Grading Texas

The three elected officials who exercise the most financial and political control over education in Texas – Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows – already have failed educators and students in our public schools multiple times.

They have deliberately underfunded classrooms, underpaid teachers and inappropriately injected politics and religion into the school day. To the delight of their billionaire financial contributors, they also led the enactment of a huge tax giveaway for private schools that, if not repealed, will soon be draining underfunded public schools of billions of dollars a year.

They still brag about last year’s funding bump for public education and statewide pay raises for teachers. But the funding increase, the first in six years, wasn’t even enough to cover inflation and left many school districts with budget deficits. And even with the pay boost, the average teacher pay in Texas still trails the national average by about $8,500 a year.

If all that isn’t enough for anyone who cares about public education to boot them out of office, they still aren’t through trying to ravage Texas’ future.

Now, they are trying to help a racist – Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission — get elected to public office. French has a long history of posting racist, antisemitic and homophobic comments on social media. He once asked his social media followers whether Muslims or Jews “posed a bigger threat to America.” And he has called for rounding up “all the Chinese and send them packing.”

Two weekends ago, French posted a picture of students of color cheering at a University of Texas Longhorns’ football game and said the photo showed “how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners,” even though most of the people in the picture were likely U.S. citizens.

Abbott, Patrick and Burrows endorsed French months ago, after he won the Republican primary and after the three elected officials knew of his racist rants. Ken Paxton, the scandal-tarnished Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, also supports French, and none of them are backing down from their endorsements.

Most of the students in Texas public schools are children of color and they, like their white classmates, deserve elected leaders who protect and respect them for who they are. Public officials who support a racist for public office disrespect their constituents. They also endanger constituents of color because hatemongers like French, if they had their way, would remove people of color from the country, citizens and noncitizens alike.

If you value democracy and equality, you don’t give a racist the authority and pulpit of a public office, any public office. But that is exactly what Abbott, Patrick, Paxton, Burrows and many other Republican officeholders are trying to do. They are turning their backs on millions of Texans of color who not only account for most of our public school enrollment but also most of the state’s population. Similarly, they are failing the religious practitioners and the LGBTQ community that French also has targeted for hate.

It is time to elect pro-public education, pro-diversity candidates to replace our failed leaders. We need to elect Gina Hinojosa governor, Vikki Goodwin lieutenant governor, James Talarico to the U.S. Senate and other like-minded candidates for other offices up and down this fall’s ballot.

As speaker, Burrows is a state representative who will be on the ballot only in his Lubbock area district. But electing pro-public school, Democratic candidates to the Texas House throughout the state can result in the House electing a new leader when it convenes in January.

Clay Robison

State Comptroller Don Huffines, who is asking the Legislature to double the amount of tax funds spent on the new school voucher program during the next budget period, believes the state has a “moral imperative” to help children pay for tuition at religious and other private schools.

At least that’s what he said in the $2.3 billion voucher budget request his office recently submitted to the Legislative Budget Board — “The state has a moral imperative to serve these children.”

He is wrong. The state doesn’t have a moral imperative to spend everyone’s tax dollars to help a group of families pay their children’s private school tuition or homeschooling expenses. There is nothing moral about taking tax money from underfunded public schools to subsidize tuition payments for parents whose children were already attending private schools — as most of the first year’s voucher recipients apparently were, based on state data.

Huffines is simply answering a political imperative shared by Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, school privatization allies and decreed by their billionaire contributor-puppeteers.

The governor and the Legislature, however, have an education imperative. It is a constitutional imperative to adequately fund public education, a mandate the governor and the legislative majority consistently fail to meet.

The Texas Constitution says nothing about funding private schools. Yet Abbott bragged about Texas creating the largest tax-funded giveaway for private schools in the country while Texas remains one of the stingiest states in funding public schools. It spends about $5,000 less per student in average daily attendance (ADA) than the national average, the National Education Association reports.

This leaves many public school districts struggling with budget deficits, closing campuses and cutting back on critical education programs for millions of kids. There is a word to describe that — immoral.

Clay Robison

TSTA’s teacher-members now pay an average of $841 a year on classroom supplies for which they are not reimbursed, according to the latest teacher moonlighting and morale survey conducted for TSTA by faculty at Sam Houston State University.

These payments basically are an educational subsidy that underpaid teachers donate each year to school districts and the state of Texas.

Collectively, how much is that? The Texas Education Agency says there are about 320,000 teachers in Texas public schools. Many shell out various amounts for school supplies, and others don’t. But using $841 as a statewide average, that is a $269 million subsidy for public education costs that should be covered by taxes.

That is $9 million more than the $260 million budget adopted by Lubbock ISD for the upcoming school year. It is $12 million more than the combined budgets for Del Valle ISD ($142 million) and New Braunfels ISD ($115 million). The subsidy is more than the individual budgets of hundreds — probably most — of Texas school districts and would more than cover Austin ISD’s projected deficit.

Teachers aren’t making those comparisons though. They are digging into their pockets because their students need the supplies and school budgets don’t cover them. In some cases, a teacher’s shopping list may even include sweaters or coats for poverty-stricken kids coming to school cold.

Every time state budget-writers fail to adequately fund public schools, they are taking these teachers for granted.

Clay Robison

Gov. Greg Abbott trotted out another campaign gimmick this week. This one is called the Texas Classroom Commission.

The governor said the commission, also endorsed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Speaker Dustin Burrows, “will bring together exemplary public school educators to identify innovative solutions that help students succeed, improve the learning environment in classrooms and strengthen our schools.”

Wow. What a load of empty rhetoric.

If Abbott really listened to educators, he wouldn’t have spent most of his time as governor chronically underfunding public schools. And he wouldn’t have rammed through the new voucher law that soon will be diverting billions of tax dollars from public to private schools.

Yes, Abbott and his legislative allies added several billion dollars to the public education budget last year, and they like to brag about it. But it was the first noticeable increase in six years, wasn’t even enough to cover inflationary losses and many school districts are still closing schools and taking other steps to deal with deficits.

The Texas Classroom Commission is a political gimmick that Abbott believes is necessary because he is facing a reelection challenge from a real public school advocate. State Rep. Gina Hinojosa has been fighting for more school funding for years and, if elected, will deliver. She listens to educators and will continue listening to educators. Unlike Abbott, she also respects educators.

Abbott has appointed education study groups before. In 2022, the last year he was on the ballot, he created the Teacher Vacancy Task Force. That study produced House Bill 1605, which the Legislature enacted in 2023.

That law opened the door to Commissioner Mike Morath and the Texas Education Agency creating the controversial, but optional Bluebonnet Curriculum with its numerous biblical passages that don’t belong in public schools. That same law also called for mandatory classroom reading lists that the State Board of Education approved last month. These lists also include biblical stories proposed by TEA.

Both the Bluebonnet Curriculum and the reading lists have created controversy over putting religion into public schools. But they have done nothing to address one of the biggest concerns of educators — more funding for Texas’ deficit-plagued public schools.

Teachers and other educators are an afterthought for Abbott, people to court during campaign season, then ignore.

Clay Robison