The State Board of Education (SBOE) is meeting Jan. 26–30, and one of the agenda items has already drawn significant attention. The SBOE is set to take a preliminary vote on a Texas Education Agency (TEA) proposal to create a required, statewide literary works list for English Language Arts. This would be the first mandate of its kind in the nation.  

Under the draft proposal, Texas public schools would be required to teach a significant number of specific reading selections at every grade level beginning in the 2030-31 school year. The proposal goes well beyond the single-text-per-grade-level required by relatively new state law and would instead mandate dozens of readings in some grades.  

Most coverage of the proposal to date, such as this Houston Chronicle article by Isaac Yu, has been about the controversial decision to include excerpts from the Old and New Testaments across multiple grade levels. However, educators (who have seen a push toward curricular homogeny and away from community-driven differentiation at the class, campus, and district levels) are also asking whether the list as a whole ensures access to a baseline of reading materials that can be easily augmented at the local level or whether it’s an attempt to embed a state-mandated mono-perspective in local classrooms.  

Although the list includes many commonly read works, the range of perspectives represented is narrow, making it hard for many students in a state as diverse as Texas to recognize characters and authors like themselves. This is true, for example, even in the list’s inclusion of religious selections, which can provide a valuable supplement for understanding literary references. Notably, all references to religious texts in the proposed list are directly from or related back to a single religious text: the Bible. No comparable selections from other faiths are included.  

As a part of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), the selection list could ultimately be tied to the newly branded version of the STAAR, raising concerns about instructional autonomy and the growing reach of state mandates into classroom practice. The SBOE’s elected members (several of whom are not running for reelection) have the authority to revise, reduce, or expand the list before any final approval. Educators will want to pay close attention to how this conversation unfolds and to whether SBOE members push back on a proposal that would make Texas the first state to require specific reading materials for every public school student.