By contrast, local members of the Texas Legislature (whom fourth-graders learn about) got a perfect score, as did Barbara Jordan, Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin and Henry B. González. President Donald Trump isn't included in the list by name, but students are required to learn about Texans who have been president, governor and mayor. 
 
 Earlier this year, the work group split up and each subgroup took a set of figures to grade using the rubric, said the two teachers, who both said they wanted to keep politics out of the decisions. 
 
 "There were hundreds of people" kids had to learn about, Misty Matthews, a teacher in Round Rock, told The News. "Our task was to simplify. ... We tried to make it as objective as possible." 
 
 Jana Poth added that the work group did "not want to offend anyone" with its choices. "But there's too many [figures]," she said. 
 
 Third-graders, for example, should learn about three dozen figures. Fourth-graders have 70 required or recommended historical figures to learn, and in eighth grade, when students take the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness social studies test, there are 50 people on the list. 
 
 Neither Poth nor Matthews said she was in the small group that made the decisions about Clinton and Keller. In a note next to the deletion from the third-grade social studies curriculum in which Keller was included in a lesson about "the characteristics of good citizenship," the work group wrote, "Helen Keller does not best represent the concept of citizenship. Military and first responders are best represented." 
 
 There was no comment next to the recommendation to remove Clinton. Students in that grade are still required to learn about former President Bill Clinton's impeachment. 
 
 Slavery, eugenics and Alamo heroes: What made the cut? 
 
 Each year, the board discusses and debates new classroom standards for Texas' 5.4 million schoolchildren. Its members, currently five Democrats and 10 Republicans, are elected to four-year terms and represent specific geographic areas. 
 
 The board's process has always garnered attention — and often controversy. Five years ago, members clashed over whether science books should have to teach an alternative to evolution. In 2014, math standards were revised, drawing criticism from parents and teachers. And earlier this year, a new Mexican-American studies course was the subject of the latest culture war. 
 
 Many of the work group's recommendations that were rejected by the board dealt with descriptions of the nation's "Judeo-Christian" heritage. Texas Values, a conservative Christian political advocacy group, sent representatives before the board this week to speak out against removing the descriptions. On Friday, they applauded the board's decision to keep them. 
 
 "In Texas, you don't mess with the Alamo and you don't mess with our Christian heritage. We applaud the majority of the State Board of Education for doing the right thing by restoring our foundational rights and history," Texas Values President Jonathan Saenz said in a statement. "We are prepared to fight to protect these standards all the way to the end." 
 
 Others criticized the board's vote. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Chris Turner urged boadmembers to add Clinton and Keller back into the curriculum. 
 
 "If Helen Keller was an important historical figure when I was in school (and she was), then she still is today," tweeted Turner, D-Grand Prairie. "Clinton is the 1st and only woman to be the presidential nominee of a major party in U.S. history. Enough said." 
 
 Here are some of the changes the board approved Friday: 
 
 Replace San Jacinto Day with Constitution Day in a section on "the origins of customs, holidays, and celebrations of the community, state, and nation" (the Battle of San Jacinto is taught in fourth-grade social studies and high school U.S. history). 
 
 Remove Helen Keller from section on "citizenship." ||||| AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks , stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. 
 
 The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it. 
 
 The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states. 
 
 In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state. 
 
 Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers. 
 
 “We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.” 
 
 Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum. 
 
 Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.” 
 
 “They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.” 
 
 The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made. 
 
 The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board’s makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others — one Democrat and one conservative Republican — announced they were not seeking re-election. 
 
 There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics. 
 
 The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution. 
 
 “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.” 
 
 They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” 
 
 Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported. 
 
 “Republicans need a little credit for that,” he said. “I think it’s going to surprise some students.” 
 
 Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism. 
 
 Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include “how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.” The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States. 
 
 Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.” 
 
 It was defeated on a party-line vote. 
 
 After the vote, Ms. Knight said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.” 
 
 In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.” 
 
 “Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ” 
 
 In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders. 
 
 “The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said. 
 
 Even the course on world history did not escape the board’s scalpel. 
 
 Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”) 
 
 “The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said. ||||| Public school students in Texas would be required to evaluate efforts by global organizations to undermine U.S. sovereignty in one of a series of changes that conservatives on the State Board of Education made Thursday to new social studies guidelines. 
 
 President Barack Obama makes a statement on financial reform and Wall Street, Thursday, May 20, 2010, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) (Associated Press) 
 
 With little discussion from Democrats on the board, conservatives also added language that would require students to discuss solvency of "long-term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare." 
 
 The board is making final edits to the new guidelines, with a final vote expected Friday. The board's decisions will set the standards for teaching history and social studies to some 4.8 million public school students for the next 10 years. The monthslong process of adopting the curriculum has made the board a lightning rod for ideological debate. 
 
 In some of the most contentious debate, the board added a reference to President Barack Obama, which critics had complained was conspicuously absent. But Democrats showed more life than they had all day when Republican David Bradley tried to refer to the first black president as Barack Hussein Obama. 
 
 "I think we give him the full honor and privilege of his full name," Bradley said. 
 
 "The intent behind what you're doing, I think is pretty obvious," said Republican Bob Craig, urging Bradley to withdraw the suggestion. 
 
 "Please Mr. Bradley, don't use the middle name," said Democrat Lawrence Allen. "You know it's going to have a negative connotation in the press. Yes, it's his birth name, but you know the significance it will play in the press. We don't have to deal with it." 
 
 Finally Bradley relented. 
 
 "To put an end to the whining I withdraw the motion," he said. 
 
 Earlier in the evening, prolonged debate came over whether to include Confederate President Jefferson Davis' inaugural address with a lesson on Abraham Lincoln's philosophical views; the board decided to require students to contrast the two views. A proposal to refer to the slave trade as the "Atlantic triangular trade" was changed to call it the "trans-Atlantic slave trade." 
 
 One of the board's most outspoken conservatives, Republican Don McLeroy, offered the amendment requiring students to evaluate efforts by global organizations to undermine U.S. sovereignty. He argued that efforts to "put us under world court" and to "impose the sovereignty of Americas under treaties that have been signed with these United Nations organizations" were threats to individual freedom and liberty. 
 
 Another Republican amendment dropped the study of a landmark 1949 federal court ruling that declared schools could not legally segregate Mexican American students, even though the practice remained popular in Texas for decades. But Craig successfully restored it. 
 
 The board rejected a renewed effort to include labor leader Dolores Huerta as an example of good citizenship in third-grade history classes. Huerta, who worked alongside Cesar Chavez for farmworkers' rights, was removed from the list in January amid concerns that she was affiliated with socialists. Huerta is listed in a high school history class. 
 
 The board also rejected an effort to add former San Antonio mayor and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros to a fourth-grade example of notable Texans and spent prolonged time debating which Civil War battles and heroes from Texas should be added to a seventh-grade class. 
 
 The standards will be used to develop state tests and by textbook publishers that develop materials for the nation based on Texas, one of the largest markets. 
 
 McLeroy believes the Texas history curriculum has been unfairly skewed after years of Democrats controlling the board. 
 
 Other proposals would tone down criticisms of the Red Scare and Sen. Joe McCarthy's anti-communist hearings of the 1950s. 
 
 Educators have blasted the proposed curriculum for politicizing education. Teachers also have said the document is too long and will force students to memorize lists of names rather than thinking critically.
– The Texas Board of Education says it's trying to "streamline" the social studies curriculum in its public schools, and one way it plans on doing so is by getting rid of two big names from the required learning plan. The Dallas Morning News reports that on Friday, the board held a preliminary vote and decided to nix Hillary Clinton from high school history class. As the first woman to nab a major political party's presidential nomination, Clinton appeared alongside Thurgood Marshall and Sandra Day O'Connor, among others, in a "citizenship" section of the curriculum in which students were tasked to "evaluate the contributions of significant political and social leaders in the United States." A work group made its recommendations to the board based on a rubric it created on how "essential" it was to learn about certain historical figures. Also cut, but from the elementary school curriculum: Helen Keller. "Helen Keller does not best represent the concept of citizenship," the group wrote. "Military and first responders are best represented." By the group's gauge, Clinton received just 5 points out of 20; Keller got 7. Some wonder how much time will really be saved by nixing these notable figures. "It won't take that long to teach about either woman. they happen to be part of history," tweeted pundit Greta Van Susteren. The work group estimates cutting Clinton will save about 30 minutes of teaching time, while yanking Keller will free up 40. What the BOE voted to keep in the state curriculum: references to "Judeo-Christian values" and "a requirement that students explain how the 'Arab rejection of the State of Israel has led to ongoing conflict' in the Middle East," per the Morning News. These decisions aren't set in stone: There's still a chance for the BOE to make changes before a final November vote.