Texas’ top leaders’ support for a racist candidate endangers Texas students and families
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billionaire financial contributors, they also led the enactment of a huge tax giveaway for private schools that, if not repealed, will soon be draining underfunded public schools of billions of dollars a year.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.
