Submit Public Comment: Your Cheat Sheet for Proposed Middle School Social Studies TEKS
A grade-by-grade review of factual errors, misleading content, and important omissions in the 2026 TEKS revision for grades 6, 7, and 8.
This is our second in our three-part series analyzing the issues in the proposed Social Studies TEKS. Find the first article, on the elementary grades K-5, here:
As a reminder, you can submit your concerns and suggestions at the SBOE’s public comment site. (Hint, there are three buttons - select the one in the middle: “Proposed New 19 TAC Chapter 113, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies.”) From there you can either type directly in the box, or upload a separate document. The full text of proposed TEKS for social studies is here. Public Comment is due by June 15 at 5 pm.
Read on to learn more about the missing pieces in the Social Studies TEKS.
Grade 6
Grade 6 covers U.S. and Texas history from roughly 1800 to 1900.
6a. The Cotton Gin Standard Buries the Real Story
Proposed standard:
Grade 6, 5.A: identify how innovations, including steamboats which improved transportation and the cotton gin which increased production, influenced westward expansion.
What’s wrong:
The cotton gin’s most significant effect wasn’t just “increased production.” It made short-staple cotton so profitable that demand for enslaved labor exploded. The expansion of slavery into new territories was the central driver of westward expansion and the sectional crisis that led to the Civil War. A standard that skips that connection leaves students unable to understand the very next unit they’ll study.
The standard also omits canals entirely, which had an enormous effect on settlement patterns and economic geography in the antebellum period. The Erie Canal alone transformed the Midwest. A standard about westward expansion that doesn’t mention canals has a significant hole in it.
Suggested revision:
Grade 6, 5.A revised: explain how technological innovations and infrastructure development drove Westward expansion and shaped settlement patterns, including canal construction, steamboats, and the expansion of slave-based agriculture into new territories, in part facilitated by the invention of the cotton gin,
6b. The Trail of Tears: Euphemism Instead of History
Proposed standard:
Grade 6, 5.D: explain how the Trail of Tears impacted tribal relations along the Northern border of Texas.
What’s wrong:
“Tribal relations along the Northern border of Texas” is a remarkably understated description of an event in which the U.S. government forcibly removed tens of thousands of Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole people from their homelands under military escort, resulting in the deaths of thousands from disease, cold, and exhaustion. The vague framing keeps the focus on interactions between Native groups rather than on what the U.S. government did to cause those interactions.
The standard also omits Worcester v. Georgia, a Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled the removal unconstitutional, and President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the ruling. That episode is one of the most dramatic confrontations between executive and judicial power in American history. Students in this course are studying the branches of government and constitutional authority. Leaving this out is not a minor omission.
Suggested revision:
Grade 6, 5.D revised: explain the significance of the Indian Removal Act, Worcester v. Georgia (including President Jackson’s refusal to enforce the Court’s ruling), and the Trail of Tears, and describe the devastating impact of forced removal on the Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations.
6c. The Harriet Tubman Standard Is Focused on the Wrong Thing
Proposed standard:
Grade 6, 8.G: describe the relationship between Harriet Tubman’s role in the Underground Railroad to help enslaved people escape to freedom and the role of Moses who led the Israelites in the biblical story of the Exodus that inspired Tubman’s nickname.
What’s wrong:
The standard is organized around Tubman’s nickname, “Moses”. Her actual history, the repeated, dangerous return trips into the South after her own escape, her work as a conductor in a network that stretched across multiple states, her later service as a Union spy and military strategist, is secondary to explaining why people called her Moses.
That’s the wrong priority. Harriet Tubman is a central figure in American history because of what she did, not what she was called. The standard as written also downplays the Underground Railroad itself: its geography, its network of conductors and safe houses, and the courage of the freedom seekers who used it.
Suggested revision:
Grade 6, 8.G revised: describe the Underground Railroad and explain the significance of Harriet Tubman’s repeated missions to guide enslaved people to freedom
6d. The 14th Amendment: Missing Due Process
Proposed standard:
Grade 6, 9.D: identify the 14th amendment, which gave citizenship to formerly enslaved people born or naturalized in the U.S.
What’s wrong:
The 14th Amendment did much more than grant citizenship to formerly enslaved people. Its Due Process Clause guarantees that no state government can take away a person’s life, liberty, or property without fair legal process. Its Equal Protection Clause requires states to treat people equally under the law. These two clauses are the constitutional foundation for the vast majority of civil rights cases in American history, and those clauses are never mentioned anywhere in K–11 in these proposed standards. Students will study civil rights, desegregation, and constitutional law in later grades without ever having been explicitly taught the concept of due process.
Suggested revision:
Grade 6, 9.D revised: identify that the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people born or naturalized in the United States and established that no state may deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny any person equal protection of the laws.
6e. Missing: Judicial Review
MISSING STANDARD in (2) The Early Republic and Emergence of an American Culture. The student understands the history of America during the Early Republic from 1800 to 1825.
Marbury v. Madison is not addressed anywhere in Grade 6, even though this course covers the Early Republic period when the case was decided. The term “judicial review” does not appear until the 12th grade U.S. government course.
Why the omission matters:
Marbury v. Madison (1803) is almost universally considered the most important Supreme Court case in American history. In it, Chief Justice John Marshall established that the Supreme Court has the power to strike down laws that violate the Constitution, the principle of judicial review. Without it, the Constitution is just words on paper with no enforcement mechanism.
Grade 6 students study Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the Early Republic, and the founding of American constitutional government. Teaching that period without explaining how judicial review came to exist leaves a fundamental gap. Students cannot make sense of the role of the Supreme Court in Civil War constitutional debates, Reconstruction amendments, or any 20th-century civil rights case without this foundation, but the proposed standards don’t give it to them until eleventh grade.
Recommended addition:
New Grade 6 standard under knowledge statement 2: Explain the significance of Marbury v. Madison, including the principle of Judicial Review.
6f. American Indian–Settler Interactions: A Standard That Says Almost Nothing
Proposed standard:
Grade 6, 4.F: identify that interactions between American Indians and settlers were, at times, peaceful and violent.
What’s wrong:
This is a standard that a student could “pass” knowing nothing. Of course interactions were sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent. That’s true of virtually every prolonged human contact in history. The standard asks for no specifics, no analysis, no understanding of why conflict occurred or what was at stake. It also erases agency: peaceful and violent compared to what? Who initiated? Under what circumstances?
The actual history of diplomacy, treaty-making, trade, broken agreements, land dispossession, military campaigns, and the displacement of communities that had lived in Texas for centuries deserves more than a single passive sentence. Sixth graders are capable of engaging with this complexity.
Suggested revision:
Grade 6, 4.F revised: analyze the varied nature of interactions between American Indians and settlers in Texas, including cooperative trade, diplomatic agreements, and the escalating conflict over land and sovereignty that resulted in the displacement of American Indian communities.
6g. Communist Ideology Standard Belongs in Grade 7, Not Grade 6
Proposed standard:
Grade 6, 10.O: explain how communist ideology promotes class conflict, violent revolution, and a dictatorship to enforce equality and why these methods conflict with democratic self-government, the rule of law, protections for individual liberty, and freedom of religion.
What’s wrong:
Grade 6 covers the 19th century. Communist revolutions, starting with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, happened in the 20th century, which is covered in Grade 7. Teaching students to analyze the failures of communist governance requires historical examples to ground the analysis. Without those examples, the standard is asking for ideological conclusion without historical evidence.
The standard just before it, Grade 6, 10.N, appropriately introduces The Communist Manifesto and socialist ideas as a comparative exercise within the 19th-century context of industrialization and labor conflict. That makes chronological sense. Grade 6, 10.O goes significantly further and should be where the historical examples are.
Recommendation:
Move Grade 6, 10.O to Grade 7, where it can be grounded in the actual history of communist governance that makes the evaluation meaningful.
Grade 7
Grade 7 covers the years 1900-2000 in Texas, U.S., and the World. TEA’s own estimates indicate that Grades 7 and 8 contain more content than can be reasonably taught in a single school year. Grade 7 is the most overloaded course in the entire curriculum, by approximately nine hours of instructional time. We urge you to encourage the SBOE to make meaningful, substantive cuts so that teachers can actually teach the material and students can actually learn it.
7a. The Founders All Believed the Same Thing
Proposed standard
Grade 7, 1B: compare the Founders’ belief in limited government and free enterprise with the Progressive belief that government should set rules to protect workers and consumers (H, G/Civ)
What’s wrong:
This standard has two significant problems. First, it treats “the Founders” as a monolith. One of the most consequential debates of the founding era was between Hamilton and Jefferson over the proper role of government in the economy, which led to the emergence of the U.S.’s first political parties. A standard that erases that debate in order to create a clean contrast with the Progressives is teaching a distortion.
Second, attributing “free enterprise” beliefs to the Founders is anachronistic. The founding era economy operated within a mercantilist framework, not a free market one. Hamilton’s economic program explicitly favored government intervention, including tariffs, a national bank, federal investment in manufacturing. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, but free market ideology as a governing framework didn’t shape American economic policy for generations. Projecting 20th-century economic ideology onto 18th-century founders is not history, it’s a political argument dressed up as one.
Suggested revision:
Explain the debate over the role of government in the economy, including limited government, free enterprise, and government regulation
7b. The Progressive Era Reduced to Two Roosevelt Accomplishments
Proposed:
Grade 7, 1C: analyze the immediate and long-term effects of Theodore Roosevelt’s major domestic issues, including conservation efforts that led to the creation of the National Park Service, including Big Bend National Park, which protected natural resources, and the Meat Inspection Act, which improved food safety for consumers (H, G/Civ, E)
What’s wrong:
The Progressive Era was one of the most transformative reform movements in American history, reshaping labor law, financial regulation, food safety, conservation, and the push for women’s suffrage and civil rights. This standard reduces it to two of Roosevelt’s accomplishments, and it gets one of them wrong chronologically, since the National Park Service wasn’t created until 1916, over a decade after Roosevelt’s conservation work began. More significantly, the standard omits the grassroots organizing, the muckraking journalism, the labor movement, and the early campaigns for women’s and African Americans’ rights that defined the era. Students get the president’s highlight reel, not the movement.
Suggested revision:
7.1C analyze the major political, social, and economic reforms of the Progressive Era, including financial regulation, food safety legislation, conservation efforts, and early movements for women’s rights, African American civil rights, and labor rights (H, G/Civ, E)
7c. The Great Depression and Dust Bowl
Proposed:
Grade 7 3J: identify that the Great Depression worsened economic recovery (E)
Grade 7 3M: describe how Texans relied on churches, charities, and community support during the Dust Bowl and rebuilt their lives with a shared sense of endurance and hope (H, Geo/C, E)
What’s wrong:
7.3J doesn’t make sense as written. The Great Depression didn’t worsen economic recovery, it was the economic collapse. There are no standards anywhere in this course explaining what caused the Depression: the stock market crash, the banking crisis, the collapse of credit. Students are handed a consequence with no cause.
7.3M is an emotional conclusion rather than a historical standard. Students aren’t asked to analyze how Texans responded to the Dust Bowl; they’re told what to conclude: that the response was hopeful and community-driven. The ecological causes of the Dust Bowl, rooted in farming practices that stripped the land; the mass migration of Texans and Oklahomans to California; and the role of federal New Deal relief programs. Leaving out federal intervention in a standard about how Texans survived the Depression is a telling omission.
Suggested revisions:
(J) explain how the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting banking crisis contributed to the economic collapse of the Great Depression (E)
(M) analyze how Texans responded to the Dust Bowl, including the roles of community institutions and federal relief programs, and the migration of families to other states (H, Geo/C, E)
7d. The Russian Civil War and Bolshevik Government
Proposed:
5(B) identify differences between the Reds, who supported the Bolshevik government, and the Whites, who opposed the Bolshevik government, during the Russian Civil War, and how the victory of the Reds led to the creation of a communist government (H, G/Civ)
5(C) explain characteristics that defined the Bolshevik government in Russia, including a one-party dictatorship with concentrated political power, the elimination of opposition, and the mass violence used to control society (H, G/Civ)
What’s wrong:
The content itself isn’t inappropriate for seventh grade, as the Russian Revolution and its consequences are standard world history curriculum. The problem is context and proportion.
These two standards drop students into the middle of the Russian Civil War without any foundation. To make sense of the Reds versus the Whites, students need to understand the collapse of the Tsar’s government, the February Revolution, the provisional government, and why the Bolsheviks were able to seize power in October 1917 in the first place. None of that is established in the surrounding standards. Teaching the Civil War outcome without teaching what produced it asks students to memorize a result without understanding a cause — which is the opposite of historical thinking.
7.5C asks students to explain how the Bolshevik government used a one-party dictatorship, elimination of opposition, and mass violence to control society. Those are accurate and important things to teach. But two standards later, 5.F attributes propaganda, censorship, and forced conformity exclusively to communist regimes, while Nazi Germany, covered in the same unit, used identical methods. The standards are building a framework in which these tactics are understood as distinctively communist rather than as characteristic of totalitarianism generally. That’s an ideological framing choice, not a historical one.
As mentioned in the note above, the Grade 7 course is already overloaded. The amount of background knowledge and depth of content needed make these two standards a very heavy lift.
Suggested revisions:
Remove these two standards.
7e. Propaganda and Censorship Are Only a Communist Problem
Proposed:
Grade 7, 5F: identify methods used by communist regimes to spread and maintain their ideology, including propaganda, public shaming tactics, censorship, and forced conformity (H, G/Civ)
What’s wrong:
The methods listed, including propaganda, censorship, public shaming, forced conformity, are not unique to communist regimes. They are the defining tools of every 20th-century totalitarian state, including Nazi Germany, which students study in the same unit. Attributing these tactics exclusively to communism while teaching about fascism in the same course produces an incomplete and politically skewed picture of how authoritarian governments actually operate. A standard that asks students to recognize these tactics in only one ideological context is not preparing them to recognize those tactics at all.
Suggested revision:
7.5F evaluate methods used by totalitarian regimes, including communist and fascist governments, to spread and maintain power, including propaganda, censorship, public shaming, surveillance, and forced conformity (H, G/Civ)
7f. Texas Oil in World War II: More Detail in an Overloaded Course
Proposed:
Grade 7, 8C: identify the role of oil production and transportation during World War II, including oil production in the Permian Basin, refining in Baytown, Port Arthur and Corpus Christi, the Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines, and the petrochemical industry along the Houston Ship Channel, as examples of the American Arsenal of Democracy (H, E)
What’s wrong:
This single standard asks students to learn one general concept, one production region (Permian Basin), three refining cities (Baytown, Port Arthur, and Corpus Christi), two named pipelines, one industrial corridor (Houston Ship Channel), and one interpretive framework (American Arsenal of Democracy). As we’ve already mentioned, Grade 7 is the most overloaded course. Standards this dense don’t produce deeper learning; they produce surface coverage of too many things, or they get skipped entirely.
Suggested revision:
7.8C: explain how Texas oil production and transportation supported the Allied war effort during World War II, including the role of the Permian Basin, Gulf Coast refineries, and the Big Inch pipeline (H, E)
7g. Description of the Origins of Israel
Proposed:
Grade 7, 9F: explain how modern Israel, with increased international support following the Holocaust, was established in 1948 and how later conflicts in 1967 and 1973 contributed over time to peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan (H, G/Civ)
What’s wrong:
The proposed standard attributes the establishment of modern Israel primarily to “international support following the Holocaust.” The Holocaust was a humanitarian catastrophe that shaped international opinion, but this phrasing omits the actual mechanisms behind it: the Zionist movement, the British Mandate, the UN Partition Plan of 1947, and decades of competing national claims to the land. This is an inaccurate cause-and-effect relationship.
The standard has a more substantive problem: it omits the 1948 war entirely, jumping directly to 1967 and 1973, and makes no mention of the displacement of Palestinian Arabs. The displacement of Palestinian Arabs is a well-documented historical event that cannot be separated from the region’s subsequent conflicts, negotiations, or the peace treaties the standard asks students to explain.
Suggested revisions:
7.9F: explain the origins of modern Israel and analyze how conflicts in 1948, 1967, and 1973 and the displacement of Palestinian Arabs shaped the region and contributed to peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan
7h. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 Are Missing from the Civil Rights Unit
Proposed:
Knowledge Statement 11: The knowledge and skills section on the Civil Rights Movement and the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson contains no student expectation referencing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
What’s wrong:
These are the two most significant pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. Their absence from a unit explicitly dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement and LBJ’s presidency is not a minor oversight. The Civil Rights Act does appear elsewhere in the standards, but out of chronological sequence. Students studying the movement that produced these laws should encounter them chronologically.
Suggested addition:
11(C) (C) explain the significance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 (H, G/Civ)
Grade 8
Grade 8 is the Texas history “Capstone” which encompasses early indigenous society pre-European contact to modern day. TEA’s own estimates indicate that Grades 7 and 8 contain more content than can be reasonably taught in a single school year. By TEA’s calculation, Grade 8 runs over the amount of instructional time allotted in a years by approximately seven and a half hours. This is more troubling in a Grade 8 course, because this is the year students are STAAR (soon to be SSTAR) tested. Because the tests are usually administered several weeks before the end of the school year, teachers have to compress content designed to cover an entire school year into a shorter time frame, ending by the beginning or middle of April. We urge you to encourage the SBOE to make meaningful, substantive cuts so that teachers can actually teach the material and students can actually learn it and demonstrate mastery in STAAR.
8a. The Federalist Papers and the Texas Constitution of 1836
Proposed:
Grade 8, 6J: describe how ideas from the Federalist Papers, including republican government in Federalist 10, separation of powers in Federalist 51, and judicial authority in Federalist 78, are reflected in the United States and Texas Constitutions (Geo/C)
Grade 8, 6K: compare the United States Constitution and the Texas Constitution written at the Convention of 1836, including separation of powers and branches of government (H, G/Civ)
What’s wrong:
Grade 8 is already a tested, content-heavy course. Students will not have studied the U.S. Constitution since Grade 5, meaning there would be a three year gap and this content would require substantial re-teaching. Requiring students to analyze three specific Federalist Papers by number, understanding the distinct arguments of Federalist 10, 51, and 78, adds significant instructional time to a course that is already overloaded.
8.6K has a more substantive problem: it asks students to compare the U.S. Constitution and the Texas Constitution of 1836 by looking at “separation of powers and branches of government,” while carefully avoiding the most significant difference between them. The Constitution of the Republic of Texas explicitly legalized and protected slavery. That omission isn’t incidental; it’s the central fact about that document that students in a Texas history course should understand.
Suggested revisions:
8.6J explain how constitutional principles championed in the Federalist Papers, including republican government, separation of powers, and judicial authority, are reflected in the United States and Texas governments (Geo/C)
8.6K compare the United States Constitution and the Constitution of the Republic of Texas (1836), including similarities in governmental structure and the significant difference in their treatment of individual rights and slavery (H, G/Civ)
8b. Labor Violence Was the Workers’ Fault
Proposed:
8.11F: identify the outcomes of major labor conflicts that resulted in mob violence and resistance to organized labor because of the belief in free enterprise in Texas, including the Great Southwest Railroad Strike, the Thurber Strike, and the Galveston Longshoremen’s Strike (H, E)
What’s wrong:
The framing of this standard distorts what actually happened. Attributing the violence in these conflicts to workers, as in “mob violence,” while framing employer opposition as principled belief in “free enterprise” reverses the historical record. In the Great Southwest Railroad Strike, the Texas and Pacific Railway deployed strikebreakers and the state militia against workers. Thurber was a company town where the Texas and Pacific Coal Company owned the workers’ housing, stores, and effectively their livelihoods. The standard takes the employers’ side of a contested historical conflict and presents it as neutral description.
Suggested revision:
8.11F explain the causes and outcomes of major labor conflicts in Texas, including the Great Southwest Railroad Strike, the Thurber Strike, and the Galveston Longshoremen’s Strike, and describe how employers and government authorities responded to worker organizing (H, E)
8c. Border Violence Goes One Direction
Proposed:
8.12E explain how the actions of Francisco “Pancho” Villa during the Mexican Revolution increased border tensions and violence affecting Texas, including cross-border raid violence, and describe the United States military response in the Pershing Expedition (H, Geo/C)
What’s wrong:
Border violence during this period was multilateral and complex. Carrancista forces also crossed the border and clashed with U.S. troops. The Plan de San Diego (1915) produced raids into South Texas by multiple factions. Most significantly, Texas Rangers and vigilante groups killed hundreds of ethnic Mexicans during this period, many of them Texas residents and civilians with no connection to Pancho Villa or the Revolution. The Porvenir Massacre of 1918, in which Texas Rangers and ranchers killed fifteen unarmed Mexican and Mexican American men and boys, is one of the most documented atrocities in Texas history. It was included in an earlier draft of this standard and then removed. A standard that attributes border violence entirely to Villa’s raids while omitting the Rangers’ role is not teaching Texas history, it’s editing it.
Suggested revision:
8.12E analyze how the Mexican Revolution increased border tensions and violence in Texas, including Pancho Villa’s raids, the U.S. military’s Pershing Expedition, and the Porvenir Massacre (H, Geo/C)
8d. POW Camps in Texas and No Mention of Japanese American Internment
Proposed:
8.13K: identify on a map World War II prisoner-of-war camps in Texas, including Hearne (H, Geo/C, S)
What’s wrong:
Teaching wartime detention in Texas through POW camps alone tells only half the story. Crystal City, Texas was the site of one of the largest Japanese American internment camps in the country, a facility that also held German and Italian Americans. Omitting Crystal City from a standard about wartime detention in Texas leaves out one of the most significant civil liberties failures in American history and one with a substantial Texas chapter. It also removes the opportunity to discuss the constitutional questions about due process that internment raises, questions directly relevant to a course built around the Texas and U.S. constitutions. Teaching Hearne without Crystal City isn’t streamlining; it’s a choice about whose wartime experience counts.
Suggested revision:
8.13K: identify on a map World War II prisoner-of-war camps and Japanese American internment camps in Texas, including Hearne and Crystal City, and describe the treatment of detainees and the constitutional questions raised by wartime internment (H, G/Civ, Geo/C, S)
What You Can Do
The State Board of Education votes in June 2026. Public comment period is open until June 15. If you have concerns about any of these standards, you can submit written comments to the SBOE at SBOE’s public comment site, contact your local school board, or reach out to your state representative. The full text of proposed TEKS for social studies is here.
We will be following up with an article about high school grades in the next few days, so stay tuned and subscribe to stay updated!