Grading Texas

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