The Texas State Board of Education voted to approve new required reading for students in its public school system Friday. Critics have denounced the curriculum change, which includes Bible passages, as a violation of the First Amendment, but state law and legal precedent allow Texas to go through with it.
In recent years, the Texas government has already been altering how its public school curriculum looks. In 2025, it notably passed a bill that required public schools to publicly display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. This move led to legal pushback and was eventually upheld by a divided Fifth Circuit panel/en banc court.
Even before the Ten Commandments law, Texas’s SBOE issued guidelines in 2024 for public school curriculum that included the possibility of reading “Bible stories” at the kindergarten through fifth-grade level. The new curriculum would mandate some biblical readings at all levels of a child’s education. The new list includes roughly 200 required texts and excerpts, ranging from biblical passages to speeches, essays, poems, and works of literature.
Although most of the focus on Texas’s education standards centers on its requirement for students to read stories like “Daniel and the Lion’s Den” or the “Sermon on the Mount,” many different books in the western literary canon are also on the table.
Books such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Ayn Rand’s What is Capitalism are also on the required literary text list. The curriculum change will take effect at the start of the 2030-2031 school year.
Texas already has the legal precedent behind it to make these changes. Although some argue that the new list is “unconstitutional” based on an alleged violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, Supreme Court precedent has already opened the door to such guidelines.
The 1963 Supreme Court case of Abington School District v. Schempp, often cited as a win for advocates of the separation of church and state, allows for teaching biblical or religious texts from a nonreligious standpoint.
“It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities,” the majority decision reads. “Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”
The Texas SBOE is well aware of this precedent, and some education officials have made statements assuring the public that the biblical texts will be considered on a literary basis.
Texas Education Agency spokesman Jake Kobersky, in a statement to The Houston Chronicle, said that the proposed list supports “what educators and scholars know about the need for a common canon of literature.”
While the issue of Christian representation in the classroom has sparked debate over the principle of the separation of church and state, most critics of Texas’s reading list decry it because it lacks “diversity.”
Critics point to the fact that the curriculum primarily uses Christian-translated, rather than Jewish-translated, Old Testament verses. They also note that some of the other stories outside of the Judeo-Christian canon are not of the same importance to their religion as the biblical stories are to Christians. For example, the story The Hare and the Moon is the only Buddhist story out of a larger book that is considered a folktale rather than a foundational moral teaching.
While many of these arguments hold water, they still miss the larger picture, which does not rely on “diversity” as its basis. By codifying a reading list, the Texas SBOE is making it easier for parents to know what their children are being taught.
In Virginia, for example, there is no state or county-level required reading list. Rather, some school districts and even individual schools decide what books to teach. Fairfax County Public Schools has no list of common literature texts listed on their online class offerings at all.
Texas’s statewide mandate does not just make it easier for parents to monitor their child’s studies but also restores a common educational foundation for U.S schoolchildren, which is embraced by many of the top colleges and universities. Columbia University and the University of Chicago, for example, have a strict core curriculum requirement for all students that aims at strengthening the schools’ communities.
According to the website for Columbia’s Literature Humanities program, “We pursue understanding together, in a shared classroom community, to learn not only how to be better readers and writers but also how to be in intellectual community with one another.”
It’s almost a point not worth arguing that if a group of people shares something in common, such as a reading list in this case, they become better acquainted with each other and grow in community. At the statewide level, a common reading list can help citizens gain common ground from a shared educational foundation.
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Although it’s extremely difficult to work out the specific details of what books should or should not be on the list — and the devil’s in the details — having a required reading list based on the principles that are at the heart of the American tradition is a fundamentally good thing for improving our citizenry.
The legal precedent for states to adopt similar practices is already in place. It’s up to state citizens to decide if they want individual schools making decisions about their children’s education behind closed doors, or if they want the curriculum to be publicized at a state level.