Archives for category: Texas
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Texas: Conservative Cell Phone Company Funding Takeover of Local School Boards

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2022 //
18

Axios Dallas writes about a new phenomenon in the battle by religious extremists to take control of public schools. A conservative Christian wireless provider is funding the school board campaigns of like-minded religious zealots. It recently won control of four school boards.

It’s bizarre to think of businesses branding themselves by religion. The imagination runs wild: buy your gasoline at a Catholic service station or a Methodist one? Buy your coffee at a Baptist coffee shop or a Muslim one? Buy groceries at a fundamentalist grocery store? The possibilities are endless.

Given the reverence that the current Supreme Court has for religious expression, it would be unlikely to object to evangelical Christians imposing their views on others in public schools.

Patriot Mobile, a North Texas-based cell phone service reseller that markets itself as “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider” was the driving financial force behind the election of 11 new school board members in four suburban North Texas districts.

Driving the news: Patriot Mobile helped elect the majority of members in Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, which recently passed a controversial new set of conservative policies dubbed “Don’t Say Trans.”

Why it matters: The policies, which include prohibitions on teachers discussing anything related to critical race theory or “gender fluidity,” are part of a major push from both Patriot Mobile’s political arm — Patriot Mobile Action — and the state GOP.

  • “Ultimately we want to expand to other counties, other states and be in every state across the nation,” Leigh Wambsganss, executive director of Patriot Mobile Action and vice president of government and media affairs at Patriot Mobile, told conservative talk show host Mark Davisearlier this summer.

The big picture: Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has told conservatives that to “save the nation,” they need to target school boards, repeatedly spotlighting Patriot Mobile.

  • “The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said during an interview with Patriot Mobile’s president, Glenn Story, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas earlier this month, according to NBC News.

Between the lines: School districts are the front line in the political battle for Texas. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke has rooted his campaign on school funding and safety, while Gov. Greg Abbott has made fears of conservative parents a cornerstone of his bid for re-election.

What happened: Earlier this year, Patriot Mobile Action hired two national GOP consulting firms — Vanguard Field Strategies and Axiom Strategies — to help target school board races in the suburbs of Tarrant County, the largest conservative county in the country.

  • The PAC spent more than $600,000 backing 11 school board candidates running in Southlake, Grapevine-Colleyville, Keller and Mansfield — all of whom won their races.
  • The group sent out thousands of political mailers warning that sitting school board members were endangering students with “woke” ideologies. One ad featured a photo of a child and the words, “They’re not after you, they’re after me.”

What we’re watching: Last week the Republican Party of Texas made a fundraising appeal praising GCISD’s new policies, saying the party is “working to bring this conservative policy” to every school district in the state.

Categories Extremism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Funding, Privatization, Texas

Will Texas Allow Schools to Post “In God We Trust” in Arabic?

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2022 //
59

Texas passed a law requiring schools to post signs saying “In God We Trust” in schools.

A prankster in Florida is raising money to donate these signs to Texas schools/-but in Arabic.

Will these signs be allowed?

As he rode his bike Sunday, longtime political prankster Chaz Stevens ruminated on a law that was irking him: A Texas statute requiring schools to post donated signs with the United States motto, “In God We Trust.”

Texas legislators, Stevens thought, were trolling people who don’t believe in a Judeo-Christian God.
Now, Stevens wants to troll them back.

The South Florida activist had raised more than $14,000 as of Thursday evening to distribute “In God We Trust” signs to public schools across Texas. The catch? The phrase is in Arabic.

“My focus,” Stevens said, “was how do I game the state of Texas with the rules?”

The Arabic text is meant to invoke Islam and some Christians’ discomfort with that faith, Stevens said. He’s hoping for even one school to hang up the poster — in his view, making a point about applying the controversial statute evenly to people of any religion or no religion.

But Stevens, a self-described “staunch atheist,” is also prepared to try to turn a loss into a win. If a school rejects his poster, he said, he plans to file a lawsuit and use the court case to challenge the statute itself.

Stevens’ stunt, previously reported in the Dallas Morning News, joins a history of challenges to the national motto that courts have consistently rejected. It also adds fuel to a political firestorm that in recent years has turned schools in Republican-led states into culture-war battlegrounds. Fights are erupting over book banning, how race and gender are taught, and religious practice on school grounds as politicians clash over what it means to be an American and who gets to decide.

Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes (R), who sponsored the sign law, said Stevens’s Arabic posters do not meet the statute’s requirements and would not have to be posted in schools. He pointed to quotation marks around the phrase “In God We Trust” to suggest that a school only has to hang a donated sign with those words in English.

“That’s all they’re required to do,” Hughes said. “But they are free to post other signs in as many languages as they want to.”


The law, which took effect last year, mandates that public schools display “in a conspicuous place in each building of the school” a sign with the national motto if the poster was donated or purchased with private donations. The sign also must include the U.S. flag and the Texas flag, and it “may not depict” any other words or images. The law does not explicitly state that the national motto must be in English.

Given the Christian zealots who now control the U.S. Supreme Court, Sen. Hughes might prevail.

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Stupid, Texas

Texas: Conservative Activists Attack Social Studies Standards for CRT and References to Gay Rights

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2022 //
16

Conservative activists in Texas are ready to fight for changes in the social studies standards because they smell “critical race theory” (I.e., any reference to racism in the past or present), and they are hopping mad that the standards refer to the gay rights movement. Apparently, they want a deletion of any standards that refer to racism or the existence of gay people.

The Houston Chronicle describes disagreement among rightwing extremists about whether to revise the standards now, in response to angry parents, or wait until 2023, when three new rightwing extremists join the state board. One of the new members participated in the January 6 insurrection.

The board is already controlled by Republicans. After January, it will shift even farther right into extremist territory. One sane Republican, Matt Robinson, lost his re-election to the far-right insurrectionist because he refused to support the MAGA love for charter expansion.

Conservative education activists are accusing the Republican-controlled State Board of Education of helping liberals smuggle bits of Critical Race Theory into social studies standards that were expected to be up for an initial vote next week.

But the vote is conspicuously absent from the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, as a faction on the board calls for delaying them into next year, when 3 current GOP members are expected to be replaced by new members who lean more to the right…

Their frustrations with the early drafts of the standards included: the inclusion of LGTBQ activism alongside civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, a requirement for students to define “sexual orientation,” non inclusion of Moses as a historical figure, supposed inclusion of Critical Race Theory in ethnic studies courses and the lack of a requirement for history students to learn the U.S. motto, “In God We Trust.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Extremism, History, Racism, Texas

Mom in Texas Shuts Down Extremists and Joins the Honor Roll

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2022 //
24

The superintendent of schools in Granbury, Texas, made clear that he didn’t want any books about LGBT characters or LGBT issues in the school library. He agreed with the angry conservatives who showed up at school board meetings to demand book-banning.

Superintendent Jeremy Glenn has previously emphasized to the district’s librarians that their community was “very, very conservative” and that any school employee who does not possess conservative beliefs “better hide it.” While he started by saying he didn’t care if the books were about homosexuality or heterosexuality, he spoke explicitly about banning books with LGBTQ content.

“And I’m going to take it a step further with you. There are two genders. There’s male, and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women. And there are women that think they’re men. And again, I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”

But then a parent with a child in the Granbury schools got up and pointed out that the folks who were complaining the loudest did not have any children in the schools. And she let them have it for their effort to impose their religion on her child’s public school.

Adrienne Quinn Martin went to the podium and let it rip.

“We know that books are continuing to be purged. We know student library aides have been banned. We know that a group of non-parents have pushed for these removals and continue to do so,” she began. “So, being a taxpayer does not grant special privileges over students, staff, and parents. I do not want random people with no education background or experience determining what books my child can read, what curriculum they learn, and what clubs they can join.”

“Just because you can get up at every meeting and rant and rave does not give you authority over my child’s education.”

“Your personal religious beliefs, people in this room and on this board, should not have an effect on my child’s education either. Our school are not to be used for personal political agendas and our children are here for education, not religious indoctrination,” she told the room as she looked various board members and attendees directly in the eye.

“I implore the board to put an end to attempts to appease these extremists. Focus on retaining staff, providing excellent public education and a safe and welcoming learning space for all students. The speakers speaking about what great Christians they are? Great. Go tell your pastor. Our schools are not your church.”

And as the room erupted in applause for her bold speech, Martin gathered up her papers and, with a nod, left the podium. The superintendent did not reply.

If you want to see her speech, it’s on her Twitter account @Mrsamartini

For her courage and common sense, I add her to the honor roll of this blog.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Courage, Equity, Extremism, Honor Roll, Texas

Texas: What You Need to Know About the Lt. Governor Race Today!

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2022 //
7

Pastors for Texas Kids is sponsoring two discussions TODAY about public schools, in Lubbock and Amarillo.

PUBLIC EDUCATION
AND YOU


Front Runners for Texas
Lt. Governor Q&A

Amarillo registration here: https://bit.ly/3QjZDyi
Lubbock registration here: https://bit.ly/3AcGTdb

Mike Collier is confirmed for both cities. No response from Dan Patrick after multiple messages to his staff.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Parents, School Choice, Students, Supporting public schools, Texas

Byron James Henry: Trying to Understand the Christian Nationalist Agenda

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2022 //
14

In the previous post, educator Byron James Henry described the election of three Christian nationalists to the board of the Ct-Fair District in Texas. He hoped for the best and hoped they would put the needs of students before their religious agenda. In this post, he describes what they did after their election.

“Something is rotten” in Cy-Fair ISD. Christian Nationalism first reared its ignorant and intolerant head in Cy-Fair ISD at school board meetings during the summer of 2021 when a loud minority of extremists began denouncing the fake threat of Critical Race Theory (CRT). For example, one resident stated that “true Christ followers are horrified to learn how the CRT ideology and BLM have infiltrated many of our schools” and insisted that “things won’t improve until we are more concerned about God’s approval than the approval of the cult of CRT.” Many of the attendees, duped into believing that young white children are being taught to see themselves as “oppressors” and feel ashamed of their race, gave her a standing ovation. It is almost impossible to reason with misinformed, self-righteous people who believe they are engaged in a battle of good vs. evil. In their quest to “save” Cy-Fair ISD students from the “threat” of CRT, these residents helped fuel an extremist movement that threatens the foundational values of the public school system: diversity, toleration, pluralism, equal treatment, and equal opportunity. Note: If you or someone you care about has succumbed to Christian Nationalism, then Christians Against Christian Nationalism can help.

Contrary to the extremist argument that public schools have a liberal bias or indoctrinate children with “woke” ideas, the public school system prepares all children for participation in our diverse, pluralistic society. Christian Nationalists oppose the civic mission of public schools if it means promoting toleration and equality for marginalized groups or affirming religious pluralism and cultural diversity. They want the public schools to promote a conservative Christian worldview that reinforces their own political and religious agenda and ignores the historical legacy of racism and discrimination. In Cy-Fair ISD, three extremist candidates harnessed this Christian Nationalist energy in the November 2021 school board election: Scott Henry, Natalie Blasingame, and Lucas Scanlon.

These board members oppose anything the schools do to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Natalie Blasingame stated on the campaign trail that teachers in Cy-Fair ISD “shouldn’t have to check their faith at the door” and pushing a conservative, Christian agenda in Texas public schools has been her motivation for seeking public office for years. We’ve known since 2015 that Blasingame doesn’t support the separation of church and state, believes that God called her to run for school board to promote Christianity in public schools, and by her own admission stated, “I have no politics but obedience.” Obedience? To what, exactly? The U.S. Constitution? To her interpretation of the Bible? Is Natalie Blasingame, like her donor Steven Hotze, a supporter of Dominion Theology that insists Christians must take over all elements of society, government, and culture to impose a Biblical worldview on everyone? Christian Nationalists are opposed to the idea of a pluralistic, multicultural republic if it means a conservative Christian worldview cannot be imposed on all of society. Should someone with such an extremist agenda be making policy for our public schools?

Alarmed by the rise of political and religious extremism in my community, I founded the Cy-Fair Civic Alliance in November 2021. We started out as a Facebook group and quickly grew to approximately 400 followers in a few weeks. Residents responded to the notion that Cy-Fair ISD needed a non-partisan group that would promote strong, inclusive public schools that serve everyone. The values of diversity, toleration, pluralism, equal treatment, and equal opportunity resonated with the community, and we started organizing on behalf of Cy-Fair ISD students, teachers, and families.

We spoke at school board meetings, wrote emails to the district about important education issues, raised money to award a scholarship to a Cy-Fair ISD graduate who planned to become a teacher, and delivered gifts to all librarians in the district when their professionalism and integrity was being attacked by everyone from Governor Abbott to members of the Texas legislature to the Texas Education Agency. The supporters of the new extremist board members called us, in public at school board meetings, “groomers” for rejecting their calls to pull books off library shelves. They said that we were supporting the “sexualization” of young children and wanted to have “pornography” available in the school libraries. They even created a hateful, anonymous sewer of a blog that somehow manages to combine the stupidity of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the misogyny of Matt Gaetz.

Our non-partisan, grassroots organization always took the high road and remained focused on our mission. Then, to our surprise, a bizarre turn of events took place. Bethany Scanlon, the wife of Cy-Fair ISD trustee Lucas Scanlon, helped create an LLC using our organization’s name and even filed federal trademark paperwork to prevent us from using it. We first learned of the creation of the faux Cy-Fair Civic Alliance when it was announced during the “Citizen Participation” portion of the June 2022 school board meeting. We were, to say the least, a little perplexed that the same crowd of people who had called us “groomers” and constantly denounced our group decided to take our organization’s name! What could possibly be their motivation? Was this supposed to prevent us from doing our activism? And, why of all people, was a school board trustee’s spouse involved in this? What was Christian Nationalist Lady Macbeth up to? A quick glance at the internet revealed that her new organization was a self-described “Conservative Christian group that believes the Bible is the Word of God, Jesus Christ is Lord, and free volunteer service to others is a constructive way to help the community.”

Read on. The takeover of school boards by those who want to destroy public schools is a frightening development.

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Democracy, Disruption, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Texas

Byron James Henry: Slate of Christian Nationalists Win Seats on District Board in Texas

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2022 //
20

Byron James Henry is an educator in Texas. He writes here about a bitter school board election in the Cy-Fair District in Texas, the third largest in the state, where three Christian Nationalists ran a campaign based on fear, lies, and exaggeration and won.

He writes:

What began as a relatively predictable conservative opposition to mask mandates and vaccines morphed into an often-incomprehensible obsession with the “threat” of Critical Race Theory. The parents who initially disrupted school board meetings to question the recommendations of public health experts became consumed by the prospect, always ridiculous and unfounded, that their children were being indoctrinated by progressive and “woke” ideas that all White people are “oppressors” and that they should feel shame and guilt for being White. This notion, that children were being made to feel bad about the color of their skin, became the genesis of a groundswell of opposition to “CRT,” which became the term for anything that discussed concepts of white privilege, systemic racism, or the legacy of white supremacy.

In truth, the analytical framework known as “Critical Race Theory” is not being taught in any K-12 schools, but discussions about privilege and systemic racism had begun to show up, appropriately, in some high school settings within the context of the nation’s collective reckoning with racial injustice after George Floyd’s murder. The propagandists of the GOP saw an opportunity to stoke White insecurity and inflame White resentment toward society’s attempt to wrestle with deep questions about race. They funneled money into a faux grassroots or “AstroTurf” movement against CRT in the hopes that it would inspire higher turnout of conservative voters at the polls. Their campaign of lies, as with previous warnings about the threat of “socialism” or “illegal immigrants” or “Ebola” or “health care death panels,” succeeded. What is somewhat different, and more troubling, about the anti-CRT movement’s success is that it is laced with Christian Nationalism and poses a direct threat to our local schools as the site where the principles and practices of pluralistic, democratic self-government are taught….

Christian Nationalists are opposed to the idea of a pluralistic, multicultural republic if it means a conservative Christian worldview is on par with other world-views in the public sphere. Christian Nationalists want their worldview to be dominant. Christian Nationalists want their religious beliefs to override secular laws. They believe their religious liberty should permit them to discriminate against people and receive exemptions from mandates others are expected to follow. They claim to believe deeply in “choice” when they don’t want to do something, but they believe just as firmly in forced compliance to promote their beliefs. For example, they believe that schools should be forced to teach a mythical version of American history that presents conservative Christians as the nation’s founders, sustainers, and heirs. They believe that a woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.

Not satisfied, as in the past, to retreat from the public schools to private Christian schools, they are now engaged in a total war with the public-school system. The Texas legislature has passed legislation, HB 3979, preventing teachers from discussing the truth about the role of white supremacy, and how Christians used the Bible to justify it, in the nation’s founding and early history….

Their campaign literature, sent to me by the “Conservative Republicans of Harris County,” declares that, “We must take back the school boards that are controlled by the radical pro-Communist, anti-American leftists who are indoctrinating our children in Critical Race Theory and sexual perversion.” The piece then says, “We can change the direction of public education by electing conservative American Patriots to the school boards.”

The campaign literature then encourages the reader to “sign the Christian Patriot Declaration” at www.crtpac.com, which states, “Stouthearted Christian Patriots must rise up to boldly oppose and defeat the domestic enemy forces of evil, the atheistic pro-Communist Democrats, the despicable baby killers, pornographers, pedophiles, sodomites, transgenders, Antifa, and the BLM that have infiltrated our civil government and threaten to destroy all vestiges of Biblical morality and U.S. Constitutional principles. These domestic enemies are traitors to God and country.” The statement concludes: “Patriots, let’s press this battle to restore our nation to its Christian heritage to its successful conclusion!”

Can American public schools teach honest and truthful history when faced with this onslaught?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Elections, Lies, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Texas

North Carolina: Sheriff Puts an AR-15 in Every School

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2022 //
27

The sheriff of Madison County, North Carolina, reacted to the massacre of students in Uvalde, Texas, by putting an AR15 in every one of the six schools in the district. The guns will be locked in a safe, and breaching tools will be nearby. So don’t come into one of those schools to kill little children!

Imagine the scenario. A gunman with an AR15 shoots his way into the school, as the deranged killer at the Sandy Hook school did a decade ago. He blasts through the door, kills everyone he sees. Meanwhile, the designated defender goes to the safe, breaks it open with the breaching tool, and takes out the AR15.

By that time, the killer has had enough time to mow down the children in at least two classrooms.

The problem in Uvalde wasn’t the lack of weapons. Dozens of heavily armed officers hung out in the corridor outside the classrooms for over an hour. They had guns. What they lacked was courage, brains, and leadership.

Categories Courage, Guns, Guns in Schools, North Carolina, Safety, Texas

Beto O’Rourke Takes Down a Heckler with One Sentence

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2022 //
42

This is a fabulous video of a rally for Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas. He was in West Texas, which is red red red. He is explaining why he thinks the gun laws for purchasing an AR15 are too lax. The Uvalde mass murderer bought two of them as soon as he turned 18.

That video is the whole rally. If you want to see the crucial one-minute e crept, it’s here.

Someone in the crowd laughed as Beto talked about the lethal power of an AR15 turned on children.

Beto let him have it. Verbally.

“You May think it’s funny, motherf—-er, but I don’t.” The crowd went wild.

A must-see.

Categories Elections, Guns, Texas

Texas Tribune: Vouchers Are a Major Issue in Governors’ Race

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2022 //
14

In the Texas governor’s race between the vile Gregg Abbott and challenged Beto O’Rourke, the candidates are fighting for rural votes on the issue of vouchers. Rural Republicans have a strong allegiance to their public schools, which are often the heart of the community and its biggest employer. Many rural communities do not have any other schools.

Yet Governor Abbott has supinely sought the approval of Betsy DeVos’s American Federation of Children.

The Texas Tribune summed up the conflict:

A battle over school vouchers is mounting in the race to be Texas governor, set into motion after Republican incumbent Greg Abbott offered his clearest support yet for the idea in May.

His Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke, is hammering Abbott over the issue on the campaign trail, especially seeking an advantage in rural Texas, where Democrats badly know they need to do better and where vouchers split Republicans. O’Rourke’s campaign is also running newspaper ads in at least 17 markets, mostly rural, that urge voters to “reject Greg Abbott’s radical plan to defund” public schools.

Abbott, meanwhile, is not shying away from the controversy he ignited when he said in May that he supports giving parents “the choice to send their children to any public school, charter school or private school with state funding following the student.” He met privately last week with Corey DeAngelis, an aggressive national school choice activist who had previously criticized Abbott as insufficiently supportive of the cause.

“School choice” tends to refer to the broad concept of giving parents the option to send their kids to schools beyond their local public school, while vouchers would allow parents to use state tax dollars to subsidize tuition for those other options, including private schools. Opponents of vouchers say they harm public school systems by draining their funding. In the Legislature, vouchers have long encountered resistance from Democrats and rural Republicans whose public schools are the lifeblood of their communities.

O’Rourke is leaning into the bipartisan salience of the issue.

“For our rural communities, where there’s only one school district and only one option of public school, he wants to defund that through vouchers, take your tax dollars out of your classroom and send it to a private school in Dallas or Austin or somewhere else at your expense,” O’Rourke told a rural audience recently.

As usual, the voucher vultures are pushing the lie that money taken away from your public school will allow children to attend elite private schools.

It can’t be said often enough: voucher funds are never enough to pay for elite public funds. It is a lie. Voucher funding ranges from $4,000 to $8,000. The tuition at elite private schools ranges from $30,000 to $70,000.

Elite private schools don’t have vacancies. When they do, they don’t seek to enroll poor kids.

After 25 years of vouchers, the research is clear: kids who leave community public schools for voucher schools lose academic ground. Large numbers return to their public schools.

Meanwhile public schools are grievously harmed by the withdrawal of funding. They must lay off teachers and cut programs.

If the Devil designed a program to hurt the public schools, he would call it vouchers. And it would be funded by the American Federatuon for Chiildren.

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Religion, Rural Schools, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers
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