“Some of the members on the board just don’t understand simple things, like what the study of history is,” Austin’s outgoing State Board of Education representative, Rebecca Bell-Metereau, told the Chronicle.
On March 3, Texans living in the State Board of Education’s District 5, which encompasses Travis, Hays, Bastrop, Caldwell, Guadalupe, and Blanco counties, will vote in the primaries for their new representative on the board that decides what students are learning in Texas public school classrooms.
As District 5 candidate Abigail Gray says, most Texans aren’t aware of what the SBOE does, or what happens during their board meetings. “It’s hard to find information about it unless you spend hours digging and really watching closely what’s happening in the meetings,” Gray said.
The State Board of Education sets the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills curriculum and approves the instructional materials used in every public school, an effort led by the Committee on Instruction. They also approve charter school applications (led by the Committee on School Initiatives), and decide how the $60.6 billion Texas Permanent School Fund is used (Committee on School Finance).
While the SBOE is elected by their large constituencies (about 1.8 million Texans each), the chair, currently Aaron Kinsey, has been appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott. Kinsey, CEO of an aviation oilfield services company, has no experience working in education outside of his service on the board. The board is unpaid, but is reimbursed for their food and travel expenses.
“You have a chairman who will fight against … CRT [Critical Race Theory], DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion], ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance], and whatever acronym the left comes up with next,” Kinsey said at the 2024 Texas Republican Party Convention. “Who will fight for these three-letter words: G-O-D, G-O-P, and U-S-A.”
The 15 board members, five Democrats and 10 Republicans, will meet five times in 2026. This year, the board will adopt revised Social Studies and Career and Technical Education TEKS curriculum standards for K-12. They will also issue the required Reading Language Arts vocabulary and book lists that inform state standardized testing language and required reading in curriculum. With the exception of CTE, implementation of revised curriculum is planned for the 2030-2031 school year.
“I’m quite concerned with the rushed nature of this process. … The number of materials that were included on this list far outweighs the letter of the law,” SBOE Member Marisa Perez-Diaz (D-San Antonio) said about the book list considered during the Jan. 30 meeting.
The SBOE has heavily debated how issues like racism, slavery, Native American history, and civil rights will be taught in the K-12 Social Studies TEKS, which have been in revision since early last year. Educators have criticized their framework for the TEKS, developed last year, as deemphasizing geography and world cultures while presenting Texas and American historical figures, like Thomas Jefferson or Robert E. Lee, without relevant connections to slavery.
“Julie Pickren [R-Pearland] seems to feel that history is about glorifying our role in the past, so she wants our students to learn about the great heroes from Texas and the United States,” Bell-Metereau told the Chronicle. “History is not a cheerleading session.”
The SBOE was in headlines as their approved Bluebonnet Learning curriculum, which includes references to the Bible and Bible teachings in elementary-level reading lessons, was made available to Texas school districts last fall with an extra $60 incentive per student, if the district chose to use it. Austin ISD declined to adopt Bluebonnet Learning early last fall.
“I feel like a broken record,” Bell-Metereau said, on the separation of church and state in public education. “I tell them that the Establishment Clause forbids the establishment of a religion. They claim to love the Constitution and love our history, and then they ignore it.
“They want to make their particular group, whether it’s a social group, a religious group, or racial group … seem to be superior,” Bell-Metereau said about certain colleagues. “Education is not about saying our state’s the best, or our cultural, racial, or gender group is the best. It’s about thinking as critically and objectively as we can.”
As of this month, 14 applicants seeking to open new charter schools in Texas will be up for review and approval at the SBOE’s June meeting, and historically, “they almost approve everything,” said David DeMatthews, professor of education policy and leadership at UT-Austin.
Charters are public schools that are privately operated, and often designed around a nontraditional learning model or specialization. “There are a variety of reasons that people will push a particular charter, but … it’s also a way of taking money from the public school system and funneling it into charters, which may have very specialized programs,” Bell-Metereau emphasized.
The SBOE also manages and budgets the Texas Permanent School Fund, overseeing a team that invests the pot of money in different assets – with 20% of the $60.6 billion in private equity. Despite the PSF being the largest educational endowment that exists in the country, Texas has only the 37th-best spending per public school student in the state, and is 31st in teacher pay.
“Some of these people, Pat Hardy, who used to be on the board, are proud of it. She said, ‘Well, I’m proud that we spend so little,’” Bell-Metereau said. “What are we doing with that money, other than helping the stock market?”
Bell-Metereau remembers that the first time she ever went to a Retired Teachers Association meeting, she couldn’t help but cry. “They obviously had so little to make it on in life. And I just thought, ‘This is a crime to treat our teachers this poorly,’” Bell-Metereau reflected.
“I always say we’re like those cartoons with Scrooge McDuck, where he’s just sitting on his piles of gold, playing with his gold, and never giving money to anybody,” she continued. “That’s the SBOE, just glorying in how much money we have. And it’s making money for people.”
In the District 5 race, one of the five Democratic candidates is likely to win the seat, with the race to be decided in the primary March 3. But on a board with a heavy Republican majority, what can Austin’s representative do to shape Texas public education?
“It’s going to be whether [they] are able to reach out, find points of agreement, and get the Republican members to go along with a vote that goes against the majority of Republicans,” Bell-Metereau emphasized. “And that has happened. … But if you go in with your guns blazing, they’re never going to agree about anything, even if they agree.”
This article appears in February 20 • 2026.