Loss of Local Control and the Erasure of Student Voices in Texas Classrooms
“In diverse communities, different ways of speaking reflect different ways of being in the world.”
— Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (1983)
Right now, the Texas State Board of Education is considering actions that go far beyond the intent of HB 1605, and they raise a fundamental question for public education:
Why are so many student voices and lived experiences missing from the stories deemed “essential”?
Exceeding the Scope of the Law
HB 1605 requires the State Board of Education to do two narrow things:
Specify at least one literary work per grade level as part of the ELAR TEKS.
Specify a vocabulary list that supports foundational coursework across the curriculum.
The law does not require:
A comprehensive reading list, including 59 titles in kindergarten
A mandated canon spanning large portions of the school year
A state-directed sequence that effectively determines what literature students will read
Yet, the Texas Education Agency has proposed reading lists that far exceed this scope. In many grades, the number of titles would consume a third or more of the instructional year, transforming a minimum requirement into a de facto unified curriculum.
This is not clarification. It is consolidation of control.
Local Control in Name Only
TEA has framed its proposal as preserving local autonomy while establishing a shared canon. But instructional reality matters more than rhetoric.
When the state mandates dozens of titles:
Teachers lose flexibility to respond to student interests and community context
Districts face pressure to align pacing and assessments
Student self-selection, the very practice the TEKS explicitly require, gets squeezed out
Local control cannot exist when time, accountability, and evaluation are tied to state-defined texts.
Religious Texts and Public Education
Among the most concerning elements of the proposed lists is the inclusion of Bible excerpts, with seven excerpts beginning in 7th grade in the original TEA proposal. While religious texts can be studied in public schools for academic or historical purposes, their inclusion in a state-mandated reading list raises serious concerns about the separation of church and state.
When texts from the Bible are elevated without comparable representation of other religious traditions, without clear academic, historical, or literary framing, and without a transparent rationale grounded in cultural literacy rather than belief, the line between instruction and endorsement becomes blurred. This risks privileging a single religious tradition within public education, marginalizing students from non-Christian backgrounds, and undermining the constitutional principle that public schools must remain neutral on matters of religion and serve students of all beliefs and none.
From Reading Lists to Vocabulary Lists: A Compounding Problem
HB 1605 also requires that the SBOE specify vocabulary derived from the adopted literary works.
This is not a neutral step.
If the reading list is overwhelmingly Eurocentric, classical, and narrow in perspective, the resulting vocabulary list will be too. Vocabulary is not just academic—it is cultural.
What words are elevated?
What experiences are normalized?
What ways of speaking are treated as “academic”?
When vocabulary is driven by a limited canon, it privileges certain cultural knowledge while rendering others invisible.
What’s at Stake Instructionally
Read-alouds and shared texts are among the most powerful tools educators have for building vocabulary, background knowledge, and language structures, especially for early readers and multilingual learners.
They are moments when students learn:
How language works
How stories reflect identity
How their own lives connect to text
When those texts are narrow, students learn an unspoken lesson about whose language and whose lives matter.
