Texas New Social Studies Include Islam’s Role in 9/11, Reject CAIR’s Demands, Pro-American

By Carole Hornsby Haynes        September 20, 2026 

This year commemorates 250 years of the world’s most successful experiment in self government. Yet America’s youth hate the country that has given them a life of freedom and prosperity, like no other nation, and are actively trying to destroy it. Sixty-one (61%) percent favor socialism. 

That is not surprising. Social studies courses have drifted leftward and apologize for the American story or ignore it altogether. Public education has failed to educate American youth about free market capitalism that is responsible for much of America’s standing as the world’s largest economy.They are swayed by Democratic Socialists who tout a utopian worldview but fail to note socialism’s failures and atrocities. 

In Texas this will change. The State Board of Education approved new social studies standards that alter the way our nation’s history will be taught. Students will learn the truth about American virtue, freedom, free enterprise and the perils of communism. 

Since Texas educates nearly 11 percent of the nation’s public school students, the turn away from the Marxist influence to the true American story is transformational. However, the true reach of Texas standards is greater because of the state's outsized influence on the American textbook market, which is the the second largest in the country. 

Desite the Board’s resolve to draft pro-America, anti-woke standards, Red-Green (Socialist-Islamic) activitists swamed their meetings en masse over the past year, demanding “equal” time for other cultures and foreign religions. The Board had to endure hundreds of hours of testimony. CAIR demanded – and will continue to demand – a total revision of U.S. and Texas History with the removal of Founding Fathers and founding documents, including the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. That’s not all! CAIR wants the Alamo portrayed as being designed by Muslims to honor Islam. 

Disregarding CAIR’s demands, the Republican-majority Board approved standards that require students to learn about early Islam throught the lens of the Prophet Muhammed’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 standards also include that “radical Islam” motivated the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11. Students will learn the truth that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaida terrorists who hijacked four commercial airplanes, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth in a Pennsylvania field after passengers and crew fought back. 

In an interview at Newsmax, Board Chairman, Aaron Kinsey, questioned why the truth about 9/11 and the ideology that drove the terrorists should be any more controversial than identifying Japan’s responsibility for the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. 

There were major considerations for the Board as they pondered what content will be taught in Texas classrooms.

First, Texas students are faring poorly in social studies – only 32% meet grade level while a mere 16% achieve mastery according to STAAR scores. The question is why. 

Social studies lessons are often cut short by math and reading classes in elementary grades that are under accountability systems. Social studies are usually taught in isolation from other subjects, rather than bulding an interconnected understanding of events and concepts. 

Clearly a new direction was needed. 

Second, under Texas law the revised standards had to include the Old and New Testaments, foundational American documents, and instruction in the dangers of communism. 

Grades K-8 

In 2025, the Board adoped a new framework for the social studies standards that included the legislative mandates cited above. The K-12 standards were created, reviewed, and sent to the Board. 

In June 2026, the Board approved the standards for grades K-8. The new curriculum framework uses a layered, chronological approach to connect people, ideas, events, and institutions in world, U.S., and Texas history in a chain of cause and effect. Students will trace the development of liberty, self-government, free enterprise, and constitutional principles through the generations. They will learn how Enlightenment ideas about liberty and self-government actually produced the American founding. 

For grades K-2, the new model introduces stories about the Mayflower Compact and its foundation in Christian values, Plymouth Colony, Thanksgiving, American and Texas symbols, including the Star Spangled Banner, Texas our Texas, the U.S. and Texas Pledges of Allegiance, so that students from a young age will develop a sense of American identity and patriotism.

As a young teacher many years ago in Tennessee, I spearheaded a pilot program for the school district where I taught to integrate social studies and English Language Arts. It was fun to integrate music from the colonial and American Revolutionary era. My students found history more interesting because they could grasp how people and events connected during a defined time period. That is why I was so delighted about the direction of this revision and having an opportunity to be a part of creating the new framework and then reviewing the draft standards. 

In grades 3-8, a chronological integrated approach fuses a time sequence for U.S. history, Texas history, and world history. By blending the subjects at the exact moment events happened, the lessons come alive for the students and gives them a complete picture. 

The current 6th grade World Cultures course was replaced by content that is integrated with U.S. and Texas history. It presents history through the lens of Western civilization and its influence on the founding and development of America. There was much protesting and handwringing by globalists who want toshow America in a negative light and emphasize other cultures over America to indoctrinate our students as little global citizens. 

For the first time, eighth graders will have a dedicated Texas history course that ranges from the founding to the present and connects the Texas story to the larger story of the nation and the world. The course is excellent with exciting material that students will love to study. 

High School 

In September, the Board approved grades 9–12 social studies standards for U.S. History, U.S. Government, World Geography, World History, and Personal Financial Literacy. 

The Board achieved its goal. The new standards have a pro-American theme that runs throughout the U.S. and World History courses. 

United States History builds on content introduced in earlier grades to increase understanding of American identity. Students will analyze the “historical development of a shared commitment to individual liberty, representative government, and the free enterprise system” and evaluate their continued influence on our society. 

The World History course “consists of a high-level overview of world history with a special emphasis on the western and American tradition often highlighting contrasting ideals and their impacts across time and place.” Students will learn about the “benefits of the United States free enterprise system” that is “predicated on limited government and strong property rights, emphasizes the individual exercise of economic decisions without government interference, allowing people the opportunity to prosper.”.

In U.S. Government, students will learn about the differences of communism, socialism, and capitalism. They will learn about the relationship of religion to America's core ideals, including civic virtue, limitedgovernment, rule of law, and preservation of liberty. 

Note: Implementation will begin in the 2030-2031 school year. In the interim, the content will be created, reviewed, and teachers trained. 

Personal Financial Literacy 

In the last Texas legislative session HB 27 was passed, requiring students to complete a standalone one semester course in personal financial literacy to graduate. The requirement begins with 9th grade classes in the school year 2026-2027. 

In September, the Board approved the standards for the course. Students will learn how to apply financial planning, goal setting, and wealth building across the timeline of life to achieve personal goals and financial independence. 

To implement the Texas legislative mandate for the study of communism, students must compare outcomes in a free enterprise system with a socialist or communist system, including understanding that socialism is a transitional stage toward communism in Marxist theory. 

This education is critical because only 39% of American youth favor capitalism today – 61% favor socialism! Public education has failed to educate American youth about free market capitalism so they do not understand it. Nor do they have any idea about the incredible suffering that socialism brings. Consequently, they are easily lured by the false promises of Democratic Socialists. 

Students will learn the financial impact of completing their education and finding a job to build financial stability and long-term wealth before getting married and having children. They will learn how important an education is in the achievement of their personal goals. 

This knowledge will bring enormous change in the mindset of future generations who will determine the direction of our country.

Several third party organizations agressively attempted to change the standards to accommodate their open resource materials. One of these was Next Gen Personal Finance, a California nonprofit. NGPF’s lessons use culturally responsive teaching to fuse race-based Marxist propaganda into units on “racial discrimination” in financial wealth, banking, housing, education, and employment These lessons claim that racial discimination – the lesson infers that whites are the oppressor – has impeded the economic progress of blacks. 

The Board remained focused on their goals and the woke companies were not able to influence the standards. We can bet they will continue to try. 

Note: Parents must be vigilant that the radical NGPF free open resource material is not used in the schools. 

(For further information, go to this link.) 

Literary List 

In 2023 the Texas legislation directed the TEA to compile a list of literary works with at least one work for each grade. This project has been in progress along with the social studies revision. 

Under Texas law, the revised standards were required to include the Old and New Testaments. 

The Bible is a foundational literary and cultural text needed to understand Western civilization and America’s founding documents. “Our history books must underscore the profound influence the Church had on the formation of our government,” said David Waller, a pastor at Fairpark Baptist Church in Fort Worth. 

Texas is the first in the nation with a K-12 Literary List. It includes around 200 Bible passages, essays and books designed to integrate within the English Language Arts classes the historical events and people which students are studying in social studies.

Following state educational code, the list includes religious texts such as The Parable of the Prodigal Son, The Road to Damascus, and Jonah and the Whale. 

In grades K-2, literary works include a variety of folktales, fables, fairy tales, and myths, such as Cinderella, The Tortoise and the Hare, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and Beauty and the Beast. Historical texts include George Washington, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Paul Revere, and James Madison along with readings about the Revolutionary War, the Constitution, the first Thanksgiving, and the Alamo. 

In Grades 3-8, students will read Benjamin Franklin, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Treasure Island, The Mayflower Compact, The Gettysburg Address, and Man in the Arena. 

The high school book list includes Great Expectations, Animal Farm, The Raven, The Scarlet Letter, Pride and Prejudice, What Is Capitalism, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, and Hamlet and His Problems. 

Note: The Literary List will be implemented in 2030. 

More Revision Is Needed. 

The State Board has done an outstanding job with the new social studies standards and Literary List. Yet there is one area that is highly problematic – the “Civil War.” The problem is far too complex for this brief summary of the social studies revision and should be addressed at another time. 

Briefly, here is the problem. 

The 2010 Social Studies standards required teachers to cover states' rights and sectionalism, along with slavery as a secondary factor, as issues connected with the “Civil War.” Over the next few years, it became fashionable for governmental bodies to follow in lockstop with the Red-Green Alliance (Socialist-Islamic) that is fomenting racial divisivness using slavery with the South being the oppressor and blacks as the oppressed (Sound familiar? This is Critical Race Theory.) 

In November 2018, the Board officially approved slavery as a central cause of the Civil War rather than secondary to sectionalism or states’ rights. The revised curriculum was implemented in the 2019–2020 school year. This is in the new standards. 

Here is an example of a new standard for Grade 1. Students are to“identify that Africans were enslaved in the United States because of the color of their skin.” This standard incites racial division and portrays whites as evil racists. 

I can expect this propaganda from Democratic Socialists but not from a supposedly “conservative” set of standards. With this kind of message, children will learn racial division early with white students being discriminated against. 

FACT: Slaves were the products of slave wars between black Africans. Black African rulers, such as the King of Dahomey, enslaved and sold black Africans to Arabs and to British and European colonies in the New World. 

Here is another standard that pushes the racist theme. Students are to “describe Southern slavery, including slave life on plantations and farms across the South, and explain the cotton gin and its effect on the economics of slavery and domestic slave trade.” 

Question: Why are slavery and slave life to be described only in the South but not in the North? 

FACT: The slave trade flourished in the North for more than two centuries and free blacks in the South also owned many slaves. Slavery was an economic system in the United States, not just the South. The standards fail to mention that it was Northerners, not Southerners, who purchased slaves from African leaders and brought them back – with ships flying a U.S. flag, - to the North where some stayed and most were sold to the South. When slavery ended in the North, owners sold them to Southerners generally. So much for abolishing slavery! The North depended on Southern cotton to create products in their factories that were heavily funded from the tariff paid by the South. 

Question: Why don’t the standards mention the Corwin Amendment that was offered by the Lincoln administration to the South as Constitutional protection for slavery yet the Southern states rejected the amendment. The catch? In return for the protection of slavery, the seceded states had to return to the Union and pay the high tariff on imports that provided much of the funding for the federal government and Northern industrialization. Not one seceded state returned to the Union. 

Question: Why don’t the standards mention the real reason why Lincoln was trying to force the South to return to the union? 

Conclusion 

As they stand now, the “Civil War” section of the new standards aligns with the Marxist Critical Race Theory of oppressed v. oppressor. It continues the propaganda spread by the Red-Green Alliance. 

Since Texas educates nearly 11 percent of the nation’s public school students, the racial division that has been incited in recent years will continue. To compound the effect, the true reach will be greater because Texas is the second largest textbook market in the country.