Texas was ground zero for a yearslong Republican effort to transform education.
The state restricted teaching around race and gender, and made Western culture more of a focus in history and English lessons. It wove teachings from the Bible throughout the public school curriculum. It launched a private school voucher program.
Other Republican-run states, like Ohio and Iowa, borrowed from a similar playbook. But in recent years, few were quite as ambitious as Texas.
All of that would seem to be over now, after Democrats on Tuesday took the Texas governorship, state assembly and possibly its school board.
But is it?
It is not clear how much the state’s new Democratic governor, Gina Hinojosa, can do to repeal Republican policies.
Texas Republicans still hold the State Senate. And the governor-elect has sidestepped culture war issues, avoiding debates about transgender children, said Jon Taylor, the political science chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
“She ignored it,” he said. “And I think you’re going to continue to see that as we go forward.”
Ms. Hinojosa, whose campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article, has avoided talking about issues like D.E.I. or how teachers discuss gender.
“In the past we have evaluated politics as right versus left — I just don’t think those labels apply at this moment in history,” she said in an interview with The New York Times last month. She added, “I just don’t think that the culture wars are the fight of 2026.”
Culture war issues were Gov. Greg Abbott’s priority, not hers, she has said. In one ad, she introduced herself with the catch phrase, “I’m Gina Hinojosa. My pronouns are ‘mom,’ ‘Texan’ and ‘soon-to-be governor.’”
Other Democrats who flipped governor’s seats were also circumspect when it came to topics like D.E.I. or conservative book bans. Successful governor candidates in Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin emphasized issues like universal preschool and school funding. They criticized the private school voucher programs that have swept the country during the Trump era.
But like Ms. Hinojosa, several also face a divided government. Those governor-elects did not promise to repeal voucher programs, instead saying they would seek to limit eligibility to low-income families or provide more accountability and transparency on how the money is spent.
Jorge Elorza, chief executive of Democrats for Education Reform, a group that supports school choice, praised the approach.
“Our goal is to spur and catalyze a more expansive K-12 conversation on the left,” he said.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, praised Ms. Hinojosa’s strong anti-voucher messaging but said she also expected that among the new crop of Democratic governors, “you will see people take on issues that are considered traditionally Republican.”
Those issues include improving early reading instruction, protecting children from harm online and partnering with employers to better prepare young adults for the work force.
Conservatives are still worried. Daniel Buck, a Wisconsin-based research fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, said Democratic governors could easily chip away at access to school choice programs without ending them.
“I see education reform as largely dead in the water,” he said. He added that some on the right were learning a valuable lesson: Their schools agenda might have been more durable with at least some centrist Democratic support, as was the case in previous political eras, such as under President George W. Bush.
“You have to shake hands across the aisle if you want to get anything meaningful done,” he said. “It’s a humbling thing to say.”
In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis led the way on anti-D.E.I. and pro-school choice policies, little is expected to change, since a Trump-aligned Republican, Byron Donalds, won the governor’s race, and Republicans also kept control of the Legislature — one of the party’s few bright spots.
Mr. Donalds has indicated he would advance Mr. DeSantis’s education policies. But he has also named other goals that are more likely to be bipartisan, such as creating individualized annual “success plans” for each child, and workplace apprenticeships for high school and college students.
In Texas, simply having a Democrat as governor comforted many educators, even if it remains unclear what Ms. Hinojosa will prioritize.
“These have been very dark times on campus,” said Pauline Strong, an anthropology professor who has taught at the University of Texas at Austin starting in 1993. That was during the administration of Ann Richards, the last Democrat to lead Texas. “It’s a new dawn and we’re going to see much better days ahead.”
In interviews, professors across Texas hoped for the return of programs that had been eliminated for ideological reasons, like women’s and gender studies. Some professors hoped Ms. Hinojosa would issue directives about how to interpret laws and policies, effectively defanging some of the higher education legislation.
But Ms. Hinojosa, a University of Texas at Austin graduate, did not talk much about higher education on her campaign. She preferred talking about local public schools.
Ms. Hinojosa said she was inspired to get into politics when her son’s elementary school was threatened with closure because of budget problems. She ran for Austin’s school board in 2012 and served for several years. During the campaign for governor, she opposed Mr. Abbott’s state takeover of struggling school districts, vowed to roll back standardized testing and said A.I. did not belong in elementary schools.
She highlighted endorsements she received from public school superintendents and coaches, and critiqued, again and again, the new private school voucher program Mr. Abbott signed into law last year.
Ms. Hinojosa also has promised to fire the state’s education commissioner on her first day in office, partly over the voucher program.
The vouchers, known as Texas Education Freedom Accounts, provide about $10,000 per student to help low-income and middle-class parents pay for private school tuition or home-schooling. Ms. Hinojosa has referred to the program as a “scam,” arguing it reduces funding to traditional public schools and gives a handout to families whose children were already enrolled in private school.
Even so, when asked directly if she would repeal the program, Ms. Hinojosa said she would, theoretically, but emphasized, “I don’t see that as a reality, frankly,” citing Republicans in the Legislature who support vouchers.
Ms. Hinojosa may have more power to reshape the state’s public universities, because she will be able to appoint regents, the ultimate governing authorities of higher education institutions. A series of Republican governors who have waded deeper and deeper into culture war politics — George W. Bush, Rick Perry, Greg Abbott — have ensured Republican domination of university governance for decades.
Even here Ms. Hinojosa may face obstacles. The Texas Senate must confirm her regent picks.
María C. González, an English professor at the University of Houston, said she spoke to Ms. Hinojosa months ago and urged her to be as aggressive as Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a Democrat who moved quickly to reshape university governing boards after she took office.
She said Ms. Hinojosa liked the idea but was noncommittal.
Despite the applause on the left, Sherry Sylvester, a fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, downplayed the idea that Ms. Hinojosa’s victory was a repudiation of the state’s approach to education.
“I don’t believe the people of Texas have made this political change to bring gender studies back to Texas A&M,” she said.
Alan Blinder contributed reporting.
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