How angry parents helped flip Texas: choosing real education over culture wars

Michelle Palmer has run for the Texas state board of education twice before, but this time felt different.“I was hearing from day one from people who had not really been politically active before that they were worried about education,” Palmer said.Voters were upset about a number of issues, including a voucher program, signed into law by Greg Abbott, the governor, that sent $1bn of public money to private schools. They were concerned about new social studies standards that critics say promote Islamophobia and minimize the impact of slavery. They had seen students detained by immigration authorities, and Abbott threaten to strip district funding if students protested against ICE. And they were angry about a curriculum incorporating Bible verses that felt “forced down the throats” of schools, Palmer said.In an August poll, 45% of Texans disapproved of their state’s handling of K-12 education, while only 28% approved.“People don’t like for their kids to be messed with,” said Palmer, who teaches history and government to 11th and 12th graders. “I really think that’s a lot of why what happened here in Texas happened.”Palmer won her race last Tuesday, helping to give Democrats a probable majority on the state education board for the first time in more than 30 years (one race has yet to be called). Her win came alongside victories for Gina Hinojosa, who made education a major part of her campaign for governor, and James Talarico, a former teacher who has criticized the inclusion of the Bible in public school curricula.“Public education was on the ballot, and voters made their voices clear,” said Thomas Ray Garcia, a Democrat and community college professor who will join Palmer on the board in January.James Talarico, a Texas Democratic senator-elect, at the US Capitol on Monday. Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/APNewly elected Democrats will have their work cut out for them if they want to reverse the effect of years of Republican control, many say. The Texas state senate remains in Republican hands, which will limit how much Hinojosa can do as governor to overhaul the voucher program.But the incoming state board members, several of whom are current or former classroom teachers, say they hope to refocus public education in Texas on student learning, rather than on what they describe as “culture war” issues that have captured attention in recent years.“I think we can turn toward local control, toward putting educators at the table again, and making sure that all the decisions we make at the Texas state board of education are based in research and the science of learning, and not in what I call the science of politics,” Garcia said.The growing anger over Texas educationTexas lawmakers and education officials have made headlines nationwide in recent years for their efforts to align public education in the state with Christianity and conservatism. In 2024, the education board approved a curriculum called Bluebonnet Learning, which incorporates Bible verses and stories, including a kindergarten lesson involving the Sermon on the Mount. While the curriculum is not required, districts receive state money for adopting it, which critics say can make the materials impossible for underfunded schools to refuse.The following year, the state legislature passed a law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. And earlier this year, the education board approved two controversial curriculum changes: Texas’ first-ever statewide list of required books, which included excerpts from the Bible as well as Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for President Ronald Reagan, and the new social studies standards, which critics say minimize Black and women’s history and paint Islam in a negative light.“It’s just not representative of all of the students who live in this incredibly diverse state,” Palmer said.Protesters outside the Texas state house chamber before lawmakers voted on a bill to require every public school classroom to display the Ten Commandments. Photograph: Bob Daemmrich/AlamyProponents cast the changes as a way to teach students about morality, or simply to introduce them to the Bible as literature. But the changes riled many voters in a state where test scores in many areas lag behind the national average, experts and candidates say.Texans have been displeased with the new books list, along with a 2021 law meant to discourage the teaching of “critical race theory”, said Jonna Perrillo, an education historian and professor of English education at the University of Texas at El Paso. “A lot of Texans are really unhappy with the focus on those kinds of issues when they know that is not the cause of our low test scores and our low student performance.”“I had a lot of people just kind of quietly whisper to me, ‘As a Christian, I don’t believe the Ten Commandments should be in public schools,’” said Kimmie Fink, an education advocate and mother of two in Liberty Hill, Texas. “There was this fear around people being public about it.”The voucher program, established in 2025, has also stirred resentment in a state that ranks 47th in the nation in per-pupil education spending. By encouraging families to leave the public school system, vouchers can cause public schools to lose enrollment and even close, critics say.“Where I live in El Paso, the student population is going down,” Perrillo said. “We just don’t have enough students to fund our schools, and so vouchers only exacerbate that.”Hinojosa got her start in education, fighting the closure of her son’s school in Austin and then running for school board. One of her key campaign promises was to “end the voucher scam”.It helped propel her and others to victory, as voters turned out to flip state offices blue, sometimes for the first time in a generation. In Texas this election season, education was “the issue”, said Dana Van De Walker, a Democrat and community college administrator who ran to represent her district on the state education board.Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa holds a news conference in Austin, Texas. Photograph: Eric Gay/APVan De Walker received about 600 more votes than her opponent, Audrey Young, a Republican incumbent, with some provisional ballots remaining to be counted. If her win is finalized, Democrats will have an eight-seven majority on the board in January.Fink, who testified before the state board against the Bluebonnet curriculum and the books list, had gotten used to seeing her advocacy efforts fail. But she kept working. This year, she became a fellow with the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Christian group that opposes religion in public schools. “I just put my everything into getting people to vote in the midterms,” she said.Now her earlier experiences at the state board feel less like losses and more like “playing the long game”, she said. “We went and we fought and we told our stories, and I have to believe that that played a part in what we saw last Tuesday.”What happens next at Texas schoolsNow the question before Democrats is how much they can do to reverse years of Republican policy and enact their own agenda. The books list and social studies standards have not yet gone into effect, and newly elected Democrats are optimistic they will be able to amend them, especially since Hinojosa, as governor, will be able to appoint a new board chair.Given the outcome of the election, “it’s hard for me to see that book list going into effect”, Perrillo said.An attender wears buttons in protest during an HISD school board meeting at Hattie Mae White education center in Houston in August 2026. Photograph: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle via Getty ImagesGetting rid of vouchers will be more challenging. The board of education doesn’t control the voucher program, and any changes would likely have to go through the state legislature, which remains partially Republican controlled. Hinojosa is “going to be hemmed in a little bit by the Texas senate”, Perrillo said.However, newly elected Texas Democratssee the election as a sign that voters across the state, regardless of political affiliation, are tired of the way their state leaders have handled education.“I never saw myself as a Democrat first. I saw myself as an educator first, and I think that resonated with a lot of Republicans,” Garcia said. “Their perception was that their party was prioritizing private interests and culture war issues over the real issues impacting their children’s education.”Fink, for her part, hopes Hinojosa will decline to fund any expansion of the voucher program, even if she can’t end it entirely. But she also has a broader hope for the state of Texas: “My vision is just this place where children of all identities and all faiths and all families can go to school and feel safe and welcome and reach their potential”.