Archives for category: Texas
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Ruth Marcus: Gun Owners Have More Rights than Their Victims

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2023 //
35

Ruth Marcus is deputy editor of the Washington Post and is a consistent voice for sanity and reason. In this article, she describes one of the worst federal court decisions ever. If this decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, we will all need guns to protect ourselves. Good news for the gun industry, bad news for public safety. Marcus wrote this article before the latest school shooting in Nashville, where three adults and three children were murdered. The killer was armed with three weapons, including an AR-15, which has no purpose except as a killing machine. Hunters don’t use it because it destroys what it kills.

She writes:

When the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to gun ownership, it emphasized the ability “of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” When it expanded that decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court noted that “ordinary, law-abiding citizens have a similar right to carry handguns publicly for their self-defense.”

Zackey Rahimi was, one presumes, not the kind of upstanding citizen the justices had in mind.

Over a six-week stretch from December 2020 to January 2021, Rahimi took part in five shootings around Arlington, Tex. He fired an AR-15 into the home of a man to whom he had sold Percocet. The next day, after a car accident, he pulled out a handgun, shot at the other driver and sped off — only to return, fire a different gun and flee again. Rahimi shot at a police car. When a friend’s credit card was declined at a fast-food restaurant, he fired several rounds into the air.

Or, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit put it in vacating Rahimi’s conviction for illegal gun possession, “Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal.”

This is the insane state of Second Amendment law in the chaotic aftermath of Bruen. The problem isn’t that decision’s precise outcome, striking down New York state’s gun licensing law because it required a showing of “special need for self-protection” to obtain a concealed carry permit.

The problem is that in doing so, the six-justice conservative majority imposed a history-based test — a straitjacket, really — for assessing the constitutionality of gun laws. No longer can judges decide whether restrictions are a reasonable means to protect public safety.

Instead, they have to hunt down obscure, colonial-era statutes to determine if there are counterparts to modern rules. So it’s little surprise that conservative judges in the lower courts are now busy declaring all sorts of perfectly sensible gun laws unconstitutional.

Those cases are just making their way to the appellate level, and Thursday’s ruling by the Fifth Circuit is one of the earliest to be decided. The court may be the most conservative — and most dangerous — in the country. The ruling in Rahimi’s case, written by one Trump-appointed judge, Cory T. Wilson, and joined by Trump appointee James C. Ho and Reagan appointee Edith H. Jones, shows why.

When Arlington police searched Rahimi’s home, they found multiple guns — and a domestic violence restraining order imposed after Rahimi allegedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend. Federal law prohibits those subject to such orders from possessing guns, and Rahimi was indicted by a federal grand jury.

Before Bruen, the Fifth Circuit had upheld such charges against constitutional challenge, and it had previously rejected Rahimi’s claim that the law violated his Second Amendment rights. But on Thursday, it did an about-face.

“We know the increased risk women in abusive relationships face when the abuser has a gun, and the Fifth Circuit just essentially greenlighted arming domestic abusers,” Adam Skaggs, vice president of the Giffords Law Center, told me. “As a matter of public safety, this is a horrendous decision.”

Wilson, who was a fervent opponent of gun regulation as a Mississippi state legislator, strained to read the Supreme Court’s language about law-abiding citizens out of the precedents. That was just “shorthand,” he insisted, and “read in context, the Court’s phrasing does not add an implied gloss that constricts the Second Amendment’s reach.”

This is simply wrong. As the Justice Department argued, the court in Bruen emphasized that “nothing in our analysis” threatened licensing laws in 43 states, which, the court said, “are designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens.’” Such as, say, Texas, which prohibits those subject to domestic violence protective orders from obtaining licenses.

Wilson was having none of it. Under the government’s approach, he asked, “Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms? Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”

Seriously? This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about a man accused of dragging his girlfriend into his car, shooting at a witness who saw him assault her, and warning the girlfriend that he would shoot her if she told anyone what had happened.

As to historical analogues, Wilson acknowledged that there were “laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, specifically including those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves, and Native Americans.”

But, he said, despite some “facial similarities” with laws disarming domestic abusers, “the purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another.”

As Pepperdine law professor Jacob Charles pointed out on Twitter, this criticism is “absolutely bonkers” — it faults the domestic abuse law for being “too tailored.” The law applies to those who have been determined, after a court hearing, to present a “credible threat to the physical safety” of an intimate partner or child.

All of which serves to underscore the real difficulty with the Supreme Court’s history fetish: As Bruen itself demonstrated, the matter of what historical examples to accept and what to reject is open to manipulation by judges predisposed to strike down gun laws.

And it poses a dilemma for the conservative justices, who are about to find this issue back in their laps. Are they going to instruct lower courts they have gone too far, or are they going to let it rip, while bullets fly and judges scour statutes from the age of muskets?

Categories Guns, Insane, Texas

Texas: Republicans Hate Education: Dumb and Dumberer

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2023 //
5

The Texas Signal has figured out the Republican plan for education. Defund the public schools. Send public money to greedy charter operators who have their eye on the bottom line. Send public money to voucher schools that indoctrinate their students. The goal: Dumb and Dumberer. Members of the Texas House of Representatives—both Democrats and Republicans—voted against public funding for private schools just a few days ago (after this article was posted), but the Governor is likely to try again.

For decades, Texas Republicans have been hoping you won’t notice how much public education is underfunded. Now that the far right is in the driver’s seat, we can see it was a failure by design.

Under Republican leadership, Texas has long underfunded our teachers and schools. For a while, this worked for Texas Republicans – at least politically. If someone complained, they could always point their fingers at the need for property tax relief or blame our failing schools on underpaid teachers. And if that didn’t work– blame Black and Brown communities. And if that didn’t work – hell blame the kids themselves. 

Of course, they could also avoid the topic altogether. Instead of allowing the light to shine on our school, they could simply redirect their high beams to some unfortunate Texas group as a distraction in their signature Texas Republican culture war two-step. Anything to avoid responsibility.

Texas Republicans have been happy to keep up this understanding during their 6-month stay in Austin every odd year. The Texas Republican culture war two-step: bully some women or LGBTQ kids and do the bare minimum so that they can say they’ve done their part for our kids while they find ways to build personal wealth. 

That worked for a while until the failures of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) started to show. 

Republican failures, TEA Takeovers, and Privatization

In 2018, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) was placed under federal oversight by the Department of Education for its failings regarding special education. This was due to the illegal actions of the Texas Education Agency that put a limit on the percentage of students it would allow into special education programs, impacting countless kids.  

This normally would be a wake-up call for any elected official who had the interests of their constituents at heart. But then again, we’re dealing with Greg Abbott. 

Instead of fixing the root of most issues, underfunding, Governor Greg Abbott made a hard right turn led by party extremists. Greg Abbott decided to turn to Republicans’ trusted distracted dance, except now he created a new cultural war two-step. Step 1: Blame teachers at struggling schools in our most diverse cities and 2) funnel money into the pockets of his rich donors who put their kids to private Christian schools through the scheme known as vouchers.

While Abbott has been on a statewide tour pushing his voucher scheme, he simultaneously had TEA take over the Houston Independent School District (HISD) takeover earlier this year. The takeover was blasted by civil and racial rights advocates, including the ACLU of Texas. “The state takeover of HISD is not about public education — it’s about political control of a 90 percent Black and brown student body in one of the country’s most diverse cities,” they wrote on Twitter.

Then in late March, Abbott continued his strategy with a new diverse (and Democratic-run) city: Austin. State Representative Gina Hinojosa (D- Austin) is a leading voice on public education and sits on the prominent House committee. And late on the last Friday of March, she sent an explosive alert on social media to activate pro-public education Texans. She announced that the TEA recommended conservatorship over Austin Independent School District (AISD). 

This means that a team selected by Commissioner Morath will have the power to take action over our local school district indefinitely, similar to the Houston Independent School District (HISD) takeover earlier this year. 

According to Rep. Hinojosa, the agency has cited the district’s failings regarding students receiving special education. And in November, the voters of Austin elected four new trustees and an interim superintendent has since been hired. Most folks agree AISD is heading in the right direction. “Specifically, we know that many of AISD’s challenges are due to staffing shortages, “ said Hinojosa. “Additionally, the TEA has acknowledged that the state underfunds special education in AISD by close to $80 million annually.” 

Of course, facts would only matter if Republicans cared about improving the lives of children. The solution seems simple: more funding equals better results. However, this is all a ruse toward the larger direction right back to the voucher scheme pushed by the extreme right. 

As we’ve noted, current proposals that could become law give families enrolling in private or parochial schools $8,000 per student, per year to cover tuition and other related expenses. 

This would be devastating to our public schools. Texas ranks near the bottom of national rankings of per-student funding, with the basic allotment totaling around $6,160 per student. 

The Governor and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick are fully on board, leaving only the Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan left as a question mark. While Phelan generally is a pushover when it comes to right-wing agenda items, some rural Republicans may force his hand into a fight. 

The solution to most of our public education problems is simple: funding. Simple solutions are usually welcome news. However, with the growing issues of sexual assault problems for Texas Republicans and other issues that plague the state, Republicans go for what they’re most familiar with for answers. The ole’ culture war two-step.

Are you tired of Texas Republicans pushing big lies and trying to steal your vote? So are we, that’s why we’re fighting back against the right-wing lie machine. Our commitment to ethical, fact-based journalism is vital to our democracy, and we can’t do it without you. Consider donating today to help us stay in this fight.

CONTINUE READING

Musings: How Ted Cruz helped turn politics into pro wrestling
Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Ignorance, Privatization, Propaganda, Stupid, Texas

Texas: House of Representatives Says “No” to Vouchers

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2023 //
14

Governor Gregg Abbott has said repeatedly that vouchers was a high priority for him. He has traveled the state, visiting private schools, to promote them. His party controls both houses of the legislature. Voucher legislation passed in the Senate. Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a bill barring vouchers by 86-52.

Edward McKinley of The Houston Chronicle reported:

The Texas House voted Thursday to restrict public funds from subsidizing private education, a major rebuke of Gov. Greg Abbott and the state Senate, which was expected to pass a so-called voucher program later in the day.

Although past efforts have fallen short in the House, voucher programs have received more support this year than ever before. Gov. Greg Abbott named them a priority in his State of the State address earlier this year, and he has toured the state calling for enaction. Abbott argues that parents are currently deprived of options for their children’s education, and he also says that public schools have become tools for progressive indoctrination.

The margin on Tuesday was 86 to 52. House Public Education Chair Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, attempted to prevent the chamber from voting on the measure at all, saying it was inappropriate considering that his committee plans to hold public hearings for several voucher policies next week.

“This process with this amendment turns things really in the wrong direction. It is the proverbial cart before the horse,” he said. In past sessions, Buckley has voted for the same amendment. If Buckley had been successful, it would have allowed the House to avoid any provocation of the governor or lieutenant governor.

Buckley’s effort failed by a seven-vote margin, with about a dozen Republicans joining the Democrats to stop it.

The House’s measure still needs approval from the Senate and from Abbott, and members could still decide to ultimately approve a voucher program later this session – but it proves there’s not a strong desire in the House to go on-record as supporting vouchers.

“These are public funds for public schools, as outlined and stated specifically in the Texas Constitution,” said Rep. Abel Herrero, a Robstown Democrat and the author of the amendment calling for the ban. Herrero has offered the same amendment in past sessions, where it has often won more than 100 votes.

In past years, the Herrero amendment has been opposed by the state Senate and ultimately stripped out during negotiations between the two chambers.

edward.mckinley@houstonchronicle.com

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Texas: Drag Queen Exposes Hypocrisy of Anti-Drag Laws

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2023 //
32

The Texas Monthly interviewed a drag queen named Brigitte Bandit, who has performed in nightclubs, bars, and library story hours. She has worn a big pink wig, lots of makeup and frilly dresses while performing as Dolly Parton, Jesse the Cowgirl, Ariel from The Little Mermaid, and other roles.

She loves performing. But here’s the catch: she was born female, identifies as female, and would not be affected by the ban that Texas legislators intend to pass.

But she’s fighting for the drag queen community. She testified before the legislative committee in full drag.

She noted that there are videos of some of the legislators dressed in women’s clothing (posted in the article).

She said in the interview:

Ultimately, drag is just a play on the gender binary. You can have a drag queen or a drag king, or more alternative drag performers, like spooky, monster-type drag. Drag can just encompass so many things that defining it by your genitalia misses the point of what drag is. A lot of people didn’t realize I was an AFAB [assigned female at birth] queen until I spoke at the hearing. They had no idea, because drag really is a costume, and you can’t poke holes through it to see what’s happening underneath, you know? …

I actually had a Dolly Parton book open on that table during my testimony. [The passage] read, “Dolly loves to wear wigs and lots of makeup. Some people may think it’s too much, but children love her look. And so does she.” I was going to read that, because if you go to story time, you’ll see that it’s really not a threat to anybody or anything. It’s actually a really fun environment, and kids love it. I did this event at [radio station] KUT’s Rock the Park as Dolly Parton, and there was this huge group of children just following me around wherever I went. It was wild to me. They just loved it so much. I was trying to perform and I was worried that I was going to trip over them because they had completely surrounded me. Kids don’t see anything other than, like, a really tall Barbie doll. It’s adults who are sexualizing this kind of art. What’s the issue with me wearing a big dress and reading a book? 

Is a female (such as Brigitte Bandit) allowed to give a drag queen performance, but a male dressed in the same outfit with the same wig going to be thrown in jail?

Why do red state legislators find drag queens so threatening? Are they insecure about their own masculinity?

Categories Gender, Humor, Texas

Sara Stevenson: Texas GOP Would Criminalize Librarians

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2023 //
14

There is a popular stereotype of librarians: Mild-mannered, quiet, unassuming, and of course, bookish. But the Republicans in the Texas legislature seem to think that behind that compliant demeanor lies a sinister purveyor of dangerous ideas and books. What other explanation can there be for proposed legislation that would place book selection in the hands of a parent committee? And why strip away the legal protections accorded to librarians doing their job?

Sara Stevenson, a retired middle school librarian in Austin, wrote the following article, which was published in the Dallas Morning News.

As a former school librarian and mother, I have always believed parents have total control over what their children select to read from the school library.

However, Senate Bill 13 goes too far. Between July 2021 and June 2022, only 22 of 1,650 Texas school districts experienced formal book challenges in the past school year, less than 2%. All school districts already have formal challenge and reconsideration policies in place.

SB 13 transfers the decisions for acquiring library materials into the hands of a council of parents, the majority of whom do not work for the district but only have children attending. What possible experience or credentials or rights does this committee have to make decisions on what children can and can’t read in an entire school district? After a long, convoluted process spelled out in the bill, the school board must then approve the list of library books before they may be purchased.

First of all, it is clear the authors of this bill have a poor understanding of school library programs. In Austin ISD, there are 116 schools. This Local School Library Advisory Council, appointed by the school board, is required to meet only twice a year to decide on the library collections for all 116 schools. A single campus librarian purchases materials throughout the year. It’s not a one and done process.

This bill will greatly delay the timeline between ordering books and getting them into the hands of children. The additional 30-day waiting period further impedes the process. As a librarian, I had the freedom to pre-order the next book in a popular series so that I could add it to our collection the very day it was published. Kids clamoring for the next book in a beloved series will now have to wait for months if not all year.

The bill also invites parents to opt in to a program in which the librarian emails them each time their child checks out a book, including the book’s title and author. One elementary school in south Austin averages 196 checkouts per day. How is it possible for the librarian to send these emails while also running her library program? Instead, why not integrate the library catalog information into the parent portal, the website which parents already access to see their child’s grades? Parents can then look up their students’ library records. It would even help librarians with the bane of our existence: long overdue books.

The portion of the bill that enables anyone to prosecute individual librarians for distributing “harmful material” under the Texas penal code (Sec. 43.24) is the most shocking and destructive piece in this bill. It removes affirmative defenses for educational purposes. Does this also remove legal protections from members of the advisory council if a “bad” book slips through the cracks?

I can’t believe the state of Texas wants to allow frivolous lawsuits against librarians, school boards, principals, and teachers. We are already experiencing a teacher shortage, with at least 59 districts switching to four-day weeks.

If passed, this bill will bring a culture of fear and intimidation to our schools.

The men and women who choose to serve as school librarians are among the most intelligent and ethical people I know. They are not just serving the children of the five parents on the Local School Advisory Committee; they are representing the interests of all children and the parental rights of all families at their schools, upholding their First Amendment Rights to read.

If the Senate Public Education Committee had only consulted in good faith with the vast majority of school librarians whose patrons are extremely satisfied with the library collections they curate, this bill would have been able to find a balance between respecting parental rights and ensuring better oversight in purchasing materials without adding unwieldy, impractical layers of bureaucracy and red tape that will prevent children from having ready access to the books they want and need to read.

Sara Stevenson is a former school librarian in Austin ISD. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Literacy, Literature, Students, Stupid, Texas

Texas: Vouchers Blocked in House of Representatives!!

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2023 //
12

Governor Gregg Abbott went all in and all out to pass vouchers, so that public money would fund religious schools, private schools, and homeschools. His proposal passed in the State Senate.

But it in trouble in the House of Representatives, where rural Republicans are standing with urban Democrats against vouchers for nonpublic schools. The House today passed the Herrero Amendment, prohibiting public funding for vouchers.

The Pastors for Texas Children have worked tirelessly to protect public funding for public schools. Five million children attend public schools. Three hundred thousand students are enrolled in private schools. they issued the following statement about today’s events:

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Rev. Charles Foster Johnson

210-379-1066

Johnson.cfj@gmail.com

 

Herrero Amendment Blocking Voucher Funding Passes Overwhelmingly

 

The Herrero Amendment prohibiting tax money for private school vouchers passed the Texas House of Representatives this afternoon on an 86-52 vote.

The Texas House has once again repudiated a private school voucher program, as they have many times over the past 25 years.

This rejection of vouchers is particularly powerful because Gov. Greg Abbott made the passage of a voucher policy an “emergency item” this legislative session, and personally lobbied House members on the chamber floor to advance it.

“Texans abhor private school vouchers,” said the Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Founder and Executive Director of Pastors for Texans Children. “For public dollars to be diverted to subsidize the private education of affluent children and to pay for religious education, particularly that contrary to one’s own, is fundamentally unjust.”

“Unfortunately, Gov. Abbott has tied up the entire legislature this session, at the cost of millions of tax dollars, for in his own petty personal political agenda.”

The Texas State Constitution, in Article 7, Section 1, calls for the suitable provision for “public free schools.” There is no consideration whatsoever for public funding diverted to private schools.

Using public tax dollars, taken from our 5.4 million Texas schoolchildren, to underwrite the private education of a few, is an egregious moral violation.

We find it particularly troubling for public funding to advance and establish religious programs in private schools. This is a clear violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and God’s Moral Law.

Pastors for Texas Children is grateful that the Texas House of Representatives once again stood firm for the true Texas conservative value of universal education for all Texas schoolchildren, provided and protected by the public.

+++

 

Pastors for Texas Children mobilizes the faith community for public education ministry and advocacy. http://www.pastorsfortexaschildren.com

PO Box 471155 – Fort Worth, Texas 76147

http://www.pastorsfortexaschildren.com

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Texas, Vouchers

Texas: Vouchers Will Soon Come to a Vote in Legislature: Write, Call, Speak Out!

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2023 //
2

Governor Gregg Abbott has pushed very hard for vouchers to fund religious schools, homeschooling, and anything else that calls itself a school. Texas has a state constitution that requires public schools, but voucher advocates abandon the language of state constitutions when they get in the way of their goal.

We know from experience that most vouchers will be used by students already enrolled in private or religious schools. We know that the cost of funding kids already in private schools will be enormous. More than 300,000 students attend private schools in Texas. Add in home schoolers, and you are looking at an annual cost of nearly $3 billion before any public school student has asked for a voucher.

We know from research studies that most of the public school kids who take vouchers will drop out of their religious school and return to their public school far behind their peers.

No group has been more effective in fighting to preserve public schools than Pastors for Texas Children. They have mobilized rural Republicans to stand strong for their public schools, which are the hub of their community.

PTC released the following report today:

Call and Write Your Senator and Representative TODAY!

The SB 8 education savings account voucher bill will likely pass out of the Senate Education Committee today or tomorrow, then go to the Senate floor for a vote. It’s been astonishing that the bill has been stalled in the Senate for the past week! As you know, the Texas Senate, under the leadership of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, has long supported private school vouchers. Contact your State Senator anyway! Our job is to influence and educate them!

Vouchers stop and die in the Texas House of Representatives. They will vote on Thursday on an amendment to the budget bill preventing public money from funding private schools. Here it is:

Call and email your State Representative before Thursday and urge him or her to support the Herrero Amendment prohibiting private school voucher funding.

You can find their Austin office numbers here.

PTC pastor Rev. Julio Guarneri, the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in McAllen, has written a powerful letter to his state senator. It gives us all a good, succinct script for our talking points as we contact our policymakers.

It’s our job before God to speak truth to power. God bless us all as we bear witness to God’s truth and justice this week!

 

Senator Hinojosa,

I hope you had a good weekend. I attempted to call you on the phone this morning but you were in a meeting and I know this is a busy week for you. I hope to still be able to talk to you over the phone but in the meantime, let me share with you what I am calling about.

I am the Lead Pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in McAllen. I am also currently serving as president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas (Texas Baptists), to whom the Christian Life Commission relates. And I am with Pastors for Texas Children as well.

I am writing you in regard to SB 8 (Education savings account/school voucher bill). As a Baptist, as a pastor, and as a religious leader, I am opposed to SB 8 for several reasons. My conviction is that church and state should be separate. A free church in a free state is our ideal. Thus, I do not believe tax dollars should be used to fund religious education. Public tax dollars should be used for public schools. Religious causes should be supported by donations from private individuals.

There are only two choices for religious schools who receive help from tax credits. They either receive oversight from the government, which violates the separation of church and state, or they receive the benefit without accountability, which is wrong.

Furthermore, this measure seems to mostly benefit middle to upper class families, leaving lower income families either without enough of a tax credit to afford a private school or with an underfunded public school system. We will do a disservice to Texas if we leave lower income families at an educational disadvantage.

I know you have historically opposed school vouchers and I am thankful for that. I respectfully ask you to hold your position. As a religious leader I believe it is the right thing.

Please do not hesitate to call me or email me.

May you have a blessed Holy Week and a Happy Easter!

For our Texas children and our Texas future,

Julio S. Guarneri, Ph.D.

Calvary Baptist Church

McAllen, Texas

Pastors at the Capitol

DONATE TO PTC

 

PO Box 471155, Fort Worth, Texas, 76147

Check out our website  

 

Categories Accountability, Courage, Education Industry, Equity, Funding, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Texas: Uh-Oh! The Book Banners Have Gone Too Far!

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2023 //
31

The latest wave of book banning in Texas high school libraries is led by people who don’t read much. Now, they’ve gone and set up a bar that even the beloved classic Texas novel—Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry—can’t get past.

In a recent legislative hearing, the book banners put their aliteracy on public display.

Christopher Hooks writes in the invaluable Texas Monthly:

State representative Jared Patterson has never claimed, through campaign literature or any other medium, to be a reader. If he had, he might not have walked into the trap set for him last night during a House Public Education Committee hearing on his inaptly named READER Act. That proposal would add several new bureaucratic controls on the kinds of books that could be kept in or borrowed from public-school libraries. When Democratic state representative James Talarico, of Round Rock, prodded the Frisco Republican during debate, Patterson took the bait. “There should be no sexually explicit books” in a high school library, he said.

Talarico replied that there’s content that could be viewed as sexually explicit in many very good books. (Though he didn’t mention it, the Bible ranks high among them.) Take Talarico’s favorite book, Larry McMurtry’s 1985 novel Lonesome Dove, about two retired Texas Rangers on a cattle drive during the twilight years of the Old West, which has become totemic to generations of Texans. The book includes characters who are prostitutes and scenes of sexual assault and its consequences. It includes birds and bees and all that kind of filth. Talarico asked: Would Lonesome Dove be banned in Texas high schools under Patterson’s bill?

Patterson hadn’t read Lonesome Dove, he replied, committing his first error. But if it contained the ribald passages Talarico indicated it did, well, then, “they might need to ban Lonesome Dove.” There were a lot of interested parties following this hearing, and it was widely understood among Patterson’s allies and enemies alike that he had stepped in it. Lonesome Dove is an easily comprehensible example of the kind of book that deals with difficult subjects but enhances the reader’s understanding of life, and of other Texans. The thought of the novel coming out of high school libraries in a brown paper bag, like a copy of Maxim, made Patterson’s whole bill seem more ridiculous than it already was.

Patterson’s allies apparently thought he needed help digging himself out of his hole, so they jumped in with him. Christin Bentley, a member of the State Republican Executive Committee, had an idea. Apparently not having read the book either, she tweeted that she had “bought Lonesome Dove on Kindle and did keyword searches.” She searched for “f—,” “p—y,” “sex,” and “vagina,” which don’t appear in the novel, and posted screenshots to prove it. After this deep engagement with the text, she was happy to report on Twitter that the book was not sexually explicit and, therefore, would not be banned under the bill.

Of course, Lonesome Dove is set in the 1870s: Bentley was searching for the wrong words. Twitter users helpfully suggested she search for the word “poke.” (Hard to picture Gus yelling “p—y” across the range.) But even a better search would have been of limited value. With a short summary, you can make Lonesome Dove sound like smut or a wholesome novel. The only way to evaluate it properly, as with any book, is to read it and think about it in its totality. That’s the point of books: You can step into the lives of characters unlike you. You can think about what it’s like to be a woman or a man, consider issues you had never given thought to, and step back into your life at the end of it, your horizons a little wider.

Some folks, however, prefer their horizons narrow and dark. For several years, the crusade against books in school libraries has had the most power when targeting literature that discusses LGBTQ issues and racism. Few animated by this debate actually seem to care whether kids are reading about heterosexual sex. Indeed, Patterson has put rhetorical emphasis in his pitch for his bill on books that have “sexual indoctrination,” a euphemism for ones about gender-nonconforming or gay kids. The fear he and allies are stoking seems to be that by reading these books, formerly immaculate daughters and sons will become transgender. His bill’s case depends on circling off “scary” books from “normal” ones. This works well enough for him because few adults have encountered, say, Gender Queer, a graphic novel he’s also put in his cross hairs. But enough Texans have read Lonesome Dove to know that while the book is challenging, it is enriching, and being able to make sense of its challenges is part of growing up, especially in this state.

Patterson’s snafu makes clear that the bill’s sponsors don’t really care about books—or that they don’t understand them. Which is fine. That’s why we have Netflix. But maybe they should leave the regulation of literature to Texans who read.

Please open the link and read the rest of the article. It’s a good one!

Categories Censorship, Libraries, Literature, Stupid, Texas

Texas: Rural Resistance to Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2023 //
3

This is a shocking story about the precarious position of rural schools in the age of vouchers. Legislators who represent rural districts in Texas know that their constituents don’t want vouchers. Their public school is the heart of their town. It’s where everyone comes together.

But in this story, a couple of billionaires who want all children in church schools, decided to take out one of these rural Republicans who stood by his local public schools. The legislator saw the amount of money arrayed against him, and he retired. He was replaced by a man who supports vouchers, even though the people in his district don’t.

Mike Hixenbaugh explains why rural districts oppose vouchers:

ROBERT LEE, Texas — After a bus driver called in sick one recent afternoon, Robert Lee Independent School District Superintendent Aaron Hood filled in for her. Slipping behind the wheel in a button-up shirt and tie, he rumbled down country roads, past ranches and wind farms to shuttle a few dozen students home in this tiny West Texas town.

Out here, where cattle outnumber children 20 to 1, no one is hollering about critical race theory in textbooks or pornography in the library. But those battles raging 250 miles away in the state capital and in far-away suburbs have galvanized a political movement that Hood fears could deal a devastating blow to rural school districts like his.

Backed by a surge of campaign spending from far-right Christian megadonors, Republicans in Texas and nationwide are pushing legislation that would siphon money from public education under the banner of “parents’ rights.” These plans, commonly known as vouchers, would give parents the money the state would have spent educating their children in public schools — between $8,000 and $10,000 per child per year in Texas — and allow them to put it toward homeschooling expenses, private school tuition or college savings accounts.

Officials in communities like Robert Lee, which has a population of about 1,000, warn these policies will chip away at already razor-thin public school budgets. With only 250 students — about 18 children per grade — even a slight drop in enrollment and funding can force rural schools like Robert Lee to make hard decisions, Hood said.

“We don’t have the same economy of scale as larger districts,” he said, which is one reason he obtained a commercial driver’s license to serve as a substitute bus driver. “If we lose five or 10 students, that’s a teacher salary. But we can’t afford to have one less teacher, so now we’re cutting academic programs, we’re cutting sports, we’re cutting the things that this community relies on.”

As president of the Texas Association of Rural Schools, a collection of 362 public school districts that are united in their opposition to vouchers, Hood and his fellow small-town superintendents have been trying to sound an alarm in Austin. They see the state GOP’s push for what advocates call “school choice” or “education freedom” as a betrayal of the party’s rural base in favor of wealthy campaign donors.

Categories Education Industry, Rural Schools, Texas, Vouchers

Carol Burris: The Real Story Behind the State Takeover of the Houston Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2023 //
3

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, recently joined parents, students, and teachers at a rally in Austin, Texas, to protest the state’s decision to take control of the Houston Independent School District. The district is no longer “independent,” since the state asserted its control. And Republicans showed that they don’t really believe in “local control,” any more than they believe in “parents rights.”

As a graduate of HISD, I feel especially outraged by the state takeover on flimsy grounds. Governor Abbott and Commissioner Mike Morath are playing politics. These kids are the future of Texas. Why are they being used as pawns?

Burris wrote the following explanation of the state takeover. It appeared on Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog at the Washington Post website.

Strauss begins:

The administration of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced this month that the state was taking over the public school district in Houston even though the Texas Education Agency last year gave the district a “B” rating. The district, the eighth-largest in the country, has nearly 200,000 students, the overwhelming majority of them Black or Hispanic, and opposition to the move in the city, which votes Democratic, has been strong.


Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath said the takeover was necessary because of the poor performance of some schools in the district — even though most of the troubled schools have made significant progress recently.


Here is the real story of the takeover, written by Carol Burris, an award-winning former New York school principal who is executive director of the Network for Public Education. The nonprofit alliance of organizations advocates the improvement of public education and sees charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately operated — as part of a movement to privatize public education.


By Carol Burris


Houston parents, teachers, and community leaders are protesting the decision by Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath to take over the Houston Independent School District. Some see the takeover as grounded in racism and retribution; others as big-government intrusion.


For Houston mom Kourtney Revels, the decision represents a hypocritical dismissal of parents by Gov. Greg Abbott (R). “How can Governor Abbott pretend to support parent empowerment and rights when he has just taken away the rights of over 200,000 parents in Houston ISD against their will and has not listened to our concerns or our voice?” she asked.

The takeover is the latest move in a long list of actions by Abbott’s administration to attack public school districts and expand privatized alternatives, including poorly regulated charter schools and now a proposed voucher program that would use public money for private and religious education. And critics see them all as connected.


State Rep. Ron Reynolds, a Houston Democrat, told the Houston Chronicle, that the takeover of the Houston district is part of Abbott’s attempt “to push” vouchers and charter schools, and to “promote and perpetuate the things that Governor Abbott believes and hears about, and that obviously isn’t diversity, equity and inclusion.”

The first takeover forum sponsored by the Texas Education Agency, which Morath leads, was described in the Houston Chronicle as “emotional and chaotic.” This week, the Greater Houston Coalition for Justice is leading a protest march before another TEA hearing. U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D), who represents the city, has asked the Biden administration to open a civil rights investigation into the takeover.

Background

The Houston Independent School District is Texas’s largest school district, with 284 schools and almost 200,000 students. It is also the eighth-largest district in the nation. Eight in 10 students come from economically disadvantaged families, and more than 1 in 3 students are not proficient in English. Fewer than 10 percent of the students are White.

The first attempted takeover of HISD by Morath was in 2019. The rationale for the takeover was school board misconduct and the seven negative ratings of Phillis Wheatley High School, one of the district’s 284 schools. Wheatley had been rated “academically acceptable” almost every other year until the YES Prep charter school opened nearby in 2011. During the 2021-2022 school year, Wheatley served 10 times as many Black students and more than twice as many students with disabilities as YES Prep, located just a five-minute drive away.

The district went to court to stop the takeover, and the debate wove through the courts until the Texas Supreme Court gave the green light for the takeover in January.

Almost four years have passed since the first takeover attempt, and the district has made impressive strides. The electorate replaced the 2019 school board, and a highly respected superintendent, Millard House, was appointed.

By every objective measure, the district is on a positive trajectory. The district is B-rated, and in less than two years, 40 of 50 Houston schools that had previously received a grade of D or F received a grade of C or better. Wheatley High School’s grade, the school that triggered that 2019 takeover attempt, moved from an F to a C, just two points from a B rating.

While there is a law that triggers a TEA response when a school repeatedly fails, the state Supreme Court did not mandate the takeover of the district. Under Texas law, Morath had two options — close the school or take over the district by appointing a new Board of Managers and a superintendent. He chose to strip local control. For those who have followed the decisions of Morath, his choice, the harsher of the two, comes as no surprise.

Mike Morath and charter schools

Mike Morath, a former software developer, was appointed education commissioner by Abbott in 2015. Morath had served a short stint on the Dallas school board, proposing that the public school district become a home-rule charter system, thus eliminating the school board and replacing it will a board appointed by then-Mayor Mike Rawlings, the former chief executive of Pizza Hut. Transformation into a charter system would also eliminate the rights and protections of Dallas teachers, making it easier to fire staff at will.

Morath and the mayor were supported in their quest to privatize the Dallas school system by a group ironically called Support Our Public Schools. While many of its donors remained anonymous, one did not — Houston billionaire John Arnold. Morath admitted encouraging the development of Support Our Public Schools and soliciting Arnold’s help in founding the organization.

Arnold, a former Enron executive and Houston resident, is a major donor and board member of the City Fund, a national nonprofit that believes in disruptive change and “nonprofit governing structures” for schools rather than traditional school boards. The City Fund touts New Orleans as the greatest school reform success. Arnold is joined on the board of the City Fund by billionaire and former Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who has blamed public school woes on elected school boards and said 90 percent of all students should be in charter schools.

The plot to turn the Dallas school system into a charter system fizzled by January 2015. In December of that year, Abbott plucked Morath from the school board to become Texas education commissioner based on his record as a “change-agent.”

As commissioner, Morath has unilaterally approved charter schools at what many consider to be an alarming rate. Patti Everitt is a Texas education policy consultant who closely follows the decisions of the Texas Education Agency. Everitt noted that Morath “has the sole authority to approve an unlimited number of new charter campuses in Texas — without general public notice, no community meeting, and no vote by any democratic entity.” According to Everitt, he has used this power more frequently than his predecessors. “Since Mike Morath became Commissioner, data from TEA shows that he has approved 75 percent of all requests from existing charter operators to open new campuses, a total of 547 new campuses across the state,” she said.

In 2021, according to Everitt, Morath approved 11 new campuses for International Leadership of Texas Charter Schools, even though 28 percent of the chain’s schools had received D or F grades in prior ratings.


Georgina Cecilia Pérez served two terms on the Texas State Board of Education, from 2017 to 2022. During that time, she observed the Texas Education Agency up close. A 2017 state law provides financial incentives for districts to partner with open-enrollment charter schools, institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations or government entities. She said that several charter partnerships with the Houston school district have been in the works waiting for the state takeover. She predicts Morath will approve them, “with no public vote.”


Abbott, Morath, and vouchers

Few were surprised this year when Abbott declared that establishing an Education Savings Account (ESA) voucher program would be one of his highest priorities this legislative session. ESA vouchers, the most controversial of all voucher programs, provide substantial taxpayer dollars, through an account or via a debit card, to private school and home-school parents to spend on educational services. Eight states presently have ESA vouchers, with three new programs in Arkansas, Iowa and Utah approved to begin in coming academic years. Other legislatures in red states, notably New Hampshire and Florida, are pushing for ESA program expansion.

Abbott had been reluctant to embrace vouchers — possibly because of a lot of opposition in Texas, especially in rural areas — causing some to speculate that his newly expressed support for them is linked to presidential ambitions. School choice is a pet cause of one potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

Two voucher bills are now weaving their way through the Texas Senate. S.B. 8 would give families a voucher of $8,000 per child a year and institute a parents’ “bill of rights” that allows parents to review public school curriculums through parent portals. A second bill, S.B. 176, would give private school and home-school families a $10,000-per-child annual voucher. Although Abbott has not endorsed either bill, he has made it clear that he supports a universal voucher program, promoting universal vouchers in speeches at some of the state’s most expensive private Christian schools.

Last year, Morath gave tacit support for vouchers, claiming that “there is no evidence” that vouchers would reduce public school funding. In February 2023, however, when questioned during a state Senate hearing, the commissioner admitted that voucher programs could have a negative fiscal impact on public schools.

That same month, his second-in-command, Deputy Commissioner Steve Lecholop, encouraged an unhappy parent from the Joshua Independent School District to work with the governor’s speechwriter to promote vouchers, saying it would be a great way to “stick it to” the school district.

The lack of success of district takeovers

Regardless of Abbott’s and Morath’s ultimate objective — whether it be flipping some or all of Houston’s public schools to charters — research on state takeovers has consistently shown that state takeovers nearly always occur in majority-minority districts and rarely improve student achievement. Student results in takeover districts, with only a few exceptions, have remained the same or decreased. That was the conclusion of a comprehensive cross-state study published in 2021. The study’s authors, Beth Schueler of the University of Virginia and Joshua Bleiberg of Brown University found “no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.”

This intervention does not help students, and it mutes community voices, undermines democracy in Black and Hispanic communities, and pushes charter schools and other privatized alternatives to democratically governed schools.

An example is the takeover of Philadelphia’s public schools in 2001. Then-Gov. Tom Ridge (R) hired Edison Learning, a for-profit management company led by Chris Whittle, to study the district at the cost of $2 million. Edison Learning made a recommendation that it play a significant role in the reform and proposed running up to 70 schools. After community outrage, the number was reduced to 20. A few years later, the number of managed schools increased to 22. It was not long, however, before Edison Learning and the district were embroiled in a lawsuit concerning liability damages after a student was sexually assaulted in an Edison-operated school. By 2008, all for-profit management companies, including Edison, were gone. By 2017, the state takeover experiment ended.

Retired teacher Karel Kilimnik of Philadelphia had a first-row seat. She taught at a school taken over by the for-profit management company called Victory Co., which ran six schools under the School Reform Commission. The Reform Commission “promised academic and financial improvements that failed to materialize over their 16 years of control,” Kilimnik said. “Instead of improving the district, they opened the door to privatization and charter expansion and laid out the welcome mat for graduates of the uncertified Broad Superintendents Academy. They paved the way for the doomsday budget resulting in massive layoffs, larger class sizes, and the elimination of art and music.”

In his 2017 book, “Takeover,” New York University professor Domingo Morel concluded that, based on his extensive research, state takeovers are driven more by the desire of state actors to take political control away from Black and Hispanic communities than about school improvement. Recently in the Conversation, Morel described the seizure of the Houston school district as motivated by a need by the Republican establishment to thwart the growing empowerment of Black and Latinos as their numbers increase in Texas.

“The Houston public school system is not failing,” Morel said. “Rather, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, Education Commissioner Mike Morath, and the Republican state legislature are manufacturing an education crisis to prevent people of color in Houston from exercising their citizenship rights and seizing political power.”

Allison Newport, a Houston mother of two Houston public school elementary students, agrees. “The commissioner should be congratulating Houston ISD and Wheatley High School for such incredible improvement in performance instead of punishing the students, parents, and teachers who worked so hard to make it happen.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Hoax, Houston, Hypocrisy, Injustice, Privatization, Racism, Republicans, Resistance, Texas
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »