God bless the Lone Star State, where our righteous state leaders love to lecture local school districts about “reckless spending” and poor planning while casually setting $8.4 million of our taxpayer dollars on fire. The Texas Education Agency successfully developed a new elementary curriculum called “Bluebonnet Learning” that managed to rack up a whopping 4,200 errors. For those keeping score at home, four other educational publishers combined had a grand total of 16 mistakes. But hey, everything is bigger in Texas, including our absolute incompetence.
The multi-million-dollar cleanup tab will go toward printing, shipping, and quietly disposing of the current garbage batch of books. According to actual horror stories from the front lines, teachers have complained that the materials feature broken answer keys, copyright violations, typos, and pages that are literally “flying around the classroom”. Nothing says “high-quality Texas education” quite like an eight-year-old getting taken out by a rogue, unglued page from a lesson plan.
Naturally, state leaders pushed this curriculum hard, even offering a $60-per-student financial bribe—sorry, incentive—to the nearly 600 cash-strapped school districts desperate enough to sign up. It is a curriculum that has drawn national scrutiny for stuffing Bible stories into elementary reading lessons while comfortably downplaying minor historical footnotes like slavery and racism. Because why teach kids accurate history when you can teach them how to dodge flying paper?
The TEA claims they’ve fired the vendor responsible and promise that future disasters will be paid for by the contractors instead of the taxpayers. But for now, we get to foot the bill to the tune of about $5 per student just to fix basic formatting and copyright laws. Meanwhile, State Board of Education members hoped to grill Education Commissioner Mike Morath about the massive bill this week, but they ran out of time because the meeting started late. Priorities, people!
If the Lord truly works in mysterious ways, is it possible He’s just trying to tell Austin that their spellcheck budget shouldn’t have been sacrificed for the sake of the scripture?
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