Grading Texas

There are many things Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and their legislative allies should be doing for children instead of attacking their schools and teachers with repeated lies about critical race theory and “pornographic” books.

Near the top of our state’s neglect list is a mental health crisis among public school students, which has worsened during the pandemic. A report (see below) by the Hopeful Futures Campaign, a coalition of national organizations working to improve mental health supports in America’s schools, gives an idea how serious the problem in Texas is.

Among the state’s 5 million-plus public school students, 363,000 suffer from major depression, and 255,000 of those do not receive treatment.

And what is state government doing about it? Not nearly enough.

The ratio of school psychologists to students in Texas schools is one to 4,962. Mental health experts recommend one school psychologist for every 500 students.

The ratio of school social workers to students is one to 13,604, which is not even in the same universe as the recommended ratio of one social worker to 250 kids.

The ratio of school counselors to students in our schools is one to 423, almost double the recommended ratio of one to 250 students. And many of those counselors spend all or most of their time on wasteful STAAR testing.

Overall, Texas’ ranking among the states for youth mental health services has fallen steeply during the pandemic from 28th in 2020 to 41st this year.

About 60 percent of the children enrolled in Texas public schools are low-income, which means the schools are about their only source of help, meager as it is, for mental health services.

Abbott, Patrick et al are neglecting an important part of their responsibilities – the support of public education. Instead, they are trying to destroy it, seeking the reelection support of voters who don’t know any better than to believe their lies. And their attacks keep adding to the stress of these vulnerable students and their teachers.

Lives are at stake, but they don’t care.

Clay Robison

Texas’s School Mental Health Report Card

The Cult of Ignorance marches on, as absurd and dangerous as ever. Now, even butterflies—and their keepers — aren’t safe, and public schools may be next.

You may have heard that the National Butterfly Center, a nature conservatory on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, has become a target of QAnon conspiracy theories falsely claiming the center is tied to human trafficking.

This is part of an old extreme claim, long promoted on social media, that Hillary Clinton and other high-ranking Democrats are behind a pedophilia ring. The headquarters were alleged to be a family pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C, prompting an armed man to fire a shot in the establishment a few years ago. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

There was absolutely no truth to the claim about the pizza parlor, and there is absolutely no truth to the claim about the butterfly center. The center hasn’t been under investigation by any law enforcement agency for human trafficking. But it caught the attention of people who would rather believe lies than the truth when it dared to file a lawsuit against the administration of Liar-in-Chief Donald Trump in 2017 over Trump’s proposed border wall. The lawsuit, still pending in federal court, said construction of the wall threatened the center’s butterfly habitat.

The suit prompted tweets falsely accusing the center’s executive director, Marianna Trevino-Wright, of human trafficking. Then some nitwit congressional candidate from Virginia showed up, demanding access through the center to the Rio Grande “to see all the illegals crossing on the raft.”

Trevino-Wright has been the subject of threats by phone, email and Twitter. So, the center was closed indefinitely this week because of safety concerns for its staff and the public. An educational and environmental institution not in any way connected to politics has nevertheless become the latest victim of the increasing insanity of right-wing politics.

“It’s incredibly distressing that the United States has come to the point where a really significant part of the public is just no longer tethered to reality,” Jeffrey Glassberg, the founder of the North American Butterfly Association,” told The Texas Tribune.

It also is incredibly distressing and anger-provoking that the alleged top “leaders” of this state – all of whom know better than to believe the QAnon lies – sit back and refuse to publicly denounce them because they are afraid to offend would-be voters. Pandering is much easier. They wink and nod and encourage the lies, including the Big Lie about the 2020 election being “stolen” from Trump, and use that as an excuse to make it more difficult for their political opponents to vote.

These “leaders,” beginning with the governor, also have spent much of the past year spreading lies about public education – from false allegations of critical race theory to false claims about pornography in schools. It may take years for the public education system to recover, but they don’t care, as long as ignorance continues to help them get elected.

Threats from QAnon conspiracists have forced a butterfly sanctuary in the Rio Grande Valley to close

Clay Robison

Before announcing his parental “bill of rights” for public education at a charter school in Lewisville, Gov. Greg Abbott reminded everyone of a parental right he already had issued – his order giving parents the right to potentially expose their children and their children’s teachers and classmates to a deadly disease every time they go to school.

Of course, he didn’t use those words exactly, but that was the effect of what he was talking about when he touted his order, still in effect during the current COVID surge, prohibiting school districts from requiring students and employees to wear protective masks.

A fairly large audience of adults and students applauded. Best I could tell from my livestream view, no one, including the governor, was wearing a mask, and no one was social distancing. The event, it should be noted, occurred during a record-breaking week for new confirmed COVID cases in Denton County, where Lewisville is located. Nearby Dallas County also was being hammered with a COVID surge.

For all the fanfare, the governor’s parental “bill of rights” was little more than a clip job of rights that public school parents already enjoy under current law.

More importantly to Abbott, though, the event was another campaign stop on the way to a Republican primary, where blind ideology trumps not only good government but also common-sense health concerns — except, maybe, the health concerns of the governor himself.

Abbott already has tested positive for COVID at least once, and I am sure he is fully vaccinated and boosted. I also am sure he and his handlers aren’t foolhardy enough not to take some precautions with his health when he is on the road. Maybe members of his security detail have to be vaccinated and/or tested regularly. Maybe similar requirements had even been imposed on the crowd in Lewisville, although that seems more doubtful.

But caution and selfless personal restraint are not the message that the governor wants Republican primary voters to hear as he continues to brag about his orders banning mask and vaccine mandates. His message to his voters – his pandemic “bill of rights,” you could say – is that someone’s right to get sick and infect others, even in a public school classroom or on a school bus, is more important than someone else’s right to try to stay healthy.

Clay Robison

From the beginning, the legislative proposal to create an 1836 Project to promote “patriotic education” seemed little more than an effort to put a politically engineered public face on Texas, cleansed of the nagging blemishes that some people find uncomfortable or want to deny.

That, folks, is not education. It is propaganda.

Now that Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Speaker Dade Phelan have appointed the nine members of the 1836 Project Advisory Committee, the early misgivings seem valid, particularly if the panel is favorably influenced, as its chairman is, by Donald Trump’s ill-conceived 1776 Commission, which also allegedly was created to promote “patriotic education.”

What the new state committee does is important because it will be working with state agencies on ways to promote Texas history for visitors at state parks, monuments, museums and other landmarks. The panel also will create a pamphlet to be given to people receiving Texas driver’s licenses, and it can make recommendations for future legislation.

In truth, Trump created the 1776 Commission to try to whitewash the impact of slavery and racism in American history and culture and to push back during the 2020 election year against Black Lives Matter activism over the killings of Black people by police officers. The then-president wrongly claimed that some educators were trying to divide Americans on race and slavery and were teaching students to “hate their own country.”

Ideology, not scholarship, guided Trump’s appointments to his commission, and its report, issued during the closing days of his administration, reflected that fact. Instead of valid academic input from professional historians, the report was largely a compilation of right-wing talking points and ideologically slanted theories that, among other things, cast doubts on the value of multiculturalism and excused the hypocrisy in the fact that several of our nation’s prominent founders, while advocating for equality, were slave owners.

The report had no scholarly footnotes or citations, and James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, said it was not a work of history but a display of “cynical politics.”

“They’re using something they call history to stoke culture wars,” he told The New York Times.

President Joe Biden promptly killed the 1776 Commission and its report after taking office.

Nevertheless, at the first meeting last week of the 1836 Project Advisory Committee, the chairman, Kevin Roberts, an Abbott appointee, called the 1776 report an “excellent piece of scholarship” and urged his fellow committee members, future invited witnesses and anyone else following the committee’s work to read it. He said the Trump commission’s report would help them get a sense of what the 1836 committee is trying to accomplish.

Roberts, who has a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Texas at Austin, is former president of a small Catholic college in Wyoming and founder and former headmaster of a Catholic school in Louisiana. Now, he is CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a conservative think tank in Austin, whose main interest in education is privatizing it and cutting funding to public schools. His group has a lot of influence over Abbott and many legislators.

Another advisory committee member, Sherry Sylvester, a former senior adviser to Lt. Gov. Patrick, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at TPPF. One member of the 1776 Commission was Brooke Rollins, domestic policy adviser under Trump and TPPF’s former president and CEO. She since has returned to TPPF as a senior adviser and board member.

Five of the nine members have backgrounds in history and/or education, including Roberts. They also include Robert Edison, a former Dallas ISD Teacher of the Year, who has spent his career and now retirement on educating the public on Black history. Another member is former state Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, who got the Alamo transferred to state oversight.

Some critics also find the name, “1836 Project,” problematic. It marks the year Texas won its independence from Mexico. The advisory committee is charged with promoting the state’s “history of prosperity and democratic freedom.” But the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, adopted in 1836, legalized slavery and excluded indigenous groups from any rights as citizens.

The committee will hear testimony from the Texas Education Agency, but so far it is not empowered to change public school curricula. It is, however, empowered to recommend legislation, which could lead to more partisan or ideological tampering with what teachers can or cannot teach. It could open up another front in the political war against public education.

Clay Robison