State Board of Education says thousands of corrections needed to Bluebonnet Learning; Texas taxpayers will pay

Texas taxpayers are footing the bill for thousands of corrections to Bluebonnet Learning.

This curriculum is controversial in some Texas public schools because portions of the reading lessons include Biblical texts.

Members of the State Board of Education say there are roughly 4,200 errors.

In January, the Texas Education Agency notified the board of all the updates needed, and it caused so much alarm among some members that the board called an emergency meeting in February to address them quickly.   

Pam Little is the Vice Chair of the State Board of Education. She's on the board's instruction committee and said they were the first to learn of the errors.

"In my whole 20-year career in publishing, I have never seen a program with that many errors," said Little.

According to a document from the TEA shared with CBS Texas, some mistakes included incorrect math, wrong answer keys, spelling errors and more.

"To be fair, some of the errors were simple things, like putting a colon instead of a comma," Little said. "But what really struck me and concerned me is there were 1,062 images that had to be replaced because the Texas Education Agency didn't have the licensing rights to use those in the program."

Without licensing rights to publish, Little said, that opens the door for lawsuits.

"In my opinion, it was just sloppy publishing," she said.

Little said it is common for publishers to correct curriculum, but she's never seen 4,200.

It's a bipartisan issue that democrat members of the board, like Dr. Tiffany Clark of DeSoto, also say is unacceptable.

"This is supposed to be high-quality instructional material, so you're thinking it's right," Dr. Clark said. "Now you are teaching your students that way, only to realize it's wrong, so it does have an impact on our STAAR test if we don't have high-quality teachers who are able to actually dissect that information and understand the computations were wrong."

In response, the TEA said:

 "To be clear, there are only around 1900 changes to Bluebonnet Learning. The 4,200 number floating around is not entirely accurate. Additionally, this number is the total number of updates; this does not mean that each instance is an error."

That means if a lesson is missing a comma, for example, it must be corrected in the teacher guide, student book, and anywhere else it's printed. Therefore, one error could translate to three changes. 

Regardless, the changes mean reprints for the physical copies. 

"Normally, when we have reprints like that for errors or corrections, it's the publisher that absorbs the cost," Little said. "Well, in this case, the publisher is the State of Texas, so that means Texas taxpayers are absorbing the cost." 

The TEA said they are currently working with the print vendor to finalize costs. Any digital corrections, they say, were applied automatically. 

Little said the updated curriculum should be in classrooms by the fall.