While many public school teachers and parents from diverse faith backgrounds rallied against Ten Commandments posters and state-mandated Bible readings, recently approved curriculum changes that spread anti-Muslim themes also have detrimental impacts on the future of public education, officials with CAIR Texas said this week.
The Texas branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations hosted a livestreamed discussion Monday night to talk about changes to the social studies Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills — the official state curriculum standards for public schools — approved for K-8 in June and for high schoolers on September 4 by the State Board of Education.
The new standards are set to take effect in 2030.
Sameeha Rizvi, the Richmond-based governmental affairs and legislative manager for CAIR Texas, said the new social studies standards will shape what millions of students learn about history, religion, culture and civic life for years to come.
“These standards include significant changes affecting the teaching of Islam, as well as representation of Black, brown, immigrant, Palestinian and other marginalized communities in Texas classrooms,” she said. “As communities continue to review and assess the impact of these changes, it is important that parents, educators, faith leaders, advocates and community members understand what was adopted and what it could mean in practice.”
So what exactly changed?
For starters, the Board approved a high school lesson requiring students to learn that “radical Islam” prompted the 9/11 terrorist attacks, rather than highlighting extremist groups like al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden. Additionally, students will now learn about early Islam based on the Prophet Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization and regulation of slavery and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.”
The Board removed references to Muslim contributions to algebra and astronomy.
“The Board has turned our classrooms into a place where prejudice is taught as fact and entire communities are written out of their own history,” CAIR Texas said in a statement following the adoption of the new curriculum. “This is not only a Muslim issue, a Black issue, or a Palestinian issue — it is a Texas issue, because a board willing to do this to one community can do it to any community next.”
The State Board of Education has an 11-4 Republican majority that appears to be taking its cues from state leadership.
Gov. Greg Abbott, who is seeking re-election in November, and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is vying for a U.S. Senate seat against James Talarico, have staunchly opposed the construction of an Islamic mixed-use development in Plano. “Don’t Sharia my Texas” became a GOP mantra during the March primaries.
Muslim advocates say religion has been conflated with political ideology by those who don’t understand it and haven’t bothered to learn about it. Abbott designated CAIR as a terrorist organization in November 2025, months after the state Legislature passed a law requiring that donated Ten Commandments posters be displayed in all public school classrooms.
The Ten Commandments mandate has prompted legal challenges and a discussion over whether Christian nationalists are attempting to take over public schools. Meanwhile, the TEKS update that Islam “is introduced through radicalism, terrorism, war and slavery” has not prompted the same level of outrage, said Jennifer Sayed, an Irving-based social studies educator and volunteer for Texas Coalition for Human Rights,
The curriculum updates aren’t just an attack on Islam, Sayed said, noting that “a lot of history is not going to be learned.”
“If you look at the U.S. history standards, enslaved people just kind of appear out of nowhere,” she said. “There’s no explanation of how slavery began in the United States, never mind its impact.”
The overarching message of Monday’s livestream — which was attended by parents, teachers, advocates and one State Board of Education candidate, Dana Van De Walker — was to educate on who the board members are, what the panel does and who’s on the November ballot.
The elected State Board of Education is overseen by the Legislature and is responsible for approving textbooks and materials, approving some charter schools and setting graduation requirements. The volunteer members don’t take their assignments lightly; meetings held earlier this year frequently ran past midnight.
Beginning in January, Muslim advocates testified at six different meetings on the social studies TEKS. Sayed said the TEKS framework, updated every 10 years, “radically departed from anything that’s ever been done before in social studies education.”
“They took away world cultures. They made a ‘western’ focus,” Sayed said. “They emphasized American exceptionalism and a Judeo-Christian influence. Anybody who’s familiar with education knows that social studies education is not supposed to have a certain bias or a certain focus to it.”
Sayed briefly reviewed new state-mandated reading lists that include Bible passages and gave an overview of the state-approved Bible-infused Bluebonnet Learning curriculum that districts, including Houston ISD, are being incentivized to use. She also noted that districts have been encouraged to adopt a prayer period, although most have rejected the suggestion, citing logistical concerns.
Monday’s discussion focused not on condemnation of Christianity in schools but on the potential problems with editing Islamic history and requiring teachings that are, in some cases, factually inaccurate, Sayed said, noting that Israel and Palestine are “mischaracterized” throughout the curriculum. “The history of Palestine is erased,” she said. “The ‘modern’ state of Israel is depicted as the ancestral land of the Jewish people.”
More than 5.5 million children attend Texas public schools, and the Muslim advocates maintain that despite someone’s faith or skin color, the alteration of history will likely lead to bullying and kids feeling that they don’t belong.
“They will not have self-confidence because of the things they’re learning in the classroom about their religion,” Sayed said. “You’re going to have a public that grows up misinformed. They’re not going to be able to engage in citizenship in a democratic society properly because they don’t have the background to do that. This is going to have dire consequences for the Muslim population especially.”
She added that the process of testifying at public hearings and working to educate the public on the State Board of Education’s role in influencing public education was discouraging at times but worth the effort.
“I think what comes out of this is a lot of doom and gloom, but there has been a lot of great solidarity too,” she said.
An overarching theme of Monday’s livestream was the importance of voting in upcoming midterm elections and staying engaged in advocacy efforts regarding public education. Nine State Board of Education seats are on the November ballot, including Districts 4, 6, 7 and 8, which represent Houston and the surrounding areas.
The advocates didn’t tell participants who to vote for but emphasized that direction to the SBOE comes from the governor and Legislature, implying that if people don’t like the curriculum changes, they have opportunities to vote out the lawmakers and policymakers who supported those changes.
Rizvi emphasized that CAIR and other advocacy groups “didn’t just let [the curriculum changes] happen.”
“There might be a perception that people didn’t advocate hard enough or no one showed up. That is completely false,” she said. “We showed up when it was needed most. Many people may be thinking that now that these changes have passed, there’s nothing we can do. There are quite a few things we can do, starting with [voting in] the November 3 election.”
