After months of contentious meetings and work sessions, the Texas State Board of Education signed off on new, anti-Islamic social studies standards that many critics say “whitewashes” history.
Among several changes, the revamped K-12 social studies lessons deemphasize geographic and cultural diversity, minimize the role of slavery in the Mexican-American War, and eliminate a requirement to learn about Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy.
Throughout the months-long revision process, state board member Marisa Pérez-Díaz has been one of the biggest opponents to the board’s so-called Texas-first approach to how history should be taught statewide.
Pérez-Díaz represents District 3 on the state board, a South Texas district encompassing San Antonio and stretching down to Starr County on the Mexico-United States border. She’s held the seat since 2012 and was last elected in 2024.
She’s one of four Democrats on the 15-member SBOE, a governing body that has taken an increasingly partisan approach to decision making.
The SBOE was supposed to make a standard revision in 2022 as part of its regular revision process, but the Republican majority pushed to delay the social studies overhaul to 2025, a year after the 2024 elections which elected more conservative voices to the board.
The process kicked off in September of last year and mostly wrapped up this summer, when the SBOE revamped history standards and created a mandated reading list with Bible stories.
Last week, the SBOE approved final changes to high school history standards, probably drawing the largest pushback from Texas Muslims. Part of the new standards require that students learn about Islam through the lens of Prophet Muhammad’s “brutal” military campaigns and describe how the teachings of “jihad” led to the expansion of Islam and “conquest of Christian lands.”
Changes at the high school level also get rid of a standard requiring students to identify contributions of African Americans like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Oprah Winfrey to military, government and business sectors in the United States.
“What has been done to this point is an annihilation of Texas history,” said Pérez-Díaz. “It’s very evident that the language that we’re using in our standards is very biased.”
The changes to the standards won’t take effect until the 2030-31 school year and the board voted to phase in the changes over multiple years rather than introduce them all at once.
To learn more about the social studies changes and why the process has been contentious, the San Antonio Report spoke with Pérez-Díaz on Sept. 3, the day before the SBOE approved the final changes to the high school standards.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Set the scene a little. Why are the revisions to social studies curriculum standards happening now?
Prior to the 88th Legislative Session (in 2022), the State Board of Education was on an eight to 10 year cycle of review, amending and approving of standards. We went through the entire process at that point. I’m talking about a nine-month process of reviewing the standards, of coming back to the board for first reading, getting public comment and testimony. We did that twice, and in our November meeting, the Republican majority of the board supported holding off on making the final decision on those social studies standards. The only assumption I can make is they were waiting for new board members coming in and they wanted to give them an opportunity to have a say in what those standards look like. You can read between the lines in terms of what that means. But the ultimate decision was to halt all of the work that had been done.
How do these changes specifically affect San Antonio and South Texas, where most of your constituent base is from?
Oh my gosh! More than half of the students in the K-12 system in Texas identify as Latino, and then the majority of those are Mexican-American. We have Mexican American roots. That’s relevant for San Antonio because we’re south — like we are abutting Mexico. One of the conversations that we had, and we sort of deliberated over this, is the removal of language around the influence that slavery had, as it pertained to the Mexican-American War. Over the course of this week, that language was removed.
It’s those sorts of really important pieces of history that would be so important for especially students in South Texas to understand because we’re so close to the border. My fear is we are whitewashing this curriculum. We are dumbing down expectations for students, and when our kids leave Texas, for jobs and experiences, and even something like global travel, we’re leaving them at a disadvantage because they’re not going to know half of what other people in this country know about their own home state. They’ll have a thwarted understanding of what America’s history looks like.
Some of the arguments in favor of these changes are that they’re patriotic. What is the concern for you there?
I think that oftentimes when we talk about patriotism, it’s conflated with what it means to be proud to be an American. I think that people just have different definitions of what patriotism means, and some are weaponizing it against people who haven’t assimilated to the culture. It’s incredibly frustrating, and I say that as I think about the student population in Texas.
We are a majority-minority population when it comes to K-12 education, and the standards that we are setting for our young people should reflect their backgrounds because there is a lot of research that indicates that when a student sees themselves in the curriculum, or when they’re learning things that are relatable, they’re so much more likely to pay attention. They have a vested interest in learning this, and the retention of information is that much stronger. You can find any kind of scholarly article that will tell you that culturally relevant and culturally responsive pedagogy is so important.
Families are allowed to opt out of a lot here in Texas. Would they be allowed to opt out of the new social studies standards?
You can absolutely opt out. Like that is definitely every parent’s right — to opt out of utilizing the instructional material. However, those standards are what are used to create the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test, and students have to take the STAAR test. So, if your student or your family opts out of utilizing that curriculum, then fantastic. You don’t get exposed to that, but you also don’t get exposed to that.
If you’ve not been exposed to that curriculum and that content, and it’s in the standard, and it’s in the STAAR test or whatever the new test is going to be, then you’re now at a disadvantage because you haven’t received that content, and now you’re being tested on it. So it’s all sort of interwoven.
What would enforcement of the new social studies standards look like with the state’s current Instructional Materials Review and Approval Process and the Texas Education Agency’s list of High Quality Instructional Materials, some of which TEA writes themselves?
Those two processes have really upended how we’ve looked at instructional materials. And for me, the HQIM process is a struggle. One of the burns for me in particular is the fact that we have high quality rubrics that were developed by the Texas Education Agency, and perhaps they’ll tell you that the State Board of Education developed those. No, TEA has created those rubrics and they bring them to us, and then we have to say yes or no. That wouldn’t be an issue except that the Texas Education Agency is also a publisher in this process.
Even if we were to say that there is a clean process with a third party. Blah blah blah. Perception is reality, right? And there is a deep perception that there is conflict of interest there.
As we’re developing these standards, that will then determine what goes into the instructional materials that we’re creating. So it’s just kind of this spiderweb of issues.
This review process has been very tense. You’ve been called a Marxist on social media by another board member, and you threatened to sue for alleged harassment. How, after serving on the board for 13 years, are you dealing with going in every day and working with this governing body?
In all of my time on the board up until 2022, I saw progress forward. The board has always had contention around social study standards and science. But we were able to basically duke it out in the boardroom, and then we leave the boardroom and we can go break bread together. We could have conversations around family and friends. We were human, and we were kind to each other. I miss that.
I have been on this board long enough that I’ve got a thick skin. You can tell me anything, it doesn’t matter to me. Two individuals in particular spend their time and energy attacking, name calling, just throwing people to the wolves on social media. I’ve been called way worse than a Marxist. I’ve been told all kinds of nasty things, and we’ve gotten threats too. And I get that that happens in politics, but there are 15 of us, and we need to be working together. If you ever watch our state board meetings, it is very hard to keep those two in particular from not attacking some of our public testimony individuals, particularly those people that identify as Muslim. I wanted to let them know somebody’s gonna stand up to them.
I can’t negotiate with willful ignorance. If they’re choosing to behave that way, like it’s not on me to change their mind. I know I can’t.
