Democrats poised for first Texas education board majority in over 30 years

Vouchers and Bible curriculum stirred voter anger, candidates and experts say

Democrats won enough seats on the Texas State Board of Education this month to hold a probable majority for the first time in more than 30 years, with one race still to be called. The victories came alongside wins for Gina Hinojosa, who made education a major part of her campaign for governor, and James Talarico, a former teacher who has criticized the inclusion of the Bible in public school curricula — as voters turned out to flip state offices blue, sometimes for the first time in a generation.

Michelle Palmer had run for the state board twice before, but this campaign felt different, she said. “I was hearing from day one from people who had not really been politically active before that they were worried about education,” Palmer said.

The voters who reached her pointed to a string of state education actions, Palmer said: a voucher program signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott that sends $1 billion of public money to private schools; new social studies standards that critics say promote Islamophobia and minimize the impact of slavery; students detained by immigration authorities; and Abbott threatening to strip district funding if students protested against ICE. Many were angry about a curriculum incorporating Bible verses that felt “forced down the throats” of schools, she said.

“People don’t like for their kids to be messed with,” said Palmer, who teaches history and government to 11th and 12th graders. “I really think that’s a lot of why what happened here in Texas happened.” An August poll found 45% of Texans disapproved of the state’s handling of K-12 education, while only 28% approved.

“Public education was on the ballot, and voters made their voices clear,” said Thomas Ray Garcia, a Democrat and community college professor who will join Palmer on the board in January. In the uncalled race, Democrat Dana Van De Walker, a community college administrator, received about 600 more votes than Audrey Young, a Republican incumbent, with some provisional ballots remaining to be counted. If her win is finalized, Democrats will hold an 8-7 majority on the board in January.

The incoming members will inherit a board whose recent moves have drawn national attention. In 2024, the board approved Bluebonnet Learning, a curriculum that incorporates Bible verses and stories, including a kindergarten lesson involving the Sermon on the Mount. The curriculum is not required, but districts receive state money for adopting it, which critics say can make the materials impossible for underfunded schools to refuse. The following year, the legislature passed a law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Earlier this year, the board approved the state’s first-ever statewide list of required books — which includes excerpts from the Bible and Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for President Ronald Reagan — and the new social studies standards, which critics say minimize Black and women’s history and paint Islam in a negative light.

“It’s just not representative of all of the students who live in this incredibly diverse state,” Palmer said. Proponents cast the changes as a way to teach students about morality, or simply to introduce them to the Bible as literature. But experts and candidates said the changes riled many voters in a state where test scores in many areas lag behind the national average.

Jonna Perrillo, an education historian and professor of English education at the University of Texas at El Paso, said Texans have been displeased with the books list and with a 2021 law meant to discourage the teaching of “critical race theory.” “A lot of Texans are really unhappy with the focus on those kinds of issues when they know that is not the cause of our low test scores and our low student performance,” Perrillo said.

Kimmie Fink, an education advocate and mother of two in Liberty Hill, said she repeatedly heard similar reservations from people reluctant to voice them publicly. “I had a lot of people just kind of quietly whisper to me, ‘As a Christian, I don’t believe the Ten Commandments should be in public schools,’” Fink said. “There was this fear around people being public about it.” Fink, who testified before the state board against the Bluebonnet curriculum and the books list, had gotten used to watching her advocacy efforts fail. This year she became a fellow with the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Christian group that opposes religion in public schools. “I just put my everything into getting people to vote in the midterms,” she said.

The voucher program, established in 2025, has stirred resentment of its own in a state that ranks 47th in the nation in per-pupil education spending. Critics say vouchers can cause public schools to lose enrollment and even close. “Where I live in El Paso, the student population is going down,” Perrillo said. “We just don’t have enough students to fund our schools, and so vouchers only exacerbate that.”

Hinojosa got her start in education fighting the closure of her son’s school in Austin and then running for school board. One of her key campaign promises was to “end the voucher scam.” That message helped propel her and others to victory, as voters turned out to flip state offices blue, sometimes for the first time in a generation. Education was “the issue” in Texas this election season, said Van De Walker, a Democrat and community college administrator who ran to represent her district on the state education board.

What the incoming Democrats can change falls into two categories. The books list and the social studies standards have not yet gone into effect, and newly elected Democrats said they are optimistic they will be able to amend them — especially since Hinojosa, as governor, will be able to appoint a new board chair. Given the outcome of the election, “it’s hard for me to see that book list going into effect,” Perrillo said.

Getting rid of the voucher program will be harder. The board does not control the program, and changes would likely have to go through the state legislature, which remains partially Republican controlled. Hinojosa is “going to be hemmed in a little bit by the Texas senate,” Perrillo said. Fink said she hopes Hinojosa will decline to fund any expansion of the program even if she cannot end it entirely.

Fink said her earlier defeats at the state board now feel less like losses and more like “playing the long game.” “We went and we fought and we told our stories, and I have to believe that that played a part in what we saw last Tuesday,” she said. Her hope for the state is broader than any single policy: “My vision is just this place where children of all identities and all faiths and all families can go to school and feel safe and welcome and reach their potential.”

Garcia said he never framed his race in partisan terms. “I never saw myself as a Democrat first. I saw myself as an educator first, and I think that resonated with a lot of Republicans,” Garcia said. “Their perception was that their party was prioritizing private interests and culture war issues over the real issues impacting their children’s education.” He and the other incoming members — several of them current or former classroom teachers — said they hope to refocus public education in Texas on student learning rather than on what they describe as “culture war” issues. “I think we can turn toward local control, toward putting educators at the table again, and making sure that all the decisions we make at the Texas state board of education are based in research and the science of learning, and not in what I call the science of politics,” Garcia said.