For the past few months, the elected Texas State Board of Education has come under national fire and been placed under a national spotlight.

The board is conducting a routine rewrite of the state’s social studies curriculum for the public schools, and Republican board members are insisting on a balanced approach to teaching history, which includes detailed discussion of the Founding Fathers and the Federalist Papers. The board, which contains 10 Republicans and 5 Democrats, is expected to approve the revised curriculum today. Preliminarily, conservatives defeated an attempt to postpone adoption of the revised curriculum and have won most of the preliminary votes on amendments taken today.