Dr. Ben Carson, renowned pediatric neurosurgeon and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has become a significant voice in the conversation about education, including in Texas. He believes there is a great opportunity for Texas to lead the nation in breaking what he says is a decline in the quality and outcomes of the education system. 

Dr. Carson's journey to become a world-class neurosurgeon shows the transformative power of education. He says his environment growing up was “not one that would generally be conducive to producing a neurosurgeon or… a rocket scientist.” He credits his mother, who had “less than a third-grade education,” with instilling in him the importance of education despite the overwhelming obstacles she faced, including a difficult marriage resulting in divorce and financial hardships.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, dropout rates for high school students who come from low-income families is seven times higher than those from families with higher incomes. 

Carson says his mother recognized early that he and his brother were struggling academically. At that moment, Carson says, she decided to “turn off the TV and make us read books.” 

While his initial reaction was resistance, Carson later embraced the world that books opened to him: “Between the covers of those books, I could go anywhere. I could be anybody, could do anything.” The change ignited a passion for learning in Carson.

Carson mentions that children who are reading at grade level by third grade have a dramatically increased chance of completing high school. According to him, “it completely changes the trajectory of their lives.” 

“All of a sudden, because I was reading so much, I wasn’t the first one to sit down in the spelling bees because I knew the words, grammar, and syntax,” Carson says. “I went from the bottom of the class to the top of the class and it really changed my impression of who I was and what I could achieve.” 

Now, as a member of the Texas Education Agency's Open Education Resource Advisory Board, Dr. Carson is an advocate for Bluebonnet Learning, the agency’s new curriculum. 

The program offers Texas schools, teachers, and parents access to free online textbooks and school curriculum. The resources, which were recently approved by the State Board of Education, are intended to improve the outcomes in Texas classrooms, as well as alleviate the workload on Texas’ teachers. 

“We became allies in the task of trying to improve education,” says Carson. “Texas is a particularly good state to be in because it’s a very large state with a very active educational component. Texas is in a very good position to lead the nation in this kind of endeavor.”

As a brain surgeon, Carson believes that incorporating the best science and data about how kids learn into education programs can have a measurable impact on student achievement in Texas.

“I had the same brain when I was at the bottom of the class that I had at the top of the class,” he says.  He describes the Bluebonnet Learning approach as “using that data in a way that will be very effective.”

Carson also believes that teaching state history will help to reestablish a sense of community in the United States.

“We want to bring back our state history to each of the states. It is very important to people living in other states, knowing how it weaves together and creates a giant community,” he says. In Carson’s view, “your history gives you your identity, and your identity is that thing upon which your beliefs are based.” 

It also helps build tighter communities, he says, which is important “because that’s what gave us the strength to be able to overcome a lot of things, including the Nazi’s and World War II.”