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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This mother in Texas wanted another child. She was thrilled when she learned she was pregnant. But then the doctor told her that the ultrasound revealed a terrible genetic condition in her fetus. It might die in utero or a few days after birth. What should she do? Should she seek an abortion or let the baby die in utero or die a painful death?
Last year, Farrah Day tried for months to get pregnant with her second child. The 32-year-old San Antonio–area mother hoped to finish building her family in her early 30s, while she was still relatively young. Doing so would allow her to commit fully to attending medical school, building upon her experience working as a medical researcher.
After going through “so many pregnancy tests that I lost count,” Day and her fiancé finally learned in the summer of 2021 that she was expecting. They were thrilled, but hesitantly so. The last time Day had tried to have a child, she’d had a miscarriage; for the first couple of months of this pregnancy, the fear of losing another child lingered.
But by the time she arrived at her doctor’s office for a routine ultrasound at thirteen weeks, Day was feeling healthy and optimistic. She’d announced her pregnancy on Facebook and had begun designing a nursery in the family’s new home. “We were so excited,” Day said. “As someone who reads medical literature, I knew my odds of having complications after twelve weeks were about five percent.”
Her excitement ended during that ultrasound visit. Day recalls the moment when her normally talkative ob-gyn went silent, a look of concern appearing on her face. Within hours, Day was sitting in front of a maternal-fetal specialist trying to wrap her head around devastating news: her unborn baby was suffering from a particularly severe case of hydrops fetalis, a rare condition that causes abnormal amounts of fluid to build up inside a fetus, which can lead to extensive damage of its internal organs.
Should she decide to continue her pregnancy for another six months, the specialist told Day, she would most likely give birth to a stillborn baby. If the baby didn’t die in utero, he said, it was unlikely to live more than a few days outside the womb. She was told that continuing to term could also put Day at risk for developing mirror syndrome (also known as Ballantyne syndrome or triple edema), a condition associated with hydrops in which an expectant mother develops severe swelling and potentially life-threatening hypertension. “I’d never heard of hydrops,” Day said. “When I found out, I couldn’t quite believe that, against all odds, this terrible thing still managed to happen….”
Because she was nearly two months beyond the deadline for accessing legal abortion care in Texas, Day decided her best option was for her and her fiancé to split the driving on the twelve-hour trip from Central Texas to a clinic in Albuquerque. She felt there was no time to spare. The longer she waited, the more expensive, and potentially complicated, the procedure would be. Though abortions conducted after the first trimester are still considered overwhelmingly low-risk, the skill required to perform the procedure increases as pregnancy advances, which partly explainsincreases in cost…
Once arrangements were in place, Day and her fiancé packed into her Jeep and headed west, driving twelve hours overnight, stopping only at convenience stores for food and gas….
After her abortion, the couple planned to race home, but Day began hemorrhaging, a rare and potentially serious complication. Feeling weak, and worried that the bleeding might intensify, the couple lingered at a gas station in Roswell for several hours; otherwise, they risked being caught in the desert without close access to medical care. Looking back, Day fears that her condition was a prelude of tragedies to come. “We were afraid to leave Roswell,” she said. “There’s a real chance that women returning to Texas who experience a medical complication could bleed out in the desert on their way home.”
Nine months later, the grief remains. But Day has no regrets about her decision. She keeps her baby’s ashes and his blanket in a closet at home— one she refers to as the “no-open closet.” It’s still too early, she said. But in the wake of Roe v. Wade having been overturned by the Supreme Court on June 24, she said, some of her grief has turned into rage…
With abortion in Texas now effectively illegal in almost all circumstances, Day knows that even more expectant mothers with unexpected complications during their pregnancies will find themselves in the same position she was in. They’ll be forced to choose between upending their lives to receive a costly abortion somewhere far away and remaining in a state that forces their unborn child to suffer and places their own health—and the family members who rely on them—at risk.
Day is infuriated by the narratives from conservative Texas politicians, in particular, that have long suggested that women approach abortions later in pregnancy casually—a conceit that deliberately strips reproductive choices of the heart-wrenching complexity they so often involve, and which, she believes, made it easier for anti-abortion advocates to demonize the procedure. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 percent of abortions were performed at or later than 21 weeks’ gestation in 2019.) Day’s frustration about how abortion is debated partly explains why she’s decided to allow her story to be made public. “Most people don’t know a woman that has gone through an experience like mine,” she said. “I’m happy to be the person that helps people understand how these laws will affect the women you do know.”
Mimi Swartz writes in Texas Monthly that the Dobbs decision banning abortion has unleashed a broad assault on freedom in Texas. And it will get much, much worse as long as Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and Ken Paxton remain in office.
I guess you could say that Texas giveth and Texas taketh away. For those too young to recall, the abortion-rights case Roe v. Wade was won in 1973 by two attorneys from the state, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. But from virtually the moment abortion became legal in all fifty states, some lawmakers here, and their supporters who opposed abortion rights, started chipping away at it. Half a century later, our Legislature had passed some of the most restrictive laws in the nation—and that was before Roe fell. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has taken Roeaway, with a 6–3 majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, some Texas leaders seem eager to exploit the opportunities that the ruling offers for further rollbacks of reproductive and sexual freedoms. Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office released employees from work early on the day of the decision to celebrate, declaring June 24 a new, annual agency holiday “to commemorate the sanctity of life.”
What could come next? Just about everything is on the table. Criminal penalties? They’ll be much stiffer, not just for those who aid Texans in getting abortions, but possibly for abortion-seekers themselves. Abortion pills? They were banned from sale for those more than seven weeks pregnant during last year’s legislative session. Enforcement mechanisms, however, are unclear. Most such medications arrive by mail from other states and countries, and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that states “may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy,” suggesting that court battles lie ahead. Limits on contraception? You betcha. The same privacy rights that the Supreme Court overturned in the Dobbscase underlie what we have for decades considered the right to contraception and private sex acts between consenting adults—and, more recently, same-sex marriage. Indeed, just as the 2022 Texas GOP platform embraces “the humanity of the preborn child,” it also calls homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice.” Paxton told an interviewer he was “willing and able” to defend a Texas law—which was overturned by the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision—that bans gay sex.
Texas statutes that predate Roe but were never overturned by the Legislature are now in effect, prohibiting all abortions except “for the purpose of saving the life of the mother.” A miscarriage could now be a death sentence for those whose doctors are averse to litigation or, worse—under the “trigger law” that takes effect thirty days after the Court’s ruling—to arrest on felony charges and a possible prison sentence, along with fines starting at $100,000. “It is kind of astounding that we are at a point where Roe will be overturned, but that won’t be enough,” said Democratic state representative Donna Howard, chair of the Texas Women’s Health Caucus. “The concern is that there will be those who will not only want to criminalize those who are seeking abortion but will use this as an opportunity to roll back access to contraceptives and other advancements that were made that the underlying privacy protection of Roe also supports.” While the law does not prohibit someone from ending their own pregnancy, a South Texas woman, Lizelle Herrera, was arrested and jailed earlier this year for ending hers, and the charges were dropped only after the case became a national controversy.
Unless you subscribe to The Texas Monthly as I do, you can’t read any more. Sadly, the rightwing fascists now running state government are flexing their muscles to stamp out the freedom of anyone they don’t like. Maybe everyone should subscribe to the Texas Monthly to see how low our nation can fall when mean-spirited bigots take control. It’s hard to believe that the same state elected the great Ann Richards as its governor. She was a strong, full-bore Texas liberal, who hated racism, sexism, and everything else that Greg Abbott represents.
In the past few years, we have seen the rise of something called the “parental rights” movement. This movement consists of angry white parents, mostly women, like “Moms for Liberty” and “Parents Defending Freedom,” who insist that they as parents have the “right” to decide what their children are taught in school and what books they read. They strenuously object to teaching about race and racism, which they say makes their children “uncomfortable.” They believe that teachers are “grooming” their children to be gay or transgender by teaching them about gender or sexuality. Of course, if the last were true, almost everyone would now be transgender, since most students have taken a sex-ed course at some point, focused mainly on health.
In response to the outcry from these groups, a number of states, led by Florida and Virginia, have passed laws they describe as “parental rights” laws, which ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” because they make students “uncomfortable.” The most “divisive” concept of all is “critical race theory,” which states ban. Since legislators don’t know what critical race theory is, their laws are meant to remove any teaching about race and racism from the curriculum.
Bottom line: only white parents have parental rights.
But what about Black parents? Do they have rights? Apparently not.
What about other parents who do not identify with angry white parents? Don’t their children have the right to learn an accurate history of the state, the U.S., and the world?
Why do Moms for Liberty get to define what all parents want?
Shouldn’t Black children learn about the history of race and racism?
Why shouldn’t all students learn accurate history, even if it makes them “uncomfortable”?
Why should a small subset of far-right fringe white parents get the power to censor what everyone else is taught and is allowed to read?
These “parental rights” laws are a paper-thin veneer for censorship, gag orders, lies and propaganda. They are the product of arrogant racists who can’t be bothered to hide their venomous racism.
They prefer ignorance to knowledge. They should not be allowed to impose their hateful ideology on others.
The Houston Chronicle reports that a participant in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol is likely to be elected to the Texas State Board of Education. She has pledged to fight “critical race theory” (i.e. teaching about racism) and to support charter schools.
Underscoring Texas lawmakers’ rightward lurch on education issues in recent years, the candidate likely to replace a moderate Republican on the State Board of Education in a district outside Houston is a right-wing activist who participated in protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
After winning the primary in March, the front-runner in the District 7 race is Julie Pickren, a former trustee for Alvin Independent School District. Pickren was voted off that board last year after her participation in the protest at the U.S. Capitol was revealed — the basis of a campaign against her by the Brazoria County NAACP.
Pickren is a former delegate to the GOP’s national and state conventions, her LinkedIn says, and on Facebook she blamed antifa, rather than Trump supporters, for violence during the Capitol riot, a claim that other Republicans have made without proof. She declined a request for an interview….
Republicans have moved further to the right on education issues in Texas over the past 18 months. Earlier this summer, Gov. Greg Abbott announced his support for private school vouchers and endorsed a “Parental Bill of Rights” to give parents more power over what and how their kids are taught in schools. Last year, the Legislature passed and Abbott signed a slew of conservative bills relating to education, including restrictions on how social studies can be taught and on transgender children playing school sports.
At the local level, school board politics have become increasingly heated, with often angry discussions over diversity and equity policies in the schools. Parent groups have organized PACs in opposition to what they view as progressive activism in education, raising substantial amounts of money to reshape local school boards around the state.
Next year’s State Board of Education is set to be more conservative, with Robinson leaving as well as two other Republicans who lost their March primaries to opponents supported by right-wing PACs. There are currently nine Republicans and six Democrats serving on the board.
The board’s core responsibilities include writing Texas’ public school curriculums, managing the permanent fund that backs debt taken out by schools, and deciding whether to allow new charter schools in the state; Pickren has said she supports adding more of them.
Moderate pushed out
The District 7 seat opened up last year, when the Legislature during redistricting moved incumbent Matt Robinson into a different district so he couldn’t run for re-election. Robinson, a doctor from Friendswood, has said he feels Republican political leaders in the state did this intentionally because they did not believe he was sufficiently supportive of charter schools and other conservative policy goals.
In a rare move in today’s increasingly polarized politics, Robinson is endorsing the Democrat in the race, Galveston ISD teacher Dan Hochman, to be his successor.
Why?
“Because he’s running against Julie Pickren. And she will be bad for public education,” Robinson said.
In lists of the most important issues to her campaign, Pickren has named ridding public schools of critical race theory, an academic theory that critics use as a catchall term to describe diversity and equity initiatives as well as discussion of systemic or historical racism. Pickren is also supportive of “parents rights” initiatives such as those espoused by Abbott.
“She is leading a fight, an assault on public education that’s going on right now. It’s not among all Republicans, but it’s among a good number and she’s kind of leading that fight. And the idea that critical race theory is going on in most schools and most districts, which is entirely false. So her overall approach is, in my view, anti-public education,” Robinson said…
‘ Soul of public education ’
Hochman acknowledged that he’s facing an uphill climb in the race, as the district leans conservative. Pickren’s campaign has spent about $40,000 so far, while Hochman’s has spent about $10,000. Hochman said his campaign bank account currently had less than $100 in it…
“It really, truly is a fight for the soul of public education in the state of Texas, which is failing right now,” Hochman said of the race. Hochman added that he would oppose expansion of charter schools.
“I’m up against a woman who is clearly anti-public education. She’s being funded by the far right, whose agenda has been publicly clear that they want to dismantle public education and replace it with private schools and charter schools so they can push through a far-right Christian agenda in schooling. And that’s not like a conspiracy, that’s been pretty much out in the open.”
edward.mckinley@chron.com
Diane Ravitch's blog 