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Introduction

Earlier this year, the Texas Education Agency (TEA), in accordance with recent state legislation, made available for public review and comment a newly state-developed Texas Open Education Resources (OER) curriculum for K-5 Reading and Language Arts (RLA). If adopted, this curriculum would be made available for use by school districts. According to a May 2024 TEA press release, the OER RLA curriculum:

"weave[s] together elements of the science of reading with a cross-curricular knowledge-building approach consistent with a classical education model that is focused on the fundamentals. OER RLA immerses students in classic literature along with reading lessons about art, history, culture, science, and technology. As a product built for Texas students, the content features strong representation from the diverse people, places and history of Texas."

What is missing from this description is one of the most conspicuous and potentially controversial characteristics of the OER RLA: its heavy coverage of religion and its incorporation of passages from religious texts, most prominently the Bible. Indeed, the  incorporation of religious source materials in the curriculum is so extensive that the developers include a special note about it in the OER RLA Program and Implementation Guide. The curriculum, they write, includes “content...from different religious traditions, including various monotheistic and polytheistic faiths around the world.”

The guide further notes that the curriculum’s inclusion of “content from or about religious source material...is not for the purpose of advancing any particular religious belief.” There is nothing wrong with the coverage of religion in public schools per se. Indeed, as I have noted elsewhere, there is a growing consensus among U.S. scholars and educators that as the world becomes more interconnected and American society more religiously diverse, public school students need a basic working knowledge of the world’s religions. Yet in the public school context, coverage of religion must be presented in a balanced and nonconfessional way, not only to protect the venerable and widely cherished constitutional requirement for church-state separation in our country, but also because public school classrooms in a state as diverse as Texas are likely to have students with families that follow a variety of faith traditions or none at all.

However, soon after the OER RLA instructional materials were released for public review, they drew criticism for their use of biblical materials and their apparent Christian bias. The curriculum was widely called “Bible infused” in the news media. Southern Methodist University scholar Mark Chancey noted a “pronounced Christian emphasis” in the OER RLA materials. The political context exacerbated these concerns: “The new curriculum was released amid a broader push by Texas Republicans, who control state government, to put more Christianity in public schools,” while in nearby Oklahoma, state education superintendent Ryan Walters in late June “directed all public schools to teach the Bible.” State officials in Texas, however, defended the OER RLA curriculum’s inclusion of religious materials, including biblical texts, as necessary for student understanding of religious allusions in literature, art, and culture.

Because of my interest as a religious studies scholar in how educators approach teaching about religion, the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund (TFNEF) commissioned me in June 2024 to conduct an independent examination and assessment of the coverage of religion in the OER RLA instructional materials.

Beginning the review process in mid-June 2024, I conducted a careful examination of all units of the K-5 materials, including those with no religion content. I focused on the teacher guides, which contain student readings and activities as well as instructions and guidance for teachers. I also consulted the family support letters which accompany units throughout the curriculum; the stated intent of these letters is to inform families about the topics covered in the unit and encourage discussion at home.

I evaluated the religion coverage in the proposed OER RLA instructional materials in terms of criteria set out in my earlier work on religion coverage in public schools:

• Is the coverage of religion accurate? Does it accord not only with what members of a given religion believe but also what is accurate historically?
• Is it balanced? Does it give students a sense of the diverse religious environment they will encounter in society?
• Is it nonconfessional? Does it avoid favoring or promoting one religion over others?

While I applaud the OER RLA materials for exposing K-5 students to religion and its role in the human story, I find that the coverage of religion in this curriculum is at times inaccurate, generally lacks religious balance, and too often fails to provide students with objective, neutral, nonconfessional coverage of religions necessary for a public school context, with its diverse student and teacher population. In this report, I discuss five key findings from my independent examination:

1. The OER RLA curriculum overemphasizes Christianity, offering very limited coverage or none at all of other major religions and faith traditions.
2. One-sided portrayals of Christianity and its impact whitewash difficult historical truths.
3. Lessons subtly portray Christian faith claims as straightforwardly true, opening the curriculum to the charge that it is meant to proselytize students.
4. The authors appear to go out of their way to work detailed Bible lessons into the curriculum even when they are both unnecessary and unwarranted.
5. Though religious freedom is vital to American democracy, the curriculum distorts its role in the nation’s founding while underplaying the importance of other fundamental liberties cherished by Americans.

I also found numerous misleading passages, inaccuracies, and errors in the OER RLA instructional materials. These are discussed in the appendix to this report.

This report was originally published by the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund in August 2024.