In Three Texas School Board Races, the Uproar Over “Parents’ Rights” Is in Overdrive

This week, a set of elections in Texas is threatening to take the state’s social studies curriculum—which is facing a big overhaul in 2025—to an even more politicized extreme.

The Texas State Board of Education already has an overwhelming Republican majority with an established opposition to climate science, “inappropriate” books, and diversity and inclusion efforts (labeled, somewhat incorrectly, as “critical race theory”).

But this week, three experienced incumbents on the board are facing challengers who are even more right-wing and who see the incumbents as insufficiently bullish on fighting the culture wars.

The heated nature of the race centers on a planned revision of the social studies curriculum. Two years ago, the board punted on any major revisions until 2025, concerned that a set of recommendations—made by working groups of experts, parents, and educators selected by the board and the Texas Education Agency—would enrage conservative parents. The working groups had proposed two new ethnic studies courses, for Asian American and American Indian studies, and revisions to the existing African American Studies and Mexican American Studies courses. Conservatives on the board took umbrage at proposed lessons about Juneteenth, the gay pride movement, the legacies of slavery, Native American dispossession, and race-based discrimination. According to the Texas Tribune, the board fielded hours of public comment before the vote to delay.

When the state board voted to delay changes to the curriculum until 2025, one of the incumbents, Pam Little, said the delay was not politically motivated, but rather motivated by concerns from parents. She added that some of the recommended material was too heavy and not age-appropriate.

Now Little and two other school board members, Pat Hardy and Aaron Kinsey, are facing challengers who boast a commitment to, among other things, “dismantling liberal curriculum” and eliminating any traces of “radical leftist agenda.”

To be clear, the three incumbents are plenty conservative themselves and reliably vote with their Republican colleagues. Kinsey, who was appointed at the end of last year by Gov. Greg Abbott, has criticized the “negative” portrayals of the fossil fuel industry in proposed science textbooks (he is the CEO of an aviation oilfield services company) and has advocated for increased library oversight to stop the “sexualization” of children in public schools.

Hardy, who has been on the board since 2002, has similarly echoed climate change denialism talking points. In an interview with Politico last year, she complained about those who make climate change “their religion,” suggesting that “both sides” of the issue needed to be heard.

And Little has promised to “be the conservative fighter Texas families can depend on.”

But an editorial in the Federalist, written around the time of the 2022 primaries, summarized the growing resentment toward more traditional policymakers like Little, Hardy, and Kinsey.* The author, singling out Little, argued that being an occasional swing vote meant Little was a benchwarmer who lacked the courage “to take the new culture war by the horns.”

Hardy’s challenger, a pastor named Brandon Hall, has doubled down on that, emphasizing a commitment to “dismantling liberal curriculum” and eliminating social-emotional learning.

He also advocates for “school choice,” seizing on Hardy’s reluctance to use taxpayer dollars to fund religious schools. (“Should someone wish to start a school of Satan, and they will, I do not want my tax dollars to pay for that education choice,” Hardy told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram last month.)

Matt Rostami, who is running against Little in District 12, wants more patriotic education, declaring, on his website: “We are in a sad state when the only thing a student knows about Thomas Jefferson is that he owned slaves, not that he wrote the Declaration of Independence or that he invented the swivel chair you might be sitting on.” (It’s unclear where in Texas state curriculum it omits that Jefferson helped write the Declaration of Independence.)

Another of Little’s challengers, Jamie Kohlmann, said in a February interview that she was raring to amend the social studies curriculum.

“They have these proposed social studies [state standards] that literally had stricken the phrase ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ from any discussion pertaining to 9/11 because that could offend people apparently,” she told the right-leaning Dallas Express newspaper. (The revision working group suggested eliminating the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” because it could promote the misleading narrative that terrorism is linked to a singular religion, rather than being a global issue.) Kohlmann has been endorsed by Sen. Ted Cruz and Lt.
Gov. Dan Patrick.

Battles about education policy are not novel, Rebecca Deen, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Arlington, told me on the phone. In the early 20^th century, she said, creationists panned the inclusion of evolutionary theory in science courses. In the 1980s, pushes for secular education ran afoul of parents who wanted prayer in the classroom.

Just like today, in those cases, parents intervened when they became worried about losing control of their children’s values. “Nothing,” Deen said, “will get somebody agitated like a perceived threat to your child.”

The difference today is a hard truth of MAGA-era politics: A more policy-based approach to campaigning, no matter how much that campaign uses the language of fighting “woke indoctrination” and protecting “parental rights,” runs the risk of appearing too moderate for ultra-MAGA voters. There’s a race to the bottom in so many down-ballot races this election cycle that seems to revolve solely around the contention of who can claim to be the most anti-establishment candidate. In this case, should the challengers win, Texas public schools will lose out on a (slightly) more nuanced approach to social studies, and the curriculum will become even more damagingly whitewashed.