The Texas State Board of Education is calling on the Legislature to fully fund its request that $500 million in distributions from the Permanent School Fund be used to purchase new textbooks. While it's easy to sympathize with their advocacy for newer and better teaching materials, now is not the right time to make that purchase.

The Legislature is trying to deal with a budget shortfall of as much as $27 billion. Public education, the state's biggest expense, is facing proposed cuts of $5 billion. Among many detrimental impacts, those cuts could lead to the layoff of thousands of teachers, increased class sizes and the elimination of valuable courses, such as advanced placement classes that allow high school students to earn college credit.

The SBOE has authorized distributions from the Permanent School Fund of $1.2 billion for the current biennium and $1.9 billion for the next biennium to support public education. Those distributions are based on the value of the fund, which has surged along with the stock market over the past two years.

The SBOE has also worked to minimize the textbook request. The board reduced the original proclamation for a $1.2 billion textbook purchase by more than half.

Members argue that the frugal $500 million request is only a fraction of the more than $3 billion the SBOE is handing the Legislature. In a normal year, that would be a sound argument. This year, anything that can be deferred to preserve the integrity of Texas public education should be deferred.

Some supplemental materials that are necessary to prepare students to meet new requirements for the high school science curriculum need to be purchased. But new textbooks for language arts and reading in lower grades, while meaningful, are not essential — or, rather, not as essential as teachers. Good and enterprising teachers always go beyond the book.

There's a boy-who-cried-wolf quality to the SBOE's interest in quality textbooks. The politicization of education standards and textbook guidelines by a faction of the board is a big reason why the call to fully fund the textbook purchase is falling on deaf ears.

If not for the ideologically skewed priorities of the board's socially conservative majority, including Chairwoman Gail Lowe, it would be far easier to accept the proposition that members of the State Board of Education are unanimous in wanting to do right by Texas students.