SAN ANTONIO – The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is considering what titles to add to a required reading list for grades K-12.
During a State Board of Education meeting last Wednesday, Nov. 19, the Deputy Commissioner of School Programs, Shannon Trejo, presented the current progress of the required reading list.
House Bill 1605 passed in 2023, requiring new book, vocabulary, and social studies lists of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for kindergarteners through 12th grade. This change will make Texas the first state to have a government-mandated reading list.
Trejo said in the meeting that titles were being decided first by consulting several reading lists from national, state and successful education systems.
The next step was to cross-reference the lists and eliminate those that were not featured multiple times.
Trejo said they found some titles that were mentioned multiple times, but not always for the same grade level.
Finally, the TEA surveyed Texas teachers to determine which titles they used in their classrooms, further narrowing the list.
According to Trejo, over 5,000 educators responded. These educators came from different grade levels, experiences and educational backgrounds.
Several repeated titles that came up in the survey for primary grades included “Number the Stars,” “Because of Winn Dixie” and “Frindle.”
Titles many Texas educators turned to in secondary grades included “Night,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Great Gatsby” and “The Outsiders.”
The list of titles began at 10,000 and is now hovering around 425, Trejo said.
The State Board of Education members will need to review key information about the list before Jan. 1, 2026.
Action items for the vocabulary list will follow, as they depend on the literary list.
Once the master titles list is in motion, it will be set for approval in June 2026.
“If we make it to June with all of those items concluded based on your guidance, right after June, we have a lot of work to do,” Trejo said.
According to the timeline presented, final lists would not be implemented into the Texas system until the 2030-2031 school year. Pilot programs and field tests may be done beforehand, Trejo said.
This implementation will only proceed if all three lists are approved by June of next year.
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