Houston’s Jewish community raises concerns about TEA proposed Christian-infused curriculum – Houston Public Media

Patricia Lim / KUT

The Texas Education Agency recently released a proposed curriculum for grades K-5 that is infused with Christian-based teaching.

The move comes after the Texas Legislature authorized the agency to create open education resource materials. Schools that use the state-created curricula would receive additional per-student funding, creating an incentive to teach it, though it is not mandatory.

That has raised alarm bells for Houston’s Jewish population. Erica Winsor is the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston’s public affairs officer. Winsor said “Tax-funded focus on Christianity in public schools could isolate Jewish students in the classroom” in a Chron article.

“We know that we have a lot of Jewish students in public school and our organization is focused on making sure that Jewish people can live openly and freely as Jews, whatever that looks like to them,” Winsor told Houston Matters on Monday. “And so when we have students in public school, we want to make sure that they can live that open and free Jewish life without fear of being alienated or ostracized, particularly by the material that’s being taught at school.”

Winsor gave an example of how that could happen with the proposed curriculum.

“In the curriculum there is a teaching about the story of Esther, and that in that story, in this curriculum, they teach that Jews were treated differently because they were different from people around them,” she said. “Instead, we suggested they say something like Jews were living in a foreign land or Jews were away from home, so that children are not telling their peers ‘You’re different from me.'”

Winsor said the organization believes that religion should be taught, however, principles of a religion should not.

“Children should know that there are many religions in the world, that there are many beliefs systems in the world,” she said. “Our issue is when you move from teaching about religion to teaching the principles of a religion, and we believe that that is between a parent and a child or a religious institution and a child and not their public school and the child.”

Winsor said there are positives to having a standardized curriculum.

“We know that in this curriculum at a certain level, they included, for example, the book “Number the Stars,” a story about the Holocaust, which may enable teachers to reach out to places around the state like a Holocaust Museum and use those resources and have a great experience,” Winsor said. “However, we have to look at the positives and the negatives of the curriculum, and while we acknowledge that there is a good way to do that, we aren’t sure that this curriculum is the way.”