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Why Indiana Refused to Redistrict to Help GOP Control the House in 2026

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2025 //
17

It’s typical in American politics that the party that wins the Presidency usually loses the mid-term elections two years later. The other party picks up seats, sometimes enough seats to dominate one or both Houses, enough to stymie the President’s agenda and enough to hold investigations that embarrass the President.

With Trump’s low standing in the polls, the rising cost of living, the backlash against tariffs, and the evident cruelty of ICE, Republicans have worried about an electoral wipeout in November 2026.

Some clever Republican strategist devised a plan to protect the Republican dominance in the House of Representatives. Simple. Persuade red states to redistrict (gerrymander) their Congressional maps, creating more Republican seats while eliminating Democratic seats. This was out of the ordinary, because states usually redistrict every ten years, after the latest census.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a loyal MAGAT, was first to act. He pushed through a new map that split up Democratic districts and created five new Republican seats. The U.S. Supreme Court supported the Trump goal, as usual, and approved the Texas gerrymander.

Governor Gavin Newsom of California was quick to respond. He called a referendum that would redistrict the state and produce five new Democratic seats. Newsom’s new map is being changed in the Supreme Court, but it’s difficult to see the Court approving the Texas gerrymander while rejecting California’s.

The administration began pressuring other red state governors to follow the lead of Texas. Some Democratic states set about redrawing their maps.

And then there was Indiana. NBC News tells the fascinating inside story of how the Trump team alienated key Republicans in that state.

Indiana is a deep-red state with a Republican supermajority in both houses of the legislature. Republicans hold seven Congressional districts, Democrats only two. Trump wanted those two seats.

The Trump operatives thought the state leaders would quickly fall in line. When they didn’t, the Trump operatives decided to unleash their usual tools: bullying, pressure, threats, intimidation, even death threats. At least 14 Republican state senators received death threats.

Jane C. Timm of NBC News wrote the story:

INDIANAPOLIS — As the redistricting battle began to pick up steam in Indiana last month, state Sen. Jean Leising’s grandchildren were receiving odd text messages.

Ads from little-known outside groups had spliced the longtime Republican lawmaker’s image next to prominent Democrats like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Some of the messaging was sloppy, referring to Leising as “him.”

A conservative and supporter of President Donald Trump, Leising, 76, was furious. Following months of conversations with her constituents, she felt they were generally opposed to redrawing Indiana’s congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections — even though such an effort would favor her party and was backed by her president. So in mid-November, she fired off a statement making it official: She wouldn’t support it.

“The negative campaigning just put me over the top,” she said in an interview with 13WTHR in Indianapolis, an NBC News affiliate, at the time. “He may wonder why Indiana is struggling to get on board. Well, it’s probably the antics they used.”

It was a sign of things to come. Ultimately, the months of pressure applied by Trump and his supporters from outside of Indiana to pass a redrawn map that would split up the state’s two Democratic districts backfired. On Thursday, Leising joined a majority of Republicans in the state Senate in voting to sink the map in the face of potential future primary challenges, a flurry of online attacks — and in some cases, violent threats. 

The result was one of the biggest rejections that Trump, who has otherwise largely ruled over the GOP with an iron fist, has faced since returning to office, and it could cost the party in its bid to preserve its narrow House majority….

“You have to know Hoosiers. We can’t be bullied, we don’t like it,” GOP state Sen. Sue Glick said after voting against the map.

Despite intense lobbying by Trump, JD Vance, and Mike Johnston, Republican leaders in the state were not enthusiastic. They resented the pressure.

When Rodric Bray, the leading Republican in the State Senate, warned that there were not enough votes to pass the new map, Trump lashed out at him. He threatened to run an opponent to Bray, but Bray didn’t tremble because he’s not up for re-election until 2028.

Trump wrote on Truth Social:

“In the entire United States of America, Republican or Democrat, only Indiana ‘Republican’ State Senator Rod Bray, a Complete and Total RINO, is opposed to redistricting for purposes of gaining additional Seats in Congress,” Trump wrote in one Truth Social post of the well-liked Republican leader in the Senate. “The Rod Brays of Politics are WEAK and PATHETIC.”

The map passed the Indiana House by The map passed the state House last Friday by a 57-41 vote, with 12 Republicans voting against it.

When the vote shifted to the State Senate, the map was resoundingly defeated, 19-31, with 21 Republicans voting against it.

Trump lost the vote of one State Senator when he called Tim Walz “retards.” The State Senator has a child with Down Syndrome. Others said they would not be bullied.

Categories Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Indiana, Politics, Republicans, Texas, Trump

John Thompson: A Stellar Review of AN EDUCATION

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2025 //
2

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wrote this thoughtful review of my memoirs, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else.

He writes:

Diane Ravitch’s An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else is dedicated to her wife Mary; her sons, Joe, Michael, and Steven; her grandsons Nico, Aidan, Elijah, and Asher; and her ex-husband Richard. An Education intertwines deeply emotional personal and family experiences with the history of how she became such a transformative education leader. Although Diane denies it, I believe she’s the most influential education advocate of the last century.

I’ve been reading Diane Ravitch’s work for decades, but An Education is my favorite book. And my favorite passage started with Diane’s citation of Robert Hutchins who said, “We have to learn to live with those whose opinions differ from our own. After all, they may turn out to be right.”

Then she wrote about Hutchins statement, “for three decades I didn’t realize that it was intended for me.”

Being from Oklahoma, I was captured by the first part of her book, about growing up in Texas. I especially loved her story about meeting Roy Rogers at the Rodeo when she was 9 years old. After Rogers slapped her hand, Diane said, “I determined on the spot that I would never wash that hand again!”

Diane was a tomboy who loved horses and dogs. But she experienced sexism and trauma. She said she “did not have an idyllic adolescence. No one ever does.”  But her teenage years were “destroyed by my father abusing me.” 

During the middle of her book, she recalled her complicated marriage to Richard Ravitch and, then, her wonderful wife, Mary. Mary worked with the progressive educator Deborah Meier and opened a progressive small school in New York City. 

I was especially impressed by Diane’s communication with Al Shanker. He sought to allow teachers to start schools within schools to turnaround kids “in the back of the classroom with their heads on their desks.” Back in the late 1980s, it seemed like he might be able to bring diverse factions together. But, by 1994, charters had been high-jacked by corporate reformers and their winners and losers ideology.

In the middle of An Education. Diane revealed in so much detail the inside stories of her years as a conservative.  Back then, when I was an academic historian, I learned the most about Diane when reading her 1983 book, “The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945 – 1980.” Although I couldn’t yet read her work through the eyes of a teacher, I was exceptionally taken by her calls for teaching background knowledge so students could develop reading comprehension skills so they could “read to learn,” and her placing education pedagogies in a broad historical context.

Diane recalls her support for meritocratic, standardized testing, and color-blind policies, when she questioned bilingual education, and even the benefit of the Equal Rights Amendment. This was the time when she made friends with Bill Bennett, President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, and Chester Finn, and Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander. I knew she had ties to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but I too thought that progressives’ criticism of him was too politically correct. And, until I read An Education, I knew little about the two sides of James Coleman’s research, whose earlier research had seemed persuasive to me.

Neither would I have thought that Chester Finn was like a “sibling” to Diane.

When explaining her then-conservative beliefs, I sometimes felt that Diane was too hard on herself. For instance, she was far, far from alone in failing to understand the wisdom of Gov. Ann Richards, who said, “If there ever is school choice in Texas, the hard-right Christians will get the money to indoctrinate children.”

Moreover, as An Education schooled me on the propaganda behind the so-called “Texas Miracle” it did more than foreshadow the “New York City Miracle,” the “Harlem Miracle,” and the “Mississippi Miracle.”  It brought me back to the decades-long Oklahoma reality when our curriculum and policies were based on Texas’ accountability systems.  During most of my career, our policies were informed by one Texas trick after another to jack up accountability metrics.

Diane served as member of the National Assessment Governing Board from 1997 to 2004, and she would dig deeply into the numbers and the methodologies behind NAEP. But, as she explained, few journalists read the fine print of the research and they wrote “breathlessly” about supposedly dismal results in traditional public schools. They certainly didn’t report properly about the way that students’ outcomes were linked to family income.

When serving in the Education Department, Diane took a lead in establishing national standards for every school subject. Drawing upon excellent historians, multicultural History standards were set. She hoped standards like those would remain voluntary and “unify their respective fields and establish a common ground for a curriculum without telling teachers how to teach.” 

But the conservative Lynne Cheney “published a scathing denunciation of them.” Cheney said the History standards focused too much on people like Joe McCarthy and the Ku Klux Klan, and not enough on Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. This launched the modern wars over curriculum that have become especially destructive under President Trump. 

Even so, in 2002, Diane hoped that Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein (who knew nothing about education) would succeed in improving New York City Schools. Klein reorganized schools from top to bottom, with multiple schools per building drawing on funding by the Gates Foundation. (By the way, I saw the chaos Klein created when visiting dozens of hurriedly opened school, especially in Bedford–Stuyvesant. Usually, leaders of the new schools didn’t even know how many new schools were being opened in their building.)

And, even worse, Jack Welch CEO of General Electric pushed 20-70-10 “stack ranking,” meaning 70% of teachers would be in the middle in terms of effectiveness, and 10% should be “removed,” even if it took the use of invalid and unreliable metrics to evaluate all teachers.

Especially after Diane engaged in a seven-year debate with Deborah Meier, which further “broadened her perspectives,” she became an invaluable leader of the grass-roots opposition to corporate school reforms. She objected to top-down mandates on teaching reading. Diane was among the first to explicitly link in a detailed manner the reforms to the wider privatization movement. And she nailed it when identifying them as the “Billionaires Boys Club.”

Diane analyzed the public relations campaigns which sold “reforms” as the “New York City Miracle.” Drawing upon her insights from serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, she clearly explained why NYC schools flipped back and forth between A and F grades.  Then, she linked President Obama’s flawed $5 billion RTTT experiment with the problems with Common Core curriculum and tests that were years above students’ reading levels.

Diane then quotes John Maynard Keynes who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Today, Diane changes minds by clearly explaining the interconnections between Free Market ideology, and profits, and the mindsets of elites that push privatization. She also reports daily on the interconnected attacks on schools throughout the nation. And now she’s sharing the same wisdom when spreading the word about Trumpism and today’s attacks on democracy.

I always read Diane’s daily blog posts. And I so very much appreciate An Education, even if it briefly pulled me away from reading everything in the Diane Ravitch Blog.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization, Racism, Ravitch, Diane, Research, School Choice, Segregation, Texas, U.S. Department of Education

Jeff Yass, the Billionaire Who Funds Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2025 //
7

Jeff Yass is one of the richest people in the world. He is the richest person in Pennsylvania. He is #25 or #27 on Bloomberg’s Billionaires’ Index, depending on which day you check. His net worth is about $65 billion. He co-founded the Susquehanna International Group, which is based in Pennsylvania. He is also a major investor in TikTok and is widely believed to have persuaded Trump not to ban it. In the last decade, he has given hundreds of millions to political campaigns, including the 2024 Trump campaign.

Yass was recently interviewed by The Washington Post, where he talked about his passion: Vouchers. The writers of the article were Laura Meckler, Beth Reinhard, and Clara Ence Morse.

Yass thinks the public should pay for students to go wherever their parents want them to go: to private schools, religious schools, charter schools, any kind of school, including public schools. He thinks all students should get vouchers, regardless of family income.

He believes the public schools are failing and that universal vouchers will turn American education into a great success.

Yass provided $6 million to Texas Governor Greg Abbott to run pro-voucher Republicans against moderate Republicans who supported public schools. Abbott ran a campaign of lies against the moderate Republicans, asserting that they opposed more funding for public schools and that they supported open borders.

With Yass’s money and Abbott’s lies, they managed to knock off enough moderate Republicans to finally pass a voucher bill. The voucher program is currently costing nearly $1 billion, and most of the voucher money pays the tuition of students previously enrolled in private and religious schools.

The strange part of Yass’s devotion to charter schools and vouchers for religious and private schools is that Jeff is a graduate of the New York City public schools. He graduated from Bayside High School in Queens. He then attended Binghamton University in New York, where he spent most of his time playing poker, betting on horse races, and honing a keen ability to calculate the odds and winning.

As a young man, he read Milton Friedan’s Capitalism and Freedom and became a Friedman devotee. He met Friedman several times; when he asked the great conservative economist which philanthropy he should support, Friedman said “school vouchers.”

Yass jumped in to support school choice. His ideological commitment to them is so strong that he ignores that show that most vouchers are taken by kids already enrolled in non-public schools. He thinks all students should get vouchers, including those whose families are wealthy.

Yass confidently told The Post that studies of voucher programs show “overwhelmingly” positive results. Several early studies of targeted voucher programs have indeed shown positive results on standardized tests, and some research shows positive impacts on other metrics such as college enrollment.

But most research over the past decade or so shows either no effect or a negative impact on test scores for larger-scale programs. Some charter schools struggle with low test scores just like traditional public schools do. That’s at least partly because educating children with many needs and few advantages is a challenging task

Yass maintains that these programs help children. But he also says he doesn’t really care what the studies say or how children perform on tests. He takes the libertarian point of view that all parents should be empowered to choose the school — public or private — that they want for their children, no matter what.

“If the mother or the parent wants the kid to go from one school to another, who the hell is anyone to tell them not to?” he told The Post. “I don’t care what the studies say.”

Yass has spent many millions in his home state of Pennsylvania, but thus far has failed to get sweeping voucher legislation passed.

He has a a starry-eyed and warped view of the U.S. economy.

In a 2021 conversation sponsored by the Adam Smith Society, part of a free-market think tank, he said that the U.S. is almost to the point where “no one” is hungry, cold or lacks basic health insurance.

“What’s the difference between a billionaire and a guy who’s making $100,000 a year? They’re both at home watching Netflix. And they’re both on their iPhones,” he said then. “The disparity between how rich people live and how poor people live in America has never been smaller.”

Government data shows that in 2024, there were 27 million uninsured Americans and in 2023, 18 million households were uncertain if they would have enough food. Wealth inequality has been rising for decades, with the richest families increasing their wealth at a faster rate than everyone else.

Despite Yass’s multi-million dollar contributions to candidates in Pennsylvania, his candidates have frequently lost. Yass has been singled out by protest groups who resent his efforts to buy elections and determine the future of the state.

Critics say his giving represents an absurd amount of influence for one person, who can press his political agenda simply because he is rich….

“Hey hey! Ho ho! Billionaires have got to go!” chanted about 50 protesters marching to Susquehanna’s front door. The group outside Yass’s office in late September wasn’t an unusual sight. All Eyes on Yass, a coalition of education, labor and civil rights groups, has worked to turn Yass into the state’s prime villain, creating an online “Yass tracker” that allows voters to look up whether their state elected officials have received money from Yass-funded PACs.

The protestors organized in response to Yass’s efforts to change the composition of the State Supreme Court.

In the last election, he supported three Republican candidates trying to defeat three Democratic judges on the State Supreme Court. All three of his candidates lost.

It was the 12th demonstration since 2022 organized by All Eyes on Yass. In a year when Musk’s role at the White House prompted intense criticism of billionaires in politics, this group stands out in its singular and persistent focus on Pennsylvania’s richest man.


“We’re here with a simple message: Billionaires like Jeff Yass can’t steal our elections,” said Raquel Jackson-Stone, 32, who works for a civil rights group called One Pennsylvania. “They don’t care about the same things we care about, like housing affordability and making our public schools better…”

Yass rarely if ever interacts with people he disagrees with on this subject. He volunteered to The Post that in business, he advises his employees to seek out alternative points of view. “I always say, ‘Go find the smartest person who disagrees with you,’” he said.

But he said he has never had a personal conversation with a public education advocate to try to understand their point of view. “I would love to do that,” he said….

In the interview with The Post, Yass stood by his comments. He said the divide in America is not about money but about how much satisfaction people get from their work. “That’s the inequality. Wealthy, educated people enjoy their jobs. Lower-income people don’t enjoy their jobs.”

His confidence feeds his opponents but also his conviction to keep spending. If the criticism bothers him, he doesn’t let it show. He sees no problem with one man using money made on Wall Street to press a personal agenda. And he compares his influence not against that of other individuals but to teachers unions and other large interest groups that represent thousands of people each.

As Yass sees it, he’s the one fighting for the underdog — a billionaire speaking up for those who don’t have billions.

“It’s David versus Goliath,” he said. “I represent David.”

So Jeff Yass has never talked to a public education advocate to test his views. I volunteer.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Pennsylvania, School Choice, Texas, Vouchers

Supreme Court Okays Texas’ Gerrymandered Map; Tish James Wins in Court

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2025 //
2

Yesterday was a bad news, good news day.

On the bad side, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a lower court, which had paused Texas’s disgusting gerrymander of the state’s Congressional districts. The party that wins the Presidency usually loses seats in the midterm election. To avoid that happening, Trump asked red state governors to redraw their districts, something that usually happens every ten years, after the latest census.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott was quick to respond to Trump’s request. The MAGA legislature drew a racially gerrymandered map intended to produce five new Republican seats by sacrificing districts that are currently represented by Black or Hispanic members of Congress.

A lawsuit to block the gerrymander lost in the District Court, won in the Appeals Court, which saw the ploy for what it was: a racial gerrymander. Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Appeals Court, finding nothing wrong with a racially gerrymandered redistricting, produced only five years after the last census.

The high court proved once again that it is an extension of Trump-MAGA, lacking in any principles or in fidelity to the Constitution or prior decisions.

We wait to see what they do to California’s gerrymander–not racially motivated–but produced to nullify Texas’ gerrymander.

There is also good news.

As is well known, Trump directed his Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies–starting with James Comey, Letitia James (Attorney General of New York), and Senator Adam Schiff.

The first indictment of Comey and James was thrown out because the U.S. Attorney, Lindsey Halligan, was unqualified.

Charges were promptly refiled against James, claiming that she committed mortgage fraud, by saying that a home she purchased in Virginia was her first home, when it was really a second home, enabling her to pocket $18,000 because of a lower borrowing rate. Coming from an administration whose leaders have pocketed billions, this is funny.

The first prosecutor thought the case was so flimsy that he refused to bring charges. Trump installed Lindsey Halligan, one of his many personal attorneys, as U.S. Attorney. Galligan got a grand jury to indict James, but a judge threw out the indictment because Halligan was unqualified and made many errors.

When the charges against Tish James were brought to another grand jury, they refused yesterday to indict James.

Trump will no doubt continue to harass his enemies, but he’s running low on personal attorneys.

Categories Elections, Racism, Republicans, Texas, Trump

Josh Cowen Interviews Gina Hinojosa, Who Is Running for Governor of Texas

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2025 //
3

Josh Cowen is a prominent scholar of education policy. He spent 20 years as a voucher researcher and eventually concluded that vouchers are a failure. In every state that adopted and expanded vouchers, he found, the overwhelming majority of vouchers were claimed by parents whose children were already enrolled in private and religious schools or home-schooled. The small proportion of students who transferred from public schools to nonpublic schools experienced academic decline.

In his new Substack newsletter, Josh interviewed Gina Hinojosa, who is running for Governor of Texas in the Democratic primary. She has broad support in the party. Whoever wins will face Greg Abbott, who is running for an unprecedented fourth term. Abbott is a Trump man whose only goal is to cut taxes and enrich his billionaire pals, while ignoring the general welfare of the state’s people.

Here is the interview.

Today we’re launching a special feature of this newsletter—a series of spotlight interviews with political candidates, authors, and other public figures across the country. These interviews are going to be in a short, 5-Question format that I hope lets you get to know each person in a way that makes you want to know more. 

First up: Gina Hinojosa. Rep. Hinojosa is a five-term state legislator in Texas, and the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination to take on Governor Greg Abbott. 

I’m doing this interview just after Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won huge margins in their race for the governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively. Both—and especially Spanberger—made renewing and reinvesting in public schools a central piece of their campaigns, to go alongside affordability and health care as major issues in their states.

A recent poll by the Texas Politics Project at UT-Austin, shows Gina Hinojosa poised to join them: Governor Abbott’s approval ratings are at a dismal 32%, with 36% of Texas saying the state is headed in the wrong direction. 

Rep. Hinojosa took the national stage this spring, first in the school voucher fight against Abbott, who took in tens of millions in out-of-state funding from billionaires—including $12 million alone from Pennsylvania’s Jeff Yass. Then, she helped lead the fight against Abbott’s redistricting scheme, which at one point meant leaving the state to deny Abbott a legislative quorum.

Over the weekend, Gina appeared with California Governor Gavin Newsom at a Houston rally to celebrate the passage of Proposition 50 in Newsom’s state—a direct response to Abbott’s redistricting scheme in Texas.

Rep. Hinojosa has been endorsed by a vast array of Democrats and other community leaders across Texas, including both her colleague Rep. James Talarico and former Congressman Colin Allred, who are competing against each other for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. 

Here’s why Gina Hinojosa is running to reverse three decades of GOP control in Texas, and why 2026 is the year for her to do it.

State Rep. Gina Hinojosa (D) is running for governor in Texas (photo: Rep. GinaHinojosa).

1.) Hi Rep. Hinojosa. Thanks for taking a few minutes here. You’re running for governor of Texas. Obviously you’re running to serve Texans, but what do think people everywhere ought to know about who you are and why you’re running?

I never wanted to run for office. In fact, I made my husband promise to never run for office before we got married. But when my son was in kindergarten, his school was threatened for closure. I got angry. Several other inner-city schools were also on the chopping block. As part of a movement to save our schools, I ran for my local school board and won. We saved our schools for the moment. On the school board, I realized that schools would be under constant threat of closure so long as the state kept withholding funding from our neighborhood schools. So I ran for the Texas House, and I won. Once there, I was able to lead on negotiations to win a substantial increase in school funding–but that happened only because Governor Abbott was forced to focus on the real needs of Texans after a 2018 wave election for Democrats. After the 2020 election when Democrats underperformed, the priorities shifted back to the monied interests and schools came under increased pressure, culminating with the passage of a $1 billion school voucher bill this year. It’s no coincidence that Governor Abbott received a $6 million campaign contribution from an out-of-state billionaire who supports privatization. I realized that we would never have the Texas we deserve so long as we have a governor who can be bought. Texas needs a Governor who is for the people, not the billionaire class.

2.) You and I met when I came to Texas during the voucher fight—Governor Abbott took a bunch of money from out-of-state billionaires to ram school vouchers into your state. You were a leader in the fight to stop him, and although they were able to finally force voucher onto Texas families, I think there’s a lot for political candidates to learn from the success you did have standing up to Abbott and those billionaires for so long. What lessons did you take away from that fight?

We beat back Governor Abbott’s voucher scam in 2023 and that fight taught me that we can have powerful cross-party alliances when we focus on what is most important, our kids. I was proud to work with Texans from all parts of the state, both Democrats and Republicans, to beat back Governor Abbott’s voucher scam. We formed strong alliances that persist to this day. One night in a meeting that went late, I was talking to a Republican woman who had travelled to Washington on January 6th in support of President Trump. We came to the realization that we were being divided by culture wars and social issues that were a distraction from the real issue: the taking of our taxpayer dollars to line the pockets of the well-connected, rich elite. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it.

3.) Folks across Texas and all over the country also know your name from the redistricting fight—which Abbott started almost as soon as he was done pushing vouchers through. You and your colleagues had to leave the state at one point to try to stop him. Was there ever a point you wanted to just give up, go home, leave the fight to someone else?

I will admit feeling a certain frustration and exhaustion after 5 terms in the Texas House and in the trenches on every big, state fight that has mattered in the last 10 years. But rather than give up, I have shifted my focus and my fight to this run for governor. For me it’s not about giving up, but about finding my place. In this moment in history, many of us are trying to find our highest, best use. Once you find it, I believe the work gives energy rather than depletes.

4.) Like we do in my home state of Michigan, Texas has a big governor’s race and key campaigns like a tough Senate contest. I worry that there’s kind of an information overload right now for ordinary folks. How do you want voters—and frankly, donors—to think about which campaigns they should be paying attention to, and why the Texas governor’s race is one of them?

Great question. Here’s why our race for governor in Texas in 2026 should be the priority for every American. By the end of this decade, in a little more than 4 years, the Brennan Center predicts that Texas will gain 4-5 new congressional seats because of population growth that is expected to be reflected in the 2030 Census. Texas will be taking those congressional seats from Democratic-majority states like California. What this means is if Texas doesn’t flip blue by the end of the decade, there will not be Democratic control of Congress for a generation. And because congressional seats equate to electoral votes, the same is true for the presidency. If Texas does not flip blue before the end of the decade, there will not be a Democratic United States President for a generation. That’s just math. A Democratic governor of Texas can insist on fair maps and veto any maps aimed to silence the will of the voters. Recent history tells us that this midterm after Trump’s re-election is our best chance to make gains for Democrats. The 2018 midterm after Trump was elected the first time, Democrats swept in Texas. Democrats won 12 seats in the Texas House and made additional gains across the state without national “battleground” funding. This time we must be ready. The fate of the Union depends on it.

5.) What didn’t I ask about you, or your campaign, that you’d like folks in Texas and across the country to know heading into 2026?

We are in a moment in history. Not of our choosing, but it chose us. This moment doesn’t care that we are tired or scared. What happens in our country at this moment will determine whether or not our children inherit a country where they will live free and be able to pursue their dreams and happiness. The stakes couldn’t be higher and there is no escaping from that reality. What we can do is find and join collective efforts dedicated to meeting the moment. We can find support and camaraderie in these efforts. We are very fortunate that there are so many dedicated to doing what is good and right. In fact, I still believe that most Americans are committed to the greater good. (Ignore social media!) Get out there! Meet each other. There is power when we come together and there is peace of mind in asserting that power.

Bonus question: I don’t know any candidates with time to watch TV these days, but give this a shot: which show have you seen or streamed lately that you’re excited about—or can’t wait to check out one day ?

I love The Diplomat on Netflix! My favorite character is Hal.

For the record: I also love The Diplomat, though my favorite character is Todd. 

You can chip in to Rep. Gina Hinojosa’s campaign right here.

Over the weekend, Hinojosa joined CA Governor Gavin Newsom at a Houston rally.

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Courage, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Texas

Texas Farmers Can’t Find Laborers to Work Their Fields

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2025 //
8

Jack Herrera of The Texas Monthly asks whether farming can survive without laborers. His article is titled “Are We Living Through the End of Texas Farming?“

Didn’t anyone in the Trump administration think about the impact of their draconian deportation policies on farming, the tourist industry, and other sectors where immigrants are employed? Apparently not.

Trump claimed he intended to deport “the worst of the worst.” The murderers, rapists, repeat offenders. But in fact, ICE is deporting hard-working people who have not committed crimes and who have contributed to our economy.

Even though Brooke Rollins, the Secretary of Agriculture, has warned Trump about the impact of deportations on farmers, nothing has changed. ICE continues to round up farm laborers, threatening the nation’s food supply.

Herrera writes:

As we broiled beneath a relentless sun in the Chihuahuan Desert, next to countless rows of improbably green cotton plants, I expected Ramon Tirres to tell me that water is his most precious resource. In the valley south of El Paso, Tirres grows cotton and pecans, and for the past 23 years, he’s farmed in the midst of historic drought. But as the wiry 71-year-old toed the dirt next to one of the canals that waters his fields, Tirres told me he’s facing a more pressing shortage: “The big issue we’re having now is finding workers,” Tirres said. “God almighty, is it hard.”

Three years ago, Tirres began working to get an H-2A employment visa for a Mexican farmhand, one of a small pool of workers who could handle the massive John Deere harvesters, the sophisticated machines that use GPS to navigate down furrows without veering an inch off course. “I need him—I was looking forward to having him,” Tirres said. “Irrigation, hauling, driving the tractor, cultivating—he could do it all.” The visa process was going well, and around January, the worker received news that it was looking likely he’d get approved. Then in March, after President Donald Trump took office, the man called Tirres and told him that working as an immigrant in the U.S. now carried intolerable risks. “He got scared,” Tirres said. “He told me, ‘I hear the talk that [immigrants] are getting shipped out to Venezuela or El Salvador—and I don’t want that to happen to me.’” He gave up on the visa process. 

Labor shortages are crippling agriculture across the U.S., and they’ve got the attention of everyone from farmers in El Paso to top officials in the White House. For generations, farmers have struggled to find American-born workers, and in recent years, the number of Mexican farmworkers in the country has decreased, dangerously shrinking the labor pool. In 2022, a national survey of farmers found that close to half—46 percent—said they didn’t have enough workers and that they were struggling to hire more. “We are losing farms in America at a rapid pace and there is no question that our broken workforce system is partly to blame,” Zippy Duvall, the American Farm Bureau Federation president, said in March of that year. 

Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, is well aware of the problem. At a forum in February, she talked about meeting with farmers across the country. “Almost every single conversation, every single one, labor comes up, so it’s clearly a top issue,” Rollins said. She has had to contend with an inconvenient fact: More than 42 percent of farmworkers in the U.S. are undocumented. As farmers raise the alarm about critical worker shortages, the Trump administration is actively deporting those workers—or scaring them away. In June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted huge raids in California, Nebraska, and Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. In the Valley, ICE raids have not come for farms, but the fear of them has been disruptive. According to the most recent survey from the National Center for Farmworker Health, as many as 80 percent of farmworkers in Hidalgo County are undocumented. Farmers have reported that fears of ICE raids have led many of their workers to stop going to work. Food has been left rotting in fields and warehouses. Over the summer, South Texas farmers told reporters that they weren’t just low on workers—they had zero workers left; even those with papers were afraid to show up. “One hundred percent, one hundred percent don’t want to come out of fear of being picked up even if they are doing it the right way,” one farmer told the Valley Central News. 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Economy, Texas

Texas Superintendent Goes Viral in Defense of Teachers, Books, and Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2025 //
10

John Kuhn is the superintendent of schools in Abilene, Texas. He was hired by the Abilene school board in April 2024. He previously served as superintendent in three small districts in Texas. The Abilene board introduced him this way

Dr. John Kuhn brings 27 years of proven experience in public education to Abilene ISD. Prior to joining the Abilene ISD team, Dr. Kuhn most recently served as Superintendent of Schools for Mineral Wells ISD. He has also served as superintendent of Perrin-Whitt CISD and as a high school principal, assistant principal, teacher, and bus driver in the Mineral Wells and Graford Independent School Districts.

I met John Kuhn at a conference of the Network for Public Education about a dozen years ago. At that time, he was superintendent of the Perrin-Whitt Distrist, which has about 320 students, half of whom are economically disadvantaged.

John is one of the most eloquent champions of public education that I’ve ever met. I remember him saying, “Send me the kids you don’t want. Send me the kids who don’t speak English. Send me the kids who are struggling to learn. Send me the kids with disabilities. I’m in a public school and we will teach them all.” Or words to that effect. I’m hoping he will be a keynote speaker at our next conference in Houston in April 2026. He’s the leader we need!

He posted this letter on his Facebook page and it drew a massive response and national attention.

Gosh where to begin? I’m eligible to retire in January, and I don’t want to because I feel like I owe the good people who hired me and this great community at least a few years of blood sweat and tears. I work for a great school board in a city I’ve absolutely fallen in love with. But holy moly do I want to pack it in right now. The burden is heavy.

Yesterday I spent hours at an update listening to the impacts on teachers and admins at public schools of bill after bill passed by our lege. Did you know that one bill says teachers are going to be required to catalogue every book in their classrooms? Kindergarten teachers have hundreds of tiny books. With what time? When?

Did you know that another bill says nurses can’t provide any health care whatsoever and counselors can’t provide any emotional support whatsoever without a written permission slip from parents? The bill language is so poorly written that—despite what it clearly says in black and white English—the bill author sent out a clarification saying nurses can provide a band-aid to a kid who is bleeding. He wouldn’t have to send out a clarification if they wouldn’t pass dumb bills—but legislators have been convinced by political groups who hate public schools that everyone inside them are wicked, evil people.

Did you know about the other new bill that says school administrators who work on the side as refs or one-act-play judges at any school anywhere are subject to a $10k fine per offense for working those jobs if they each individually don’t present a contract to their school board.

That doesn’t apply to me, but I know tons of APs and principals who ref and judge student drama contests. In fact, there’s a huge shortage of both, so if they didn’t do it, we’d be in an even bigger bind in trying to put on games. Again, the bill author had to put out a “clarification” claiming the bill doesn’t mean what it clearly says.

Because they refused to listen to the input of our educator groups—groups, by the way, that they are trying to get defunded because they consider them “taxpayer funded lobbyists” for representing school districts and municipalities.

There is a political movement to pull the teeth of local officials at schools and on city councils and county commissioners courts so that all we have is centralized state leadership. So local yokels like yours truly have to be continually demonized and legislated into submission.

I haven’t even talked about vouchers draining our public schools of resources so those education dollars can go toward private schools that aren’t subject to the crushing bureaucracy. I haven’t event talked about the new testing bill—the one that replaces STAAR with the 3x per year Death STAAR that, like its predecessor tests is solely owned and controlled by the TEA commissioner and is not norm-referenced so Texas student results can be compared to other states, which would keep things honest and prevent the manipulation of student results for political narrative-building.

Anyway, I go to a conference all day listening to this stuff the day after Republican Charlie Kirk is murdered and months after a Democratic state senator is murdered, and I just keep thinking, is it worth it? I can retire and keep to myself until I die of old age. I can just fish every single day. I can travel. I can camp. I can sleep in.

And I get to my hotel room and find some social media commenter calling my teachers “demons” because they assigned an chapter of the amazing book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as a reading passage for a freshman honors English class. This is a book written in the voice of a nine-year-old boy who lost his dad on 9/11 in the terrorist attack on the twin towers. It’s an award winning book. But the passage has the word “shit” in it. And it has a vulgar term that I’m told the teacher was unfamiliar with it. And it has a crude joke about talking butts, which I was a nine-year-old boy and that’s the kind of crudeness we giggle at, so the author was pretty spot on. It also has the word “pussy” but that was what the kid called his cat, but the Facebook post highlighted it as part of making a case that this book was inappropriate.

Thing is, it’s likely valid that this book should be restricted to older kids—17 and 18 year olds. It’s worth noting that this was assigned to only the honors kids because the other passage that the class was reading—also related to 9/11–was at too easy a reading level. So these poor teachers are trying to find something for advanced kids to read, and they don’t have time, and they’re making a good faith effort to push kids to Meets and Masters because they care (and if our A-F grade is too low, there is outrage over that too). And they pick this award-winning book. They decide one “shit” is tolerable. They aren’t offended by the word “pussy” because it literally isn’t a bad word in the context. They get it approved by a colleague.

And they are called “DEMONS.” (Ironically, in the comments of the outrage post, they’re also called “assholes,” which is literally worse than “anus,” which is one of the words the parent highlighted and took offense to, but nobody scolded the commenter for that vulgarity. What’s good for the goose… Commenters also typed “wtf” and “WTH,” which mean “what the fuck” and “what the hell” but nobody accused them of “grooming” children. Selective outrage, anyone.

Who needs this? Is everybody serious? Does everyone just feel absolutely compelled to post their moral superiority online by attacking perceived enemies they’ve never met or shared a meal with.

Our country is no longer capable of living in community. We’ve been driven to our corners. It is barely possible to be a public servant anymore. I totally get why our city manager retired.

My teachers aren’t demons. They may have made a mistake in assigning this book to 15-year-olds rather than 17-year-olds, and for that there are people online saying they need to be fired. Today Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close is likely temporarily coming off our library shelves while we review our book challenge policies. Read the book. It’ll make you cry.

We can’t win in public ed anymore. This is absolutely ridiculous. If I make it to December, it’s gonna be a miracle. I don’t need your sympathy replies, either. I’ll hang it up when I have to for my family and my health, and I’ll stick it out if I feel like I want to. In the meantime, I just want you to know I’m sick of politicians playing divisive politics and leaving local public servants to clean up the mess. Public schools are apolitical entities with the job of teaching kids to think critically and become awesome humans. We aren’t perfect. We have missteps, because we are human organizations. But don’t call my teachers DEMONS while you cuss in the comments.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Censorship, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Resistance, Supporting public schools, Teachers, Texas

The Biggest Liar in Texas

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
3

Michelle H. Davis writes a blog called “Lone Star Left,” where she chronicles the usually corrupt politics of Texas. In this post, she eviscerates Governor Abbott, who loves to brag about the economic success of his state. She calls him out for ignoring the people who are nott part of the state’s prosperity.

She writes:

Today, our feckless leader gave a State-of-the-State Address at the Baylor Club in Waco. Now, if you didn’t know, the Baylor Club is a prestigious private social club nestled within McLane Stadium, offering floor-to-ceiling panoramic views of the stadium, downtown Waco, and the Brazos River.

While many Texans are choosing between groceries and insulin, Abbott delivers big promises from an elite club perched over McLane Stadium. That should tell you all you need to know. 

It was about an hour long, so I watched it for you. Below, I’ve broken down everything he said and what he conveniently left out. 

He began the speech by bragging about having dinner with Governor Glenn Youngkin and then told him that Texas’ budget for building roads was $146 billion. He claimed Youngkin dropped his spoon, saying it was bigger than Virginia’s entire budget. He went on to say that Texas had the “largest road building fund in America.” 

It’s only partly true. According to TXDOT’s 10-year plan, we have allocated about $101.6 billion for projects and $45 billion for maintenance. But this road-building bonanza feels stupid without high-speed trains. Seriously, what are we doing? 

Trains would alleviate traffic, carbon emissions, congestion, and get us from Dallas to Houston in just 90 minutes. It’s faster and greener than driving, but we’re investing all our money in roads? 

Modern marvel, or not, no one likes this shit: 

But Republicans do it all for the fossil fuel industry. 

In related news, ConocoPhillips, headquartered in Houston, plans to lay off 25% of its global workforce. 

Then, he stoked the bigwigs in Waco for a little bit. 

Abbott discussed Waco’s significant economic success, noting its high job numbers and record-low unemployment. 

The unemployment rate in Waco in July was 4.1. In DFW, it was 4.0. In the Austin area, it was 3.5. So, really, it’s comparable to Texas. 

What he failed to mention at this invite-only event was that the poverty rate in Waco is about 24.3%, nearly double the state’s average. Or that in some neighborhoods in Waco, it’s as high as 38%. Meanwhile, 57% of Black children in Waco live below the poverty line.

And that’s the optics, right there. While Abbott spoke from his panoramic perch, over half of Waco’s Black children struggle to make ends meet. This is the story of what Texas has become under Republican control. 

It wouldn’t be a boastful Abbott speech if he didn’t brag about Texas’ economy. 

He always does this. 

Texas is the #1 state for doing business.

Texas is the #1 state for economic projects.

Texas is the #1 state for economic development.

Texas is the #1 state for exports.

Texas has a GDP $2.7 trillion.

But he never talks about how we’re the worst for basic health. Or how we have the most uninsured adults in America. Texas sits 43rd for overall child well-being. And 22% of Texas kids are hungry. In fact, over 5 million Texans don’t know where their next meal is coming from. He also forgot to mention that there’s a housing insecurity crisis, and that Texas cities rank the worst for air quality.

They wine and dine behind glass walls and chandeliers, as Abbott brags to the wealthy. The Baylor Club is a fortress of privilege where the powerful toast each other on gold plates, high above the city streets. 

Down below, children go to bed hungry, their bellies gnawing at them while Abbott gloats about GDP. Senior citizens, the same ones who built this state with their hands and backs, are being taxed out of their homes, cast onto the streets, the newest members of the unsheltered community.

How could you hear that and not burn with anger?…

Then, Abbott told the biggest, most monstrous lie of them all. 

I had to clip this 30-second video for you to see it. Otherwise, you might not believe a whopper this big. 

Abbott claimed that since the 2021 storm (Uri), they have bolstered the Texas electric grid, and it has remained perfect. He went on to say that since 2021, no Texan has lost power due to a deficiency in the grid. 

This is flat-out false. This is such a fucking stupid lie, do I even need to fact-check it? 

Ask the 2.3 million CenterPoint customers in Houston who lost power for over a week after Hurricane Beryl in July 2024. Or the nearly 1 million Texans left in the dark by the Houston derecho just two months earlier in May 2024. Families sweltered in the heat, elderly neighbors died waiting for oxygen refills, and Abbott wants to call that a “perfect” grid?

What he’s really doing is splitting hairs. ERCOT didn’t order rolling blackouts in those disasters. The distribution system collapsed. In other words, the wires and poles failed instead of the generators. But tell that to the family sitting in the dark with spoiled food and no air conditioning. To everyday Texans, it doesn’t matter whether it’s ERCOT or CenterPoint. The lights are off, the fridge is warm, and the Governor is lying.

This isn’t a story of resilience. It’s a story of deregulation, neglect, and profit over people.

Abbott claimed the Legislature made a “generational investment” in water. 

Also, bullshit. We talked about this in June: Did the 89th Legislature Address Texas’ Water Problems?

Voters will decide in November whether or not we make that investment, which will not be nearly enough money to cover the extent of Texas’ water problems, but it’s a start. 

Abbott claimed that they prioritized small businesses with the new “DOGE law.” A spin if there ever was one. It’s a new bureaucratic agency added to the Governor’s office, which will look for “ways to make regulations more effective, streamline the regulatory process, reduce department costs, and increase public access to regulatory information.”

If you followed along with Lone Star Left during the weeks where we watched the Texas budget hearings, you may remember that every Texas agency is running on outdated computer systems (if they aren’t still using paper), they are all understaffed, they are in buildings that are falling apart, and most government employees aren’t even making a livable wage. 

Republicans have already run every inch of this state into the ground, and the idea that they are going to use a new government agency to run it into the ground even further is ludicrous. 

Running our state agencies in such an inefficient, broken-down way doesn’t save money. It raises costs. Outdated systems, paper records, and skeleton crews result in Texans waiting longer for services, errors piling up, and agencies paying more in overtime and contract work to keep the lights on.

Republicans are really bad at governing. 

The human toll is brutal. Employment turnover in some state agencies runs as high as 50%. Think about that, half the workforce gone, year after year. When you’re constantly training new people instead of keeping experienced staff, services collapse. And nowhere is this clearer than in our Health and Human Services agencies.

These are the people who process Medicaid applications, SNAP benefits, and health services for children and seniors. Understaffed offices and burned-out employees mean months-long backlogs. Families in crisis are told to wait for food assistance. Elderly Texans often lack home health care due to a shortage of caseworkers. Disabled children get lost in the system while Abbott’s donors laugh from the Baylor Club balcony.

This is intentional sabotage. Republicans have hollowed out the very agencies that keep Texans alive. Then they use the dysfunction as an excuse to privatize more, deregulate more, and funnel more contracts to their cronies. The suffering of everyday Texans is the plan.

Governor Abbott said the Texas Legislature fully funded public schools. 

The basic allotment (the base per-student funding) sat at $6,160 from 2019 through 2024. 2025’s package adds $8.5B with strings and only a modest BA bump debated (far short of inflation, per district leaders). Many districts still report deficits and cuts. “Fully funded” is another flat-out lie.

But when your audience is a bunch of wealthy CEOs who paid $2,000 a plate to get in to hear you speak, lies like that don’t matter. Surely all of those CEOs are sending their kids to private school, on the taxpayer’s dime, with the shiny new vouchers Mr. Let-Them-Eat-Cake got for all his wealthy donors. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to vote this motherfucker out. 

Every year he lies a little bigger, every year he sells us out a little deeper, and every year the gap between those sipping cocktails at the Baylor Club and those wondering how to feed their kids grows wider.

The truth is, the wealth inequality in Texas right now is more drastic than the wealth inequality in France shortly before their revolution. You know what happened then.

And I’ll leave you with this, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 

“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”

So let’s be ready. Let’s be angry. And let’s be organized. Because November 2026 is coming, and it’s time to flip this state.

Categories Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Texas, Vouchers

Texas: Some of the Worst-Performing Charters have Some of the Highest-Paid Superintendents

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
3

ProPublica has been working with The Texas Tribune to cover politics–but especially education–in the Lone Star State. In their latest report, they discovered that three charter districts had some of the highest paid superintendents in the state, despite the poor performance of their schools. In some of them, teachers were low-paid and teacher turnover was unusually high.

The report begins:

Three charter school superintendents who are among the highest paid in Texas are overseeing some of the lowest-performing districts in the state, newly released records show. One of them is at risk of closure by school year’s end.

An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune previously revealed that board members at Valere Public Schools had paid Superintendent Salvador Cavazos up to $870,000 annually in recent years, roughly triple what it reported publicly to the state and on its website. Two other districts the newsrooms covered, Faith Family Academy and Gateway Charter Academy, also substantially underreported the compensation paid to their top leaders.

The state determined that all three of those districts have had failing or near-failing levels of performance in recent years. The ratings, released last month by the Texas Education Agency, also show that charter schools make up the majority of the districts that have repeatedly had “unacceptable” performance, though they account for a small portion of public schools across Texas. The agency published two years’ worth of accountability ratings for the state’s public and charter schools that were previously undisclosed due to litigation.

Faith Family Academy, a Dallas-area district with two campuses, was one of eight charter school districts that are now on track to be shut down at the end of the school year after receiving a third consecutive “F” rating. Board members paid superintendent Mollie Purcell Mozley a peak annual compensation of $560,000 in recent years to run the district, which has about 3,000 students.

Education experts said they were troubled that the underperforming charter networks the newsrooms identified would invest so heavily in superintendent compensation instead of areas with a more direct impact on student achievement.

“I don’t know what metrics the board’s reviewing to say that this is performance that would warrant this amount of pay,” said Toni Templeton, a research scientist at the University of Houston. “What we know from academic literature is when you put resources closest to the students, the students benefit the most. And the superintendent’s position is important, but it’s pretty far from the kids.”

The state’s “three strikes” law mandates that the state education agency automatically shut down a charter school district that has repeatedly failed to meet performance standards.

School leaders have a 30-day window to contest the ratings with the state education agency if they believe there were errors. The state will then release final scores in December that will determine whether failing campuses will be forced to close.

Keri Bickerstaff has sent four of her five children to school at Faith Family Academy but pulled most of them out after prekindergarten. She said she was shocked and saddened when she learned about the district’s payments to Purcell Mozley from ProPublica and the Tribune. At her children’s school in Waxahachie, south of Dallas, Bickerstaff observed crowded classrooms and felt that the teachers lacked experience and left the school at high rates. She was surprised that the superintendent had been paid so highly.

“I was under the impression that funding was an issue,” Bickerstaff said in an interview.

Purcell Mozley and Faith Family Academy did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but in an Aug. 14 letter to parents and staff posted on the school’s website, she stated that the district planned to appeal the state’s rating. “While this rating is disappointing on its face,” Purcell Mozley wrote, “we want our community to know that we have conducted a thorough review of our performance data — and we strongly believe that our true score for 2025 reflects a solid C rating.”

Another small charter district in Dallas, Gateway Charter Academy, has two strikes against it after receiving a combination of “F” and “D” ratings over the last three school years. If the district receives another low score next year, it too will be forced to shutter its two campuses that serve around 600 students.

State education records show Gateway has been plagued by teacher turnover, with as many as 62% of its instructors leaving the district in recent years. The district has paid teachers about $10,000 less than the statewide average while paying superintendent Robbie Moore more than $426,000 in 2023, according to tax records— nearly double his base salary of $215,000.

Gateway and Moore did not respond to requests for comment. After it was originally contacted by the newsrooms about the previously undisclosed compensation, the district posted a new document on its website that lists an undated $75,000 bonus for Moore.

While there are no state regulations limiting how much school districts can pay their superintendents, state lawmakers have tried to change that for years. Lawmakers filed at least eight proposals during the most recent regular legislative session that would have constrained administrators’ pay and severance packages at public and charter schools, but none passed. That included a bill authored by Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a Republican from Corpus Christi, that would have capped a superintendent’s income to twice that of the highest-paid teacher in the district.

Hinojosa filed another bill during a special session that began in July that would have allowed superintendents to earn up to three times as much as the top-paid teachers when their district scored an “A” rating. But if a district earned a “D” or “F” rating, a superintendent’s income could not exceed that of the top-paid instructors. The measure failed to reach a committee for discussion.

“If teachers are held accountable for student performance, administrators should be too,” Hinojosa said in a statement.

Although Valere received a “D” rating for the past two years, its board has compensated Cavazos hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on top of his base salary, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the country, the ProPublica and Tribune investigation found…

Holding Charter Schools Accountable

Texas’ A-F rating system was established in 2017 and uses metrics such as standardized test scores to grade each district and campus on student achievement, school progress and success with closing socioeconomic achievement gaps.

The new ratings come after a lengthy legal battle between Texas public school districts and the TEA over changes to the education agency’s ratings system. Districts twice sued Mike Morath, the TEA commissioner, to stop the release of the scores after the agency announced plans to revamp the system in 2023. The lawsuits successfully kept the scores from public view until this spring, when a state appeals court overturned a ruling in favor of the districts, setting the stage for the release of performance ratings for the 2022-23 school year in April, and ratings for the two most recent school years in August after a separate decision by the same appeals court.

The ratings affect charter schools and traditional public schools in different ways. A traditional public school district can potentially face state intervention after one of its campuses receives five years of failing ratings. The new TEA records show that there are five such districts at risk. By comparison, the state is required to automatically shut down an entire charter district that receives three years of failing scores.

Supporters often point to the “three strikes” law as evidence that charter schools are held to a higher level of performance standards than public schools.

The regulation, which was introduced in 2013, is one of many guardrails that has been put in place since charter schools were authorized in the 1990s with far less state oversight than public schools. Charter schools, for example, were originally shielded from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws until reports of leaders engaging in self-dealing and profiteering gradually prompted lawmakers to act.

Brian Whitley, a spokesperson for the Texas Public Charter Schools Association, said that Texas holds charter schools “more accountable, more quickly” when they don’t meet performance expectations, including through automatic closures.

Private schools are set to receive a similar level of protection from the laws that govern how traditional public schools spend their money: Under a landmark school voucher bill the Legislature passed this spring, the state plans to direct at least $1 billion public dollars to private education in the coming years. Earlier this month, an investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune revealed more than 60 instances of nepotism, self-dealing and conflicts of interest at Texas private schools that likely would have violated state laws had the schools been public.

These sorts of conflicts of interest and familial business entanglements have been common among at least two of the three charter districts that have made outsize payments to their leaders.

Records show that Gateway Charter Academy has hired employees related to administrators, including Moore. According to Gateway’s 2017 financial audit, Moore also married an “instructional coach” in the district that year. Records show that the coach’s compensation increased from $75,000 to $221,000 during the 2022-23 school year, after she was promoted to director of curriculum development. She did not respond to requests for comment.

At Faith Family Academy, Gene Lewis, one of the founding board members who hired Purcell Mozley and reviews her performance, is also her uncle, according to bond documents. Lewis’ wife also sits on the board of a separate entity that oversees the district, according to Faith Family Academy’s tax filings.

Lewis and his wife did not respond to requests for comment.

.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Texas

Pastors for Texas Children Speak Out Against the Harm of Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2025 //
9

Our allies at Pastors for Texas Chuldren fought courageously against the passage of voucher legislation but were ultimately defeated by Governor Abbott’s plan to oust moderate Republicans from the legislature.

Funded by Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass and Texas billionaires Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn, both of whom are Christian pastors and nationalists, Abbott managed to defeat the moderate Republicans who worked with Democrats to beat vouchers.

Now the Pastors have set their sights on minimizing the damage done to children by standardized testing. For many years, Texas legislators have been obsessed with test scores. They never consider the harms done by the tests to students, teachers, and the love of learning.

The Pastors did, and they issued this statement:

At Pastors for Texas Children, we believe every child is a precious gift of God, created with unique abilities and potential. Yet for decades, our public schools have been forced to rely on standardized testing as the primary measure of learning and progress. These tests were designed with good intentions, but in practice, they have done real harm to our children, our teachers, and our schools.

Standardized testing narrows the curriculum, reducing education to what can be measured on a multiple-choice exam. It discourages creativity, critical thinking, and the joy of learning. Instead of nurturing a child’s individual talents, testing forces them into a one-size-fits-all mold. For many students, especially those from vulnerable communities, these tests add unnecessary stress and stigma, often labeling children by a single score rather than recognizing their God-given worth.

Teachers, too, are burdened. Their ability to teach with passion and flexibility is restricted when their professional value is tied to test results. Entire classrooms are transformed into test-prep factories, rather than places of discovery, curiosity, and growth. Public schools—the foundation of our democracy—are weakened when accountability is reduced to a number on a page.

HB 8 purports to mitigate the damages of standardized testing and fails. The version advancing out of the Senate is even worse. There is still time to fix this bill, but the clock is ticking. Call your State Representative now and tell them to remove high stakes from these assessments and strip TEA of its authority to administer them. 

Our faith calls us to see children as whole beings, not data points. We must move toward assessments that encourage true learning, affirm student progress, and honor the dedicated work of educators. Texas children deserve classrooms that inspire and equip them, not testing regimes that drain and demean them.

We urge you to join us in advocating for an end to the overreliance on standardized testing in Texas public schools. Let us stand together for education that celebrates the fullness of every child’s potential.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Industry, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Real Education, Standardized Testing, Students, Texas, Vouchers
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