with new content that they will be impossible to teach with any effectiveness. These concerns warrant meaningful revisions before final adoption.

Before moving forward, the SBOE should evaluate the draft through these guiding questions:

1. What must be added to ensure compliance with statutory requirements and to provide students a complete education in history and social studies?
2. What must be revised to eliminate inaccuracies and bring the TEKS into alignment with historical evidence, current scholarly consensus, and disciplinary best practices?
3. What should be removed, prioritized, or reframed to ensure that the standards are teachable and support meaningful student learning?

Answering these questions through a transparent, evidence-based revision process will strengthen the standards and better prepare Texas students for future success.