To understand the Texas influence, you need to know some background. The US has a K-12 education system of open territory states and state adoption states (22 states mostly in the South and Southwest). In open adoption states, schools choose their curriculum materials. In state adoption states, like Texas, schools choose from a state-approved list of textbooks.
To get approved in a state, publishers must exactly follow the curriculum the state has established. The state board of education sets standards and approves text materials. Because of the cost of developing nationwide curriculum materials, Texas thus has an outsized influence on national textbooks. Part of this influence formerly related to money, as Texas used to purchase 110% of all textbooks anticipated to be needed for the full five years of an adoption period. In Texas, that’s a huge chunk of money. They no longer do this, and the rules for approval of books have also changed somewhat for the better, but Texas still wields enormous influence simply because of its market size. So does California, which does state approvals for K-8 only.
In the 1980s through the early 2000s, the Texas Board of Education was filled with rabid anti-science, anti-history nuts who believed more in a religious curriculum than in educating kids with the truth. We have less rabid people elected to the Board today because it was getting so much public ridicule for being flat-out crazy. The legacy of the past still lingers in textbooks, however, because publishers revise only a small portion of their content with each new edition because of cost. They mostly update for changes and to meet any new curriculum standards.
The upshot is that Republicans in the state-adoption states have controlled the writing of curriculum stands for each subject. Their conservative, religious, white views are what is represented in today’s textbooks.
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