Grading Texas

Gov. Greg Abbott has frequently made the point that public schools “are for education – not indoctrination.” He is correct, but he doesn’t believe what he says any more than he believes the moon is made of cheese. What Abbott really believes is that public schools should be forced to participate in selective indoctrination, the kind of indoctrination that promotes his political career and undermines the truthful, unbiased education that children really need.

Abbott is all in on promoting the Trump world view that panders to racism, bias and fear; denies the reality of climate change; sanitizes history; and promotes authoritarianism and the myth of Christian nationalism. Increasingly, he and his legislative allies are using Texas’ public schools to indoctrinate students with this partisan, right-wing ideology.

Abbott has encouraged school districts to ban books about the LGBTQ+ community and signed a law forbidding instruction about diversity, equity and inclusion and banning DEI clubs in schools. He also has signed laws restricting what educators can teach about slavery and race relations and requiring school districts to post copies of the Ten Commandments in their classrooms.

The governor claims that teaching about DEI or promoting DEI programs is “indoctrination.” It is not. It recognizes the fact that Texas is a multicultural society and that every child – regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identify – should be welcome in our public schools.

Now, Abbott has joined Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to launch a campaign to create chapters of the right-wing organization Turning Point USA on every high school campus in Texas. These chapters are called Club Americas. Patrick has pledged $1 million of his own campaign funds to pay for them.

Turning Point USA was founded by the late Charlie Kirk, who was praised by conservatives as a champion of free speech. But many Americans – including some people of color, non-Christians and LGBTQ+ individuals – fear attack by the organization if they open their mouths.

Turning Point already operates on many college campuses, where students are older and better prepared to form their political views. Now, the organization is expanding into high schools, where it hopes its Club America chapters can build conservative networks and help students register to vote.

It is not clear if Abbott plans to force school districts to create the conservative clubs, but he said he expects “meaningful disciplinary action” against any school that tries to prevent the formation of a Club America.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism, says Turning Point’s “primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and civil rights activists.”

What if the Southern Poverty Law Center or the American Civil Liberties Union were to try to establish student chapters in Texas high schools? Abbott would scream, of course, about political “indoctrination.”

Texas launches plan to open Talking Point USA chapters in every high school 

Clay Robison

Greg Abbott, one of the most anti-public education governors Texas has ever had, will probably be reelected to a fourth term next year if Texans who have the most to lose with Abbott don’t quit voting for him.

I am talking about the teachers and other public school employees who have voted for Abbott one, two or three times already and are still wondering why they aren’t paid more, or why their classrooms are so overcrowded, or why they get political orders about what they can or can’t teach their students.

Look at a political map of Abbott’s victory over Democrat Beto O’Rourke in the 2022 general election, and you will see that O’Rourke won every large metropolitan county except Tarrant (Fort Worth). But most of the rest of Texas, except for several counties mainly along and near the Mexican border, are Republican red. (See link at the bottom of this item.)

The largest employers in many (maybe most) of those red towns and counties of rural and suburban Texas are school districts with many teachers, support staff and administrators who voted for Abbott. Many also voted for Donald Trump in last year’s presidential race and for the legislators who gave Abbott the voucher law that will divert $1 billion in tax funds from under-funded public schools to private schools and home-schoolers next year and many more billions in years to come.

Texas had 745,000 public school employees in 2020-21, and Abbott beat Democrat Beto O’Rourke by 883,000 votes the next year. So, the education vote was not the only factor in the election outcome last time. But Abbott will probably have a different opponent next year, and the stakes for public schools will be higher.

Educators, of course, are free to vote for whomever they choose for any reason they choose, and they are free to vote against the best interests of their profession and their students. Candidates like Abbott rely on that. Many Texas educators come from Republican political traditions, but the Republican Party of Trump and Abbott isn’t the Republican Party of anyone’s grandparents.

Any public school employees who think Abbott may be their choice for governor again should consider this. During his decade-plus in the governor’s office, Abbott has been slowly but surely squeezing public school budgets in favor of other priorities, including tax relief and school privatization. He has wrongly accused teachers of promoting ideology over truth, has advocated for book bans and has made it more difficult for teachers to do their jobs.

Abbott brags that during his time as governor he has increased funding for public education from $54 billion to $93 billion, but that doesn’t account for inflation and enrollment changes.

During the 2024-25 school year, the average teacher salary in Texas was more than $10,000 below the national average, and the average amount spent per Texas student in average daily attendance (ADA) was $5,600 less than the national average. Only three states – Utah, Oklahoma and Idaho – spent less per student. The additional funding that the Legislature appropriated for teacher pay and public education this year – the first real increase since 2019 – didn’t do much, if anything, to close those deficits.

If he is reelected, Abbott will be ready to start applying a stranglehold on future public education funding. That is what will happen if he succeeds in abolishing all school property taxes or puts so many restrictions on them it will be next to impossible for most school boards to raise the local revenue they need to keep their districts operating. Those are priorities Abbott laid out as he launched his reelection campaign last week.

So far, the Legislature has reimbursed school districts for the property tax breaks it has initiated. But the state will not be able to replace the lost revenue from all school property taxes without a huge increase in sales or other state taxes, which Abbott and his legislative allies will oppose.

Abbott’s answer will be more cuts in public education, including the jobs of many of those who voted for him. Elections have consequences. Educators can continue suffering the consequences of Abbott’s anti-public education policies. Or, they can do something about it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-elections/texas-governor-results/

Clay Robison

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately will decide whether the new state law requiring copies of the Ten Commandments to be prominently displayed in Texas’ public school classrooms is constitutional or unconstitutional, but despite what Attorney General Ken Paxton claims it is not unpatriotic to oppose the law. Nor is it anti-Christian.

Soon after Gov. Greg Abbott signed the law last summer, a group of 16 parents of various religious and non-religious backgrounds with children in public schools filed a federal lawsuit against it. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other religious freedom organizations, they won a ruling in August from U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of San Antonio, temporarily blocking the law as unconstitutional.

Biery concluded that the law favors Christianity over other faiths and is likely to interfere with families’ “exercise of their sincere religious or nonreligious beliefs in substantial ways.”

The ruling, however, applies only to the 11 school districts in which the plaintiffs have children in school. Other lawsuits with statewide implications are pending in other courts but haven’t been heard, and Paxton has demanded all other school districts comply with the law.

The attorney general, who is appealing Biery’s ruling and has won a hearing before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in January, has attacked the plaintiffs as “radical, anti-American groups trying to ignore our moral heritage.”

Who exactly are these “radical anti-Americans?”

One is a Jewish rabbi who said, “While our Jewish faith treats the Ten Commandments as sacred, the version mandated under this law does not match the text followed by our family, and the school displays will conflict with the religious beliefs and values we seek to instill in our child.”

Another plaintiff is a Baptist pastor who believes, like many other Christians, that “posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is un-American and un-Baptist.”

“Baptists have long held that the government has no role in religion – so that our faith may remain free and authentic,” he added. “My children’s faith should be shaped by family and our religious community, not by a Christian nationalist movement that confuses God with power.”

Like many Christian nationalists, Paxton is intent on rewriting history to deny our country’s founders’ belief in the separation of church and state.

The First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

In a Jan. 1, 1802, letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, President Thomas Jefferson described the First Amendment language as “building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

The Supreme Court already has cracked the wall that Jefferson described by allowing private religious schools to receive taxpayer-paid vouchers from state governments. How it will eventually rule on Texas’ Ten Commandments law in this age of Trumpism, hyper-partisanship and alternative “facts,” I have no idea. But justices who believe as the nation’s founders will vote to strike it down.

Clay Robison

Texas taxpayers and private donors are spending $550 million on a construction project in downtown San Antonio that, when completed, will refurbish and expand the city’s most popular tourist site and include a new facility to be called the Alamo Visitor Center and Museum.

For generations, many politicians as well as everyday Texans have called the Alamo the “Shrine of Texas Liberty” because it was the site of a 13-day siege that ended in a much shorter battle during Texas’ war for independence from Mexico in 1836. All the Alamo defenders, about 200 men, died at the hands of a much larger Mexican army and have been considered heroes by millions of Texans ever since.

But the Alamo was more than a battle site. In 1718, many years before Americans started settling Texas, it was established by the Spanish as Mission San Antonio de Valero with the goal of converting the indigenous people of the area to Catholicism and teaching them Spanish ways and customs. It remained a mission until 1793, when the Catholic Church gave up control. For a while after that, it was a Spanish fort.

There is a difference between a shrine and a museum. Historical museums are supposed to be based on facts – the good, the bad and the ugly. Shrines can share facts, but they also promote legends and thrive on hero worship and similar emotions.

Some shrines are religious. Others aren’t. For many years, the Alamo has been a memorial shrine, with a religious-like devotion from many Texans, including many of Texas’ elected leaders. It commemorates an event and people – the Texan defenders, whose exploits have become legendary, maybe even mythical.

Many adult Texans grew up believing every Alamo defender died fighting, fed by popular beliefs and movie or TV portrayals of Davy Crockett swinging his rifle like a club after running out of ammunition. But based on written accounts left by Mexican soldiers, some historians have concluded that some defenders, including Crockett, surrendered and were executed.

Does their surrender diminish their role in Texas history? No, and the new Alamo Museum must differentiate between facts and legends. Some historians believe the preservation of slavery was a factor in the Texans’ revolt from Mexico and believe the new Alamo Museum also must include that story, even though it is decidedly less than heroic and doesn’t reflect the ideals of freedom and liberty historically associated in the public mind with the Alamo itself.

And to be a real museum – as opposed to a shrine – the museum must tell the true story of the indigenous people who were served and/or exploited at the Alamo when it was still a Spanish mission. Their living conditions were harsh, their work was arduous, punishment for disobedience was severe and mortality rates were high. That period lasted 75 years. The outcome of the Texas Revolution put Texas on the road to statehood, but the Alamo siege lasted 13 days and the battle, which the rebels lost, less than two hours.

At present, the state General Land Office is custodian of the Alamo site, but it is operated by a nonprofit, the Alamo Trust, through a contract. An agreement between the Land Office, the Alamo Trust and the city of San Antonio calls for the new Alamo project to include Indigenous, Mexican, Tejano and Black perspectives, but state Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham seems to have lost her copy of the deal.

Last week, on Columbus Day, a federal holiday that some states (not Texas) also celebrate as Indigenous Peoples Day, someone posted a message on the Alamo’s official X page honoring indigenous people and their history at the Alamo. According to stories in the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle, Buckingham, whose ancestors first arrived in Texas nine generations ago, reacted angrily.

The post on the Alamo’s X site noted that the “Alamo Visitor Center and Museum will feature an Indigenous Peoples Gallery, celebrating the bands, clans and tribes that shaped the region.”

After a right-wing activist tipped her off about the Alamo post, “Buckingham posted this response on X: “I did NOT authorize this post. This is frankly unacceptable, and it has been deleted.”

“Woke has no place at the Alamo,” she also wrote. “This speaks to a pattern of behavior that is completely misaligned with the priorities of my office and the vast majority of Texans who care so deeply for our Shrine of Liberty.” She made clear her priority was to keep a “battle-centric focus” on the Alamo as a defender of liberty and freedom. The Alamo Trust apologized for its indigenous people post.

But Ramon Vasquez, an indigenous scholar on the Alamo project’s museum committee, pointed out “there is nothing woke about facts.”

Vasquez told the Express-News and the Chronicle that he was hopeful that Buckingham’s response wouldn’t sabotage the progress the Alamo project has made in “celebrating the diversity of our state and our city.”

But now that the Alamo has become a front in the culture wars, who knows what kind of story or stories the new Alamo Museum will tell when it opens in 2027. Will it be a real museum or simply an expensive, prettied-up version of an old shrine?

Alamo overseer’s anti-woke demands loom over $550 million project’s future

Clay Robison