Texas wants to erase history in textbooks. Students will pay the price.

Taylor Crawford of Houston holds a sign reading “History belongs to everyone” during a rally on the Capitol Mall outside the Barbara Jordan State Office Building, where the State Board of Education meets, in Austin, Tuesday, April 7, 2026. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman)

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My mother was intentional about making sure my brother and I knew the difference between history and what some textbooks called “history.”

As a former public school teacher, she was keenly aware when the information in our books was questionable. Take my brother’s elementary social studies textbook that stated Native Americans “vanished.”

Disappeared like ghosts, with no mention of why.

No mention of the systemic displacement of Native peoples from their ancestral homelands through legislation like the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forcibly removed tribes from the Southeast to what is now Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died from disease, starvation, and the perils of the long journey.

No mention of the forcible separation of Native children from their families, in which their languages and customs were banned, so that they could assimilate into white culture. In 2022, I wrote about Shana Ross, a Native Houston woman who was adopted by a white family and raised in a small conservative East Texas town. She found her birth mother through a DNA test in 2016.

Before the 1970s, 25% to 35% of all Native children were removed from their communities and placed with white families, according to the National Indian Child Welfare Association.

Think about that.

This week, the State Board of Education voted to cut previously proposed lessons that explained racial segregation and slave revolts. They want to remove any references that African Americans were enslaved in this country because of their skin color. The board plans to cut the explanation of the Democrats’ Jim Crow laws, a system of laws and practices that denied black people full freedom and subjected them to inferior treatment and facilities from 1874 to the mid-1960s.

The board also wants to rename the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to the Tulsa Race Riots. Such a small change in wording implies it wasn’t really that bad. But it was.

In 2025, the Justice Department issued a 126-page report on the Tulsa Race Massacre, when as many as 10,000 white Tulsans murdered hundreds of black residents and burned their businesses and homes to the ground in an attack that federal investigators found “was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.”

The board will take a final vote Friday on the standards that determine what Texas students must learn in social studies classes from kindergarten to 12th grade. If approved, the new lessons would begin in Texas public schools in 2030.

The Whitewashing of American history robs students of an accurate and complete education, making it harder to learn from some of the darkest chapters of this country’s past. It also teaches lies. How many elementary students read their social studies textbooks and actually believed Native Americans disappeared?

Years ago, I wrote on social media about my brother’s social studies textbook, which was from a small private school curriculum. Some readers dismissed it as something that could only happen in a private school.

Yet, here we are.

I’m hopeful that there are more parents and educators, like mine, who understand that erasing history does not erase the past.

And that learning from it is what makes us better.

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Original Article: Texas wants to erase history in textbooks. Students will pay the price.