Altheria Caldera: Texas educators, not the Legislature, should decide how to teach current events

(Dr. Altheria Caldera is an Education Policy Fellow with the Intercultural Development Research Association. A former teacher and teacher educator, she lives in Tarrant County.) In a local sixth-grade class, a teacher asked: “What languages do most of you speak?” The students responded, “English and Spanish.” The teacher continued: “Why do you think that is?” After some discussion, she explained: “Today, we’re going to talk about how conflicts of the past shape our current events. I want you to learn how colonialism impacted the languages spoken today by people in the New World.” The teacher derived the goal from curricula standards adopted by the State Board of Education, known to educators as the TEKS, for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. Using graphics to complement her story, she explained European expansion into the Americas and the physical and cultural decimation of indigenous peoples.

As the lesson continued, she showed the class a video of a recent incident in which a man berated and threatened Spanish speakers in a New York restaurant. “Why do you think the man doesn’t want people to speak Spanish in this restaurant?” she asked the students. As a professor supervising this student teacher, I appreciated the way she made the lesson relevant to her students’ lives. I gave her high marks for integrating activities and materials that had real-world implications. Because she connected her lesson to a current news story, she was able to help her sixth-graders understand the concept of colonialism. The Texas House recently approved legislation, House Bill 3979, that would discourage educators from teaching lessons that integrate current events. Lessons such as this could be scrutinized or forbidden altogether because it includes what some might perceive as controversial. The bill, a different version of which has passed the Senate, explicitly conflicts with what teachers are required to teach. In nearly a dozen places, Texas’ vetted standards emphasize learning about current events and issues.