Education Policy and Curriculum

The Texas State Board of Education has approved a sweeping set of corrections to the state-designed 'Bluebonnet' reading curriculum, a Bible-infused program adopted by at least 300 districts and charters, after teachers and officials flagged hundreds of errors in its first year of classroom use. At a Feb. 26 meeting, members from both parties said more than 4,000 fixes were initially identified, while the Texas Education Agency later said roughly 1,900 changes—many duplicated across teacher guides and student workbooks—are being made, including factual corrections, math typos, grammar fixes and replacement of improperly licensed images. The optional curriculum, whose adoption is incentivized with extra funding, was already controversial after religious scholars and advocacy groups warned its lessons privileged Christianity and blurred the line between preaching and teaching. Online materials are supposed to be updated within 30 days, but officials did not say how long it will take or how much it will cost to reprint and replace physical books, prompting one Republican member to warn the board is 'setting a precedent for sloppy publishing.' The episode underscores how quickly a state-backed push to inject more religion into public schools can run aground on basic quality-control failures, and will likely fuel fresh legal and political scrutiny of Bluebonnet as other states watch Texas’ experiment in Bible-infused curriculum.