Texas Is Building Textbooks That Tell The Whole Story

Texas is about to do something that almost never happens in modern education: force textbooks to tell the full story. From the hearing rooms of the Texas State Board of Education, we explain why a vote on social studies standards is not just a state issue, but a national inflection point that could influence American history curriculum, civics education, and textbook publishing for the next 40 to 60 years. If you care about what students learn about the founding, religious liberty, and the meaning of citizenship, this is the kind of behind-the-scenes fight that decides the future long before election day headlines. 

We unpack how we got here, including the long arc of secularization and how “separation of church and state” became a slogan that shaped classrooms and courts. David Barton connects the dots across generations: what professors teach becomes what teachers teach, which becomes what lawyers argue, which eventually becomes what judges decide. Then we get specific about the breakthrough that changes everything: moving from a system where publishers could ignore half the standards to a law requiring 100 percent alignment, plus a Texas-driven approach to publishing that makes it harder for national textbook companies to water down the content. 

We also tackle the philosophical fight underneath the policy, from DEI-driven division to the argument for a shared American identity and a renewed “melting pot” civic culture. We discuss classical education, why the Bible appears as literature in reading lists, and how that context helps students understand major works and speeches, including Martin Luther King Jr. We close with the practical playbook: show up, testify, pay attention to state board of education races, and recruit serious candidates who will hold the line on standards. 

Subscribe, share this with a friend who cares about schools, and leave a review so more people can find the show and get equipped to act.

Transcript

Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's the WallBuilders Show, taking on the hot topics of the day from a Biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton, of course, our websites, wallbuilders.com and wallbuilders.show. Just think Nehemiah, arise and rebuild the walls. That's where WallBuilders comes from. And then think radio.show, so wallbuilders.show if you want to catch up on some of the radio programs. And then of course.com, wallbuilders.com. That's our main website. And I mean, there is a wealth of information there, all kinds of programs for you, all kinds of things you can get to for, you know, the 250th, but really beyond the 250th, and we talk a lot about the 250th, but let's already be thinking about going way beyond that and actually having a, uh, a resurgence of patriotism that lasts more than just for the celebration of the three fifties, but actually for years, in fact, generations beyond that. In fact, I remember someone saying on one of our Flashpoint shows, we can either have four golden years or four golden generations. And I would certainly like to see four golden generations. I'm guessing most of you would as well. So check that out. Wallbuilders.com. Lots of great things you can get right there. And then of course, uh, you know, share it with your friends and family. Be a force multiplier. Don't just study or just think about these things yourself. Get people in a room together, study them, sharpen each other, share them with your pastor and with your church. Take the materials off of WallBuilders that about pastors and Christians in civil government and the history of the Black Robe Regiment. And give that to your pastor or to the leaders at your church. And you can be the one that starts a brush fire of liberty right there at your particular church. I call it being literally the catalyst for restoring biblical values and constitutional principles. So, check all that out at wallbuilders.com. So, David and I both on the road. Tim is on the roads stuck in an airport.  So actually, he's in the air. So, we're having to record without him. But David and I both on road as well, but super excited about some things that are breaking loose in the great state of Texas. Yes, even the promised land can get better. So, David, you have been at this with the State Board of Education for literally decades. You've been involved in the last couple of times that the standards were redone and essentially the rules for what the textbooks would be that would go into all these classrooms. But this year is different, man. This one, you've been really working hard for honestly a couple of years here. And I was just testifying yesterday at the State Board and it feels like something monumental is about to happen in Texas. Catch us up on what the State Board of Education is doing right now with regard to textbooks. 

David Barton [00:02:40] Yeah, Rick, I would say this is monumental. This is something that has not happened in our lifetime. And I would, say it's not happened in our life time anywhere in the United States. It's interesting. I was just doing a podcast with our Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, really popular guy and he's, they asked him to start his own podcast because he's got so many followers. He's super close friends with President Trump. They call each other several times a week. And President Trump chose Dan to be head of the Religious Liberty Commission. They've just finished their seven hearings across the United States and are now coming back to the President with a dozen recommendations on what the President can do to strengthen religious liberty in America. And so I was on the podcast today and we got to talking about how America has become so secular, particularly in the 60s and the 70s, how that literally they took Jefferson's Separation of Church's State phrase and turned it on its head to make it exactly the opposite of what it was. Jefferson, he very clearly expressed a separation of church and state was to keep the government from stopping public religious activities. And he did that in a 233-word letter. But here about really back in 1947, the court took that 233 word letter and used only eight words, a wall of separation between church and State. And use that to explain to people that Jefferson didn't want religion in public. He wanted a secular public square, exactly opposite of what he wrote. And so, Dan was saying, well, how, how did this happen? You know, in the sixties, I said, well Dan, it all starts back in the 1890s because that's the generation after Darwinian evolution came in. Darwinian, evolution says, hey, there is no Creator God and we've just evolved and so there's no, no Creator to direct us. And so that came out in the 1860 kind of frame, 1859. And so, by the 1890s, you had a whole generation who believed that. Well, they're the ones that started getting to be professors by 1890s. And then the professors were teaching the kids that became the professors in the 1920s. And the 1920's were teaching the people who became law guys in the 1950s. And now they're on the Supreme Court. So. Really the change to where we are was a three-generation change. It was not something that happened quickly. And, and so he thought, oh man, that I hadn't thought of that. Yeah. It's one generation teaches next and, over three generations, we lost it. Wasn't that we lost all at once. And that's really going back to where you were talking about the textbooks in Texas, this is something that has taken a good while to get to where that we're in position to be able to start turning America back in the opposite direction. This literally goes back, the standards that were coming out within Texas that you testified on yesterday that they're gonna vote on this week and we think that they will pass, this will be the most American history set of standards we've had since World War II and we're talking basically three generations there. You know, it's the great grandparents and grandparents that were in World War II. And it's taken us that long to get back to this point. And so, with this, talking particularly about Gen Z, Gen Z is really coming back to history in a really remarkable way. They're coming back the faith in a remarkable way, it's like they're not encumbered with what, you know, I'm the boomer, you're the Gen X, Tim is Gen Y, and now the next generation is Gen Z. This Gen Z generation does not seem to be encumbered with what Gen X and Gen Y were taught. They seem to moving back toward truth. And so, all that's a long explanation to say that what we're seeing this week, Rick, I think is something that's been coming for 50, 60, even 70 years. And I think it'll last at least that long into the future. If indeed we are as all three of us think, if we are in another great awakening, which I think we're in the early stages of that. This will be something that with a lot of fight and effort at the local level and with citizens getting engaged all over the U.S., they can take these new standards and they're going to affect textbooks all over the United States for the next 50 to 60 years. 

Rick Green [00:07:10] It's a, man, it's a monumental change, David, because, you know, I was, I was actually leaving the building today with some of the kids we took to, to testify and there were a bunch of protesters out there and, and, and I couldn't help but think, you know, the other side has, has been winning for a long time in the, on, in the education world and basically dominated in public education. And it just felt so good leaving there, knowing we're on the cusp of an incredible victory and actually turning the corner and reversing so much of the damage that the Marxists have done for so many years in our education system. And, you know, of course it's in the vote's going to happen here in the next few days to ultimately finalize this, but it's just such a monumental change. And, and I can't, I mean, I'd be remiss to not say, I mean, bro, this is, this is decades of work. So this is not something that happened overnight or just because a couple of good people got elected. This is decades and decades of your hard work behind the scenes, of the hard work of recruiting good candidates to run, of people in the legislature that have passed legislation that, that demands that this happen with our textbooks, those were people that got elected, you know, years ago and have been working hard in the trenches and, and failing, right? Losing, losing, losing and then winning a victory and then losing, losing, loosing, then winning the victory. It's, it's not an overnight success. It's you know we joke about it, right. 20 year overnight success, maybe 30 year overnight success, but I just think that shout out is, is deserved both for you and Cheryl and the WallBuilders team and the, and, and all of the people that worked on the campaign, some of our friends, the legislature, like Phil King and Brian Hughes, Dan Patrick, these guys that have been working to get us to this point for such a long time. And it's so important. I mean, I, you could just feel the energy at the, at the meeting. You could, you can, you, could tell that everybody realizes, and when I say everybody, I mean the other side too. In fact, one of the, one, the board members in our press conference who we've had on the radio her, Brandon Hall just a brilliant young man that's been outstanding in this work. And that's what he said at the press conference. He said the other side knows how monumental this is. That's why they're coming out of the woodwork. That is why they are doing everything they can to stop this from happening because they know what a big deal it is. So anyway, I didn't mean to filibuster you bro, but I just think people need to know this did not happen overnight. This has been a lot of hard work to get to this point. 

David Barton [00:09:30] Well, you know, Rick, you were talking about the hard work and how many people are involved and we're able to, we're on the verge of being able to do something that will affect the entire nation. I know we're talking Texas, but there's something here that it's much bigger and it's something, I mean, the way we've gotten here to this point we're successful is through a path that I would never have charted and I wouldn't even have thought of it. Because you mentioned I've been doing this for a little bit. So back in 1998 I was one of the folks and we came up with a really good set of standards back then, but the national publishers would not incorporate the standards we came up what and so they keep using the educrats that they've had at, you know, Harvard and Princeton and Yale and all these flaky guys that don't like America. And so, we come up with good standards, but the textbooks don't ever reflect that and so then again, I was did this again in 2009. So, you know, 11 years later, you go back and you look at the textbooks, are there any things you need to update? And we came up with, again, a really good set of standards. And again, the national publishers, McGraw-Hill, Scott Forsman, all these national publishers. They didn't include the stuff we came with. They included some of it that they agreed with, but they didn't include the rest of it. And so, this time, and by the way, and all those other previous cycles. The standard was that for your textbooks to be used in Texas, you only have to have 50% of the standards we write put in there. And so they can take the 50% that is the most, that the weakest part, you know, whether we're saying, hey, there was an American War for Independence and that's maybe as much as they put, you know, they don't talk about the people or the heroes and the principals. But this time, the state law now requires that a hundred percent of what they're voting on this week, that if it passes, and we think it will, that 100% of it has to appear in the textbooks. Now, that means that we're gonna get all the details that none of the national publishers put in before because somehow the other, some legislators came up with the idea and said, hey, why don't we in Texas, why don't we create our own publishing house for our own text books? Rather than using all the national guys who write for California and Oregon and Michigan and New York City, why don't we create our own publishing house that actually likes history and will report history? I would never have thought of that as a solution. And so, you know, here I am, I can help with the content, but that's a creative idea. Why don't create our publishing house? And so now that it's happened, and now that word has gotten out about this is going to be a 80-year throwback to sound history standards. Suddenly we have all these other states saying, hey, we want to get Texas textbooks, we won't that to be the textbooks for, I don't know, Missouri or for Indiana or all these other states. And so suddenly instead of only 50% of what we come up with going in, you're looking at a hundred percent. And now it's going all over the United States, particularly to the redder states and yeah, I would wish it was in blue states too. But you know what? If you get it in all the red states, that's more than half the United States, and that means 10, 15 years now when these kids that go through this become the professors and they start teaching the next generation, they're gonna be teaching all the kids in the blue states as well, and they will have a whole different view. I mean, this, it's just hard to say how far reaching this change will be. And it goes to that concept that this is gonna touch the next two or three generations. I think what's happening this week in Texas is something that will be felt for the next 40 to 60 years. And I think that what we're doing this week would not have been possible if God hadn't touched other people to come up with ideas to create our own publishing house and do things differently and stop letting the progressives minimize this down to just warm water, take 50% out. So, I just, I'm amazed to see how God orchestrates all this. And I'm a amazed to what I think is going to be impact of this for generations to come. 

Rick Green [00:13:43] Yeah, I love that. So, you know, it's kind of the, I mean, it is the whole thing about it. You can only come up with so many good ideas yourself, but that iron sharpening that happens and all these other people getting involved is the reason a representative government works in a deliberative body where, you know, you bring a bill, you think you got all the solutions and, and you think people bringing amendments is hurting your bill, but often it actually helps because you have, you have other people coming up and God using all these different people. So really, really cool. David Barton is giving a report folks on State Board of Education just the hard work over the years and some of the things that are happening now and how it affects you So this is not just a Texas battle or fight or a result. This is restoring good education for people all across the nation. So it's a big, big deal. We'll be right back here listening to the WallBuilders Show 

Rick Green [00:15:32] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show. I appreciate you joining us. Be sure and visit the website, WallBuilders.com. And I want to encourage you today, get on our email list. Make sure you sign up for the emails there at WallBuilders.com, that way we can keep you up to date on things like this that we're talking about and you'll see some of these victories and even potentially have the chance to be involved in some of the things at the local level as David was talking about in the first segment today. There's something everybody can do to help improve civic literacy in our country. So be thinking about that as we continue this conversation. And David, there's also you know, just a, a huge sort of philosophical change here that, you know, the kind of the DEI stuff had dominated over the last few years and education became all about what you used to talk about you, you warned about this years ago, this deconstruction where instead of out of many, one, E pluribus unum would come in together and, and assimilating we were, we were tearing people apart and separating them into all these categories. And I heard a lot of testimony on that at the State Board yesterday and all sounded sweet and nice. It was all like we just want everybody to feel welcome, but, but it really does divide us. Speak to that for a moment, how that shift happened in the last few years, where a lot of people started saying, wait a minute, this is racist. Why would we look at each other based on color of skin? Why are we judging each other? Based on that, we want to all, you know, find unity in what, what we, uh, what, we are as Americans together. It just seems like that was a big argument that had to be won in order for y'all to be able to, you, know, accomplish as much as been done here with the overall historical standards. 

David Barton [00:17:02] Yeah, and it's not an argument that we've won yet, but we've wanted at this point at the State Board, we haven't won in Texas and we sure haven't won it in America, but at the same time that Darwin was doing his progressive secularism and this secular evolution, non-theistic stuff, it's the same, one of his contemporaries at the time doing the same kind of work was Karl Marx, all the Marxism. And Marxism says, hey, there is no God, and all that matters is all the different groups and your individual group identity. And so, we've got this smorgasbord, instead of having the melting pot in America, we've 832 different nations. I'll go back to what happened just a couple of weeks ago with, we were talking about the chaplains and how that Hegseth is trying to fix chaplains. The US military recognized over 200 different religions and had a chaplain in the military for 200 different religions and some of those religions, they've never even had a single soldier claim that religion and yet they have it a designated religion, they have a chaplain for it. I mean that that's how you divide things, hey, we're all Americans and we can get together shoulder-to-shoulder. And so they went back through and now it's down to 31 different groups and I'm not saying religions because they have Baptists and they have Catholics and they Methodist and the Assembly of God, and they've got Jewish and they got Sikh and they have others, but no longer is it this thing of you're unique because of how different you are. It's like, you know, we're all Americans and we've got a lot of stuff in common, and it's just a whole different approach. By the way, going back to what you were doing yesterday, all the folks that you got mobilized to be there at the State Board of Education, there is no question that that has impact. And for people to show up at local school boards, your own state board of education, you find that stuff about that, that they're doing, all 50 states have some type of state boards of education and they're responsible for curriculum and materials in those states. You know, find out about it, get involved. Rick, you had folks there yesterday and you turned them out in high measure. And that is so impactful. There's 15 people on the State Board that will vote for all of this. And seeing people show up and express what you were just talking about that hey, we're not a salad bowl here, we're a melting pot. We don't keep all the ingredients separate. We all blend together as Americans. And that's what literally they have to hear. And I know talking to you earlier, they had two big debates going on. One, the first debate literally was on the literature list, the reading materials that go with these history standards, and the second was on standards themselves. And so, another piece of good news is those standards that you and all those who testified yesterday defended in that literacy list, part of what the state legislature has done is say, you know, we're going back to classical education, not this progressivism. And that means we're gonna study the old classics like the Founding Fathers studied, including the Bible. And so at every grade level, there are Old Testament and New Testament excerpts out of the Bible, and that's not theology. That is Bible as literature. And there's no question that so much of the greatest literature in the history of the English-speaking world came from guys who read the Bible. And whether it's Paradise Lost or whether it is the Inferno, Dante's Inferno or whether its Pilgrim's Progress or anything else, these classics, they came out of guys who had the Bible. And so even Martin Luther King, the letter from the Birmingham jail, when he talks about being in jail like Paul was. Well, unless you know something about the New Testament, you don't know what he's talking about when he talks about Paul in jail. And what he talks about being at the fiery furnace, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, unless you read that part of the Bible, you have no clue what Dr. Martin Luther King is talking about in his speeches. And so that's where the Bible's literature is coming back in. And again, the stuff that was that was being debated yesterday, Rick, with your guys engaged and all that. This could go across the U.S., but it's because people here in Texas got engaged. So thank you for doing that and for mobilizing people. And once this gets done this week, if this vote goes as we expect it to go, it'll be a year or two that other states can start getting this in their states as well. 

Rick Green [00:21:35] Yeah. And I'll tell you, bro, I was so inspired. There was a, there were groups that, that drove in, you know, I'm not kidding for like five hours, there was a whole group of 25, I think it was from Lubbock, Texas, all the way from Lubbuck. Came in, spent their own money, stayed in, paid for hotels to stay the night so they could do multiple days, the big groups from Dallas. I mean, from all over the state, they came in and these are, these are citizens that are getting a chance to participate in, in not just what their, their government looks like, but what their education system looks like. And it was kind of fun at the press conference, we had somebody sang the national anthem and it was so good when I, when I got up, I said, I feel like I should say play ball after that. And in fact, I do want to say play, ball play the game of politics, which is the whole system of representative government and, and people being involved in coming in and, you know, who's got the best idea and who's going to organize the best, they win the day and what are we winning today? We're winning the future of education in Texas and, and restoring an American exceptionalism. So it was, it was kind of fun for, for everybody to, to, to realize, you know, hey, this is, in some ways a healthy competition. It's literally coming in with the best ideas and best organization. And the other side, I think has gotten at for a long time. And we just sort of thought too often on our side, oh, it'll just take care of itself. The best idea will win instead of actually, you got to work hard and you got it, you gotta do all this organizing and you got to spend years in the, in the trenches. But we're starting to see some of the fruit of that labor and I appreciate what you said, it's not over. We haven't won the culture part of some of these big philosophical issues but we've finally at you know in the fight and in the trenches. So that's good Well with only a few minutes left David, where do you think we go with this? Like what would be for people for our listeners to kind of see some are know what to look for next? What do you think happens next? 

David Barton [00:23:21] You know, Rick, the biggest thing that has, the biggest challenge we've all faced in this is getting eight votes out of the 15 votes on the State Board to do this. Now, getting eight vote to vote for traditional history and social studies as opposed to seven, what we've had is we have on our state board in Texas, we have 10 elected Republicans and five elected Democrats, and yet the Democrats, regularly get seven votes and eight votes and even nine votes because you have Republicans that go where the Democrats go. Why is that? It's because people in Texas have not paid much attention to State Board of Education races. They don't even know who they are. Listen, we've got the average State Board of Education race is two congressional districts, it's actually two and a half congressional districts. I mean, these people represent a lot of folks. And they get the voter turnout like you get in a mayor's race. They just don't get any kind of coverage. And so, where we go from here is, OK, other states start paying attention to down ballot races, start looking around now for a neighbor you know of that's really good on this stuff and go recruit them and say, hey, we need you on the local school board. We need you in the State Board of Education. We need you on the County History Commission, whatever. You start looking for people. And that's been our biggest battle throughout this whole process. Over the last several months is just trying to keep two or three of the Republicans from being progressive Democrats and voting with progressive Democrats. And so, if other states or other counties or other regions want to have any kind of success, you got to start looking at recruiting the right kind of people who have the right values. And that's one of the big things you can do. Look around you, get groups together, get 10 of your friends and say, Who do we know that would be really good on this? That could really handle this. What do we do to get them elected? That's the kind of stuff that'll start changing the whole country. 

Rick Green [00:25:25] Wow, it's almost like a microcosm in each community of what what we just did here at the state level with the State Board of Education, people could do the exact same thing at the local level with their local school board. 

David Barton [00:25:37] Yeah, absolutely. And that's where change comes from because so many of these state board of education members started out as local school board members and then they just kind of rose up the ladder. It's the same way that a lot of congressmen started out a mayor, city councilman, and then went for state rep or state senator and then on the US Congress, the US Senate. It's kind of the training process that you have in Exodus 18:21 where the scripture says choose out leaders of tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands, which is your local, county, state, and federal. And that's exactly what you see working out on the State Board of Education. It's now we're at a state level, but we need to start focusing on that local level to train people for the state level so that we can win these battles in all the states in years to come. 

Rick Green [00:26:22] Well, great victories but much work still to be done. And everyone listening right now, you can be a part of it. Go be a of the solution in your community. Get involved, be a good citizen. Start getting together with your neighbors. Start studying these things. Go to wallbuilders.com today, get you some good materials. And then of course, today's program is great news. So, share it with your friends and family. We appreciate you listening. You've been listening to The WallBuilders Show.