Product Placement

How a billionaire-funded network is installing its national curriculum in Texas schools and more importantly, why

The current draft of the Texas social studies standards your child will study for the next decade were not built by Texas educators. They were written in part by a New York advocacy organization funded by billionaires, using a curriculum it has deployed, or tried to deploy, in more than a dozen other states. Texas is not the origin of these standards. Texas is the latest target.

That organization is the Civics Alliance, a project of the National Association of Scholars. Its product is called American Birthright. And the evidence that it was installed in the Texas TEKS revision process is documented in the organization’s own publications, in the IRS filings of its funders, and in the feedback memos of the advisors who shaped the standards. What are their goals? They seek to replace inquiry-based, skills-focused social studies with a content-heavy framework centered on Western civilization, American exceptionalism, and free enterprise as the definition of liberty.

There is a classroom consequence to all of this that gets lost in the policy debate. Standards built around rote memorization and predetermined conclusions about American patriotism and Christian nationalism will not improve student outcomes. Instead, this approach is more likely to produce bored students and disengaged teachers. Students, and teachers, derive joy in learning when there’s a productive struggle, when students piece together meaningful ideas and draw their own conclusions. When the answer is always given in advance, there is no discovery, no reason to care. The research on this is not contested: students learn history by doing history: asking questions, weighing evidence, reaching their own conclusions. A generation trained to recite is not a generation equipped to govern itself. But as we argue below, that is exactly why Civics Alliance, and its wealthy donors, are organizing this infiltration of social studies standards.

The standards will be voted on by the State Board of Education in June 2026. The public comment period will be open soon. What follows is what you need to know before they are adopted.

The Product: American Birthright

American Birthright is a complete 13-grade, K–12 scope and sequence for history and social studies, published in 2022 by the Civics Alliance. It is not a policy paper or a set of recommendations. It is a ready-to-adopt replacement for state social studies standards, written in the exact format state boards use to adopt curriculum frameworks.

Its stated organizing principle, in its own words: it “selects individual items to teach students the story of liberty in human history.” Every civilization, every historical development, every person included in the curriculum must earn its place by contributing to what the document calls the story of liberty and American exceptionalism, meaning the arc from ancient Greece and Rome through Western civilization to American constitutional government and free enterprise. If a civilization or a culture is not part of that story, it does not qualify.

The Civics Alliance has been explicit about what it wants to do with American Birthright: adopt it in all 50 states. It maintains a public 50-state bill tracker. It publishes model legislation. It runs monthly Zoom meetings for activists. It has a network of state affiliates in twelve states, including Texas. And it has celebrated adoptions in Oklahoma — where committee members reportedly had to sign non-disclosure agreements and were not allowed to take draft documents home and in a Colorado school district, and has pushed for adoption in Ohio, where its executive director personally testified before the state legislature.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court invalidated the approved 2025 Oklahoma social studies standards for violating open meeting laws. Those standards would have required schools to teach Bible stories, alleged COVID-19 lab-leak claims, and “discrepancies” in the 2020 election results. The new 2026 standards drop that explicitly controversial content, but critics, including a writing committee member, say the board lacked the legal authority to rewrite the standards and that the process undermined the credibility of public education. Sound familiar?

In April 2026, after the Texas public hearing, the David Randall published a newsletter characterizing the Texas draft as "also lightly informed by American Birthright... although the influence is more diffuse than in Oklahoma." In the same newsletter he wrote: "Confidentiality precludes much comment for the moment." He was under a confidentiality obligation about the Texas process while simultaneously directing his national readership to use the Texas draft "as material to remodel for other states." Official state content advisor while simultaneously employed to advocate for your own organization’s standards? That’s not how we serve Texas children.

The Funders and What They Are Buying

The National Association of Scholars derives approximately 96% of its revenue from private donors who are not publicly named on its tax filings. Some of those donors are on the record through the filings of their own foundations.

The Sarah Scaife Foundation contributed approximately $2.975 million to NAS between 2012 and 2022. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation gave $250,000 between 2020 and 2022. Thomas D. Klingenstein, a member of the NAS board itself, contributed more than $588,000 through his private foundation between 2015 and 2022. Klingenstein is also the board chairman of the Claremont Institute, to which he has directed more than $19 million since 2005, including a single $2.97 million gift in 2021. The Claremont Institute is a California-based conservative think tank that promotes a particular reading of the American founding, and has become one of the intellectual centers of the nationalist right, providing theoretical justification for challenging democratic norms and election results. Since 2020, Klingenstein has also directed more than $11.6 million to Republican candidates and PACs, including $7 million to the Club for Growth Action PAC alone.

The Philanthropy Roundtable, a Washington organization that coordinates conservative grant-making, spun off DonorsTrust in 1999. It is a vehicle through which donors can fund organizations anonymously and is actively marketing the Civics Alliance to its donor network as an investment opportunity. Its profile page for the Civics Alliance ends: “Contact the Roundtable’s Programs team to learn more about this investment opportunity.”

The question is not just who paid. It is why. The Scaife, Bradley, and Klingenstein foundations fund organizations that oppose environmental regulation, labor protections, and progressive taxation. The Philanthropy Roundtable was founded to serve donors committed to limited government and free enterprise. These are not neutral patrons of civic education. What they are buying in Texas is a curriculum that teaches students from kindergarten that free enterprise is liberty, that capitalism and strong property rights are American values, that Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement, and that government intervention in the economy leads to communism.

 The core of our work is to provide and promote model federal legislation, model state legislation and model state social studies standards, all of them working toward restoring proper civics education to K-12 schools, undergraduate education and education schools. We aim both to remove negative influences—such as DEI, Critical Race Theory and action civics—and build up solid cores of good classes, good teachers and good administrative structures.

—David Randall, Executive Director of the Civics Alliance and Texas Content Advisor

That is not neutral history education. It is ideological preparation, commissioned by people with specific financial interests in ensuring the next generation of Texans believes it. A citizenry trained to memorize founding documents and feel proud of their country is less likely to question why the people funding this education own so much of it. A citizenry trained to analyze power, evaluate evidence, and organize in their communities is a direct threat to that arrangement. That is why inquiry-based learning is called radical. That is why the C3 Framework, built by professional educators, is called "ideologically extreme" by the man who helped write these standards. That is why action civics, which teaches students to contact their elected officials, is banned from classrooms while the Civics Alliance publishes a detailed Activists' Kit teaching adults to do exactly that on behalf of the donors' preferred standards.

The Takeover Strategy: How It Works in Every State

The Civics Alliance’s approach is systematic and documented. It follows the same sequence in every state it enters.

First, model legislation. The Civics Alliance publishes a full Model K-12 Civics Code, more than two dozen model bills covering everything from curriculum requirements to school board elections to teacher training. Its Partisanship Out of Civics Act (POCA) bans inquiry-based learning and what it calls action civics from K–12 classrooms. That bill, or a version of it, has passed in Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. In Texas it became HB 3979 in 2021, with NAS co-testifying alongside the Texas Public Policy Foundation to pass it. NAS celebrated in its own publications: “Texas led the nation.”

Second, standards revision. Once the ideological guardrails are in law, the Civics Alliance pushes for social studies standards revision aligned with American Birthright. Its Activists’ Kit instructs supporters to ensure revision committees include “champions of American Birthright” and warns that professional educators will try to “sabotage” the standards--the Kit’s own word--by including skills-based instruction, diverse perspectives, or what it calls identity-politics content.

Third, curriculum alignment. Once standards are adopted, the Kit instructs activists to push school districts to adopt aligned curricula, specifically naming Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and Great Hearts Academies as the implementation vehicles.

Fourth, monitoring. Randall has stated publicly that the next phase is to hire state-level staff specifically to monitor legislative compliance and ensure the standards hold. “Evasion and sabotage” by professional educators and local bureaucracies must be prevented.

Texas is not a special case in this strategy. It is a priority target. The Civics Alliance lists Texas among its twelve state affiliates, meaning a coordinated local organization connected to the national network is already operating here. The revision process that led to the current draft standards was set in motion by SB 24 in 2025, which mandated anti-communism instruction and accelerated the timeline, compressing the public review process that would have allowed greater educator and community input.

How Texas Was Targeted

The man the Civics Alliance sent into the Texas process is David Randall, its Executive Director and NAS’s Director of Research. His academic background is in early modern British history. Before joining NAS, he was the sole librarian at an art school in Greenwich Village. He has never taught social studies in a K–12 classroom, much less in a Texan K-12 classroom. He lives in New York City. As he states in the video below (starting at 5:50): “The first thing you have is facts, and you have lots and lots of facts… You don’t talk about skills [emphasis added]. You don’t talk about pedagogies.” His aim is to crowd out skill building and critical thinking by pushing for rote memorization of facts.

He was appointed as a content advisor to the Texas SBOE in 2025 by board members Evelyn Brooks and Audrey Young. Brooks said publicly: “I really can’t say I agree with everything he has said. I don’t even know everything he has said.” She appointed him anyway.

When he announced his appointment in his own Civics Alliance newsletter, he wrote:

“I get to say ‘this would be a good idea!’ to the Texas State Board of Education officially... in the best of all possible worlds, the Board members will agree on recommendations X, Y, and Z, and say, ‘Make it so.’”

He arrived with a pre-written outcome. The Activists’ Kit he published instructs state policymakers to “make sure that these committees include champions of American Birthright.” Randall wrote that instruction. Then someone followed it. He is both the author of the playbook and the beneficiary of its execution.

On April 7, 2026, hundreds of Texans came to Austin, teachers, curriculum coordinators, parents, scholars, to testify at the public hearing on the standards. Randall was not there, just as he had not been during any of the other Board meetings to that point. Two days later, for the April 9 first reading Board discussion, he joined virtually. From New York.

The Fingerprints in the Text

Randall describes the Texas standards as “lightly” informed by American Birthright. The following comparisons are drawn from the documents themselves, available on the SBOE website and on civicsalliance.org. Read them side by side and decide.

“Roots of Western Civilization”

A glaring example: American Birthright, the Key Topics and Subtopics, and Work Group A and B drafts organize their treatment of ancient history around four section headers using identical phrasing and an identical sequence: “The Roots of Western Civilization: Ancient Israel,” “The Roots of Western Civilization: Ancient Greece,” “The Roots of Western Civilization: Ancient Rome,” and Christianity as the fourth pillar.

“Roots of Western Civilization” is not a generic academic term. It is the specific organizational claim Randall chose for his document. It encodes an argument: that Israel, Greece, Rome, and Christianity are the foundational pillars of all legitimate civilization, and everything else is context.

The draft Texas World History TEKS contains four consecutive knowledge-and-skills statements with these exact headers: “The student understands roots of Western civilization in ancient Israel.” “...in ancient Greece.” “...in ancient Rome.” “...in Christianity.” Same phrase. Same sequence. Same four pillars. No other civilization in the Texas World History standards receives the “roots” designation. Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Islam are addressed in separate statements without it, making the four-part structure an explicit ideological argument embedded in the required standards.

The Pilgrims and the Bible

American Birthright’s K-2 sequence centers civic identity on the Pilgrims as the origin of American self-government, with the Mayflower Compact as the foundational governing document and Thanksgiving as the central shared narrative. The Texas draft TEKS follows this structure precisely. Across Kindergarten and Grade 1, the Plymouth Colony and Thanksgiving receive more dedicated student expectations than any other pre-revolutionary topic.

Grade 1 of the Texas draft TEKS describes the Mayflower Compact as “an agreement between the Pilgrims to live and work according to their beliefs and religious faith.” The Key Topics document, produced by the content advisor group Randall sat on, called it “an agreement between God and Pilgrims.” God is a party to the founding governing document, in standards for six-year-olds.

The role of the Bible runs deeper than the Pilgrim sequence. The Texas Grade 3 draft standards require students to “describe how Hebrew teachings, including the Ten Commandments, provided foundational ideas about right and wrong that influenced American laws” and to “explain how the Hebrew idea of being a chosen people with a promised land influenced Puritans and others who moved to North America.” Students are asked to trace a direct line from the Old Testament to American law. American Birthright makes this same chain explicit in its own Grade 8 standards on ancient Israel: the Hebrew Bible as a root of Western civilization, the Ten Commandments as the origin of legal systems. The Texas Grade 3 standards are doing the same work, four years earlier and more explicitly tied to American law.

Slavery: Universal, Diluted, Contested

American Birthright instructs students to “compare North American slavery with other systems of slavery,” listing indentured servitude, the intra-African slave trade, and Russian serfdom as parallel systems. The Texas Grade 5 draft TEKS requires students to identify the roles of “European traders and African tribal leaders in the capture and sale of Africans into slavery.” Placing African leaders’ agency in the same sentence as European traders’ is a specific framing choice, one that distributes responsibility for the slave trade in a way that minimizes the structural role of European colonial demand.

In the recent SBOE meeting discussing these standards, Member Julie Pickren even questioned the race-based nature of American slavery, citing “Irish and Chinese slavery,” despite clear historical evidence that chattel slavery in the United States was a race based, hereditary, legal institution.

What the Law Says

Three provisions of the Texas Education Code are relevant to what you have just read.

First, §28.002(c) requires that TEKS be developed “with the direct participation of educators, parents, business and industry representatives, and employers.” The content advisor panel included one advisor out of nine with substantial current K–12 classroom experience in Texas. The process compressed the statutory requirement for educator participation.

Second, §28.002(b-2) prohibits the SBOE from adopting “common core state standards.” The legislature’s intent was clear: Texas curriculum should be developed by Texans, not imposed by outside organizations. Board Member Brandon Hall was emphatic during the April 9th discussion on the Personal Financial Literacy and Economics draft TEKS that national standards should not influence Texas TEKS. While the validity of his argument to ignore standards developed by professionals in relevant fields needs to be evaluated, let’s examine its implication. American Birthright is a single document produced by a single out-of-state organization with no proven content or pedagogical expertise, strategically designed for identical adoption in all 50 states, not for quality education, but for ideological indoctrination. The law was designed to stop exactly this. It just assumed the outside interest would arrive from the left.

In January 2026, while shaping Texas standards, Randall published an op-ed in The Federalist about Iowa’s social studies revision. In it, he describes the National Council for the Social Studies, a professional organization that is dedicated to supporting classroom social studies teachers, as an organization whose definition of social studies is “ideologically extreme.” He calls the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies State Standards, the C3 Framework, a vehicle that “replaces content knowledge with insubstantial and opaque inquiry” and “inserts ideologically extreme activism pedagogies such as Action Civics.” He calls the American Institutes for Research, a 75-year-old nonprofit education research organization, “highly politicized.” He says Iowa made the mistake of using “the same radical methods and personnel that caused the problem.” Those “radical methods and personnel” are professional social studies educators.

Here is the credential comparison worth sitting with: The National Council for the Social Studies has served as the professional home of social studies teachers, curriculum designers, and education researchers since 1921. The C3 Framework was built by people who have spent their careers teaching history and civics in actual classrooms and studying what helps students learn. Randall has never been one of those people. He has never taught social studies in a K–12 classroom. His academic work, in his own words, covers early modern British history. And he is calling the professionals “radical.”

Consider what he is dismissing by contrast. The Educating for American Democracy project, which Randall’s Iowa article treats as part of the radical establishment, was a multi-year research effort involving more than 100 prominent historians, civics educators, and education researchers, developed through partnerships with Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, Tufts University, Arizona State University, and iCivics (founded by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor). It was peer-reviewed. It was collaboratively built. It was funded by a joint agreement between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Education. It produced a public roadmap explicitly aimed at helping every student, regardless of background, develop a deep connection to constitutional democracy.

Call to Action

The Texas State Board of Education votes in June. The public comment period is open now. If you have read this far, you understand what is at stake. This is not a curriculum dispute, nor a political disagreement. This is a coordinated, billionaire-funded effort to use your child’s classroom to produce the citizenry its donors need. The people running this strategy are counting on you not knowing how it works. Now you do. Submit a public comment. Contact your board member. Share this piece. The window is short and the opposition is organized. We need to be organized too.