Grading Texas

Late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel operates in a different world than schoolteachers and most university faculty, and his earnings dwarf theirs, but the TV star has something very important in common with the educators. They are all on the front lines of protecting democracy, and that makes them political targets in this age of the aspiring dictator, Donald Trump, and his gang of apologists and enablers.

Trump and many of his elected followers keep attacking what autocrats hate and Kimmel and educators represent — things like the First Amendment, real freedom of speech, truth and inclusion.

Trump has made it clear that, in his view, free speech doesn’t include speech or media reports that are critical of him and doesn’t include educational policies or classroom discussions with which he takes issue.

Months ago, he bullied two TV networks — CBS and Kimmel’s ABC — into settling lawsuits he brought over alleged grievances that should have been thrown out of court. Brendan Carr, Trump’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, then strong armed ABC into temporarily pulling Kimmel’s show off the air.

Trump also has withheld funds appropriated by Congress from several, elite universities to force them into dropping diversity, equity and inclusion programs that offend the racists and bigots among his political base and his own personal sense of superiority.

The anti-First Amendment infection has spread to Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Trump’s legislative supporters in Texas have clamped down on what public school teachers can teach their students in our state. This began a few years ago with restrictions on teaching about slavery and race relations, followed this year with a ban on teaching about diversity, equity and inclusion.

Texas leaders also have imposed restrictions on books in school libraries.

A few weeks ago, politics also figured in the firings of two higher education faculty members in Texas. One was a Texas A&M instructor who was axed for allegedly teaching material that was not part of the course catalogue description for her class in children’s literature.

In truth, she was fired for discussing DEI material with a class and being caught on a student’s video. Abbott demanded she be fired for violating state law, even though, unlike the DEI ban in K-12 public schools, there is no state law prohibiting professors from discussing DEI in higher education classes. Under MAGA-inspired political pressure, though, the A&M president fired the professor and then resigned from his own job a few days later.

Now, Angelo State University, citing a legally dubious executive order from Trump, is banning discussions of transgender issues in its classrooms.

A Texas State University professor was fired for allegedly inciting a violent overthrow of our government. He was axed after a video of him speaking at a socialist conference about anarchists and their lack of organization was posted on social media. “Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven, mad organization in the history of the world — that of the United States?” he reportedly said.

I don’t know if he really was promoting violence — most professors in Texas don’t — or merely trying to make an academic, hypothetical point, a risky endeavor nevertheless for educators in an era when unfriendly digital eyes and ears are lurking everywhere. In any event, he didn’t make the remarks in a classroom, and he is entitled to due process.

The former professor, who had tenure, has sued the university, claiming violation of his free speech and due process rights as well as his contractual provisions.

“Conduct that advocates for inciting violence is directly contrary to the values of Texas State University,” the university’s president said after reviewing the video. “I cannot and will not tolerate such behavior.”

The only violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government since the Civil War was the Jan. 6, 2021, deadly attack on the Capitol by rioters stirred up by Trump’s claim that the 2020 election, which he lost, had been stolen from him. The rioters delayed but didn’t stop Congress’ certification of the election results favoring Democrat Joe Biden.

Despite numerous court decisions upholding Biden’s election, Trump still wrongly claims the election was stolen. On his first day back in office in January, he pardoned everyone who had been convicted of participating in the riot, including those who had been convicted of assaulting Capitol police officers.

Inciting violent conduct may be contrary to the values of Texas State University and, I hope, to most Texans. But what are the values of a president who is a threat to democracy?

Clay Robison

All the students, parents, teachers and school administrators who hate the STAAR test – and that would be most of you – are about to get an unwanted surprise from the Legislature, a replacement test that promises to be even worse.

Yes, the Republican majority that controls our state’s lawmaking body goes through the motions of listening to a ton of complaints about the unhealthy student stress from high stakes testing, the costly waste of classroom time teaching to the test and the discriminatory impact on disadvantaged kids and English language learners and then ignores all those concerns.

The result is House Bill 8, which is expected to receive final legislative approval before this second special session ends. It provides for a new school testing/accountability system that will increase – not decrease — the number of standardized tests students will have to take each year. One test will be added at the beginning of the school year and another during the middle of the year in addition to testing at the end of the year.

The new accountability system will be largely designed and created under the control of an unelected, test-happy education commissioner. Teachers, whose future careers can depend on their students’ test scores, will have little input into designing the new system. Only one classroom teacher will be included on a new accountability advisory committee.

The new testing will debut in the 2027-28 school year. Republicans in the Texas House and Senate have voted for it, and most Democrats voted against it.

Here are some other problems with the new testing/accountability system:

• A-F accountability ratings of K-8 schools will continue to be based solely on high stakes tests. The measure fails to provide other quality indicators – such as enrichment programs, career and technical education or the provision of full-day pre-kindergarten programs – as alternatives to testing. Federal law allows these alternatives.
• The new law could result in the addition of another quality indicator based on test scores to be considered as a factor in a school’s or district’s accountability rating. It would be student progress during a school year measured between the first and third testing periods.
• The law will permit the education commissioner to change the standards for accountability indicators every year, creating a constantly moving target for school districts.
• It will limit an independent school district’s ability to challenge a state accountability rating it considers inaccurate or unfair, but charter schools would not be subject to that restriction.
• The measure will allow the education commissioner to order a school district to enter an 1882 partnership with a charter school to seek educational improvements for a struggling campus as an alternative to sanctions. Such charter partnerships already are an option, but it is unacceptable for the state to order a district into a charter partnership, robbing district voters of local control. Besides, many of those charter partnerships have failed, despite costing taxpayers and school districts hundreds of millions of dollars.

Under the STAAR testing system, some school districts already administer progress monitoring exams earlier in the school year, but they are not required to. HB 8 will make the tests at the beginning and middle of the school year mandatory. The state will pay for these extra tests but only if they are developed by the education commissioner, who may choose to align them with the Bible-infused Bluebonnet curriculum that districts are already receiving financial incentives to adopt.

I am sure they will find another name for it, but we may as well call the new testing regime STAAR II or Mega-Migraine.

Clay Robison

Some people may wonder why the Texas State Teachers Association is siding with the Democratic legislators from Texas who fled the state in the fight over a congressional redistricting map. What does this have to do with education?

TSTA is backing the Democrats because this is more than just a matter of routinely redrawing political boundaries. It is an effort by the president of the United States to rig the 2026 midterm elections that will determine the future control of the U.S. House of Representatives and, in turn, the future of our democracy and the education system that is dependent on it.

Since inauguration day, both democracy and education have been under attack by President Trump, a me-first, autocratic leader who believes the Constitution doesn’t apply to him and who is aided and abetted by a lapdog, rubber-stamp congressional majority that refuses to exercise its constitutional role to rein him in. Members of that majority are a combination of Trump accomplices, political cowards and individuals who, in the pre-Trump era, wouldn’t have qualified to be Capitol tour guides, much less policymakers.

Some federal judges have tried to apply the brakes to Trump’s abuses – including deep cuts to public education and health care and excessive, sometimes illegal enforcement of immigration laws — but with limited success. His minions have lied to some judges and ignored others, while so far, the U.S. Supreme Court has mostly stayed out of the president’s way.

The current Republican majority in the U.S. House is narrow, 219-212, with four vacant seats. Three of the vacant seats were most recently held by Democrats, and one by a Republican. All these seats, including vacant ones, will be on November 2026 ballots in the various states.

These numbers plus Trump’s rising unfavorable ratings mean Republicans may lose their House majority. If they do, a new Democratic majority will gain control over the House’s oversight powers and use them to challenge and investigate the administration’s attacks on democracy and maybe impeach the president for the third time, all of which Trump fears.

So, to protect himself, he is trying to rig the election. He started by asking Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional district lines to add five more Republicans to the U.S. House and increase the chances of the GOP keeping its majority. So, Gov. Greg Abbott – one of Trump’s Texas lapdogs – added congressional redistricting to the Legislature’s special session agenda.

When Republican leaders produced a new map that ignored voting rights protections for minority Texans and took five congressional seats from Democratic incumbents to create new districts favoring Republicans, more than 50 Democratic legislators left Texas to break a quorum and keep the House from passing the new redistricting bill before the special session adjourns Aug. 19.

Democrats may maintain their session boycott until then, but Abbott remains in control because he can keep calling special sessions of 30 days each, making it likely Democrats ultimately will return, and the Republican majority will pass the new redistricting bill.

With the Texas redistricting walkout receiving national attention, the fight is likely to continue in other states. If Trump gets his way in Texas, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California vows to pursue mid-decade redistricting to add five Democrats at the expense of five Republicans to his blue state’s congressional delegation, and governors of other Democratic states may follow suit. Meanwhile, urged on by Trump, other Republican states may follow Texas’ lead.

“It’s existential now,” U.S. Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., told the Axios news site. “I think there’s broad agreement by Democrats that…we simply can’t stand by and let the Republican Party completely ruin the map.”

Bare-knuckled partisanship isn’t pretty. Neither is Trump’s presidency, and the midterm elections are crucial.

Clay Robison

President Trump has gone out of his way to endorse racism and other forms of bigotry with high profile immigration raids and detentions as well as his efforts to destroy diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher and public education and the corporate world.

Now, it looks like an end to desegregation enforcement in public education could be next.

The Guardian news site recently reported that the Trump Justice Department was ending a consent decree in a Plaquemines Parish, La., school district that has been under a desegregation order since the Johnson administration in the 1960s.

According to The Guardian, the Justice Department still has about 135 desegregation cases on its docket, most of which are in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. Many of these cases date back to the1960s’ civil rights era when President Johnson and the federal courts were clamping down on school districts trying to find ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation order.

Now, the Trump administration is suggesting those old cases are obsolete, and court-approved enforcement orders are no longer necessary. The Louisiana school district did not have to prove it was still complying with the old consent decree. Instead, the Justice Department simply worked with the Louisiana state attorney general’s office to agree on the dismissal.

Johnathan Smith, chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law, said the decision “signals utter contempt for communities of color by the administration and a lack of awareness of the history of segregation that has plagued our nation’s schools.”

“Even though we are 71 years after the Brown vs. Board (of Education) decision, schools of this country remain more segregated today than they were back in 1954,” Smith added. “The fact that the administration is kind of wholeheartedly ending these types of consent decrees is troubling, particularly when they’re not doing the research and investigation to determine whether or not these decrees really should be ended at this point.”

The years following the Supreme Court’s desegregation order also marked the introduction of private school vouchers, which were used by segregationists to pay the way for white students to attend so-called segregation academies, which eventually were outlawed by federal courts.

Interestingly, vouchers are surging now. Yielding to the demands of Gov. Greg Abbott, the Legislature enacted Texas’ first voucher bill this year, and at the urging of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the first federal voucher program was included in Trump’s budget bill recently enacted by Congress.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s civil rights division said the dismissal of the consent decree in the Louisiana case was part of “getting America refocused on our bright future.”

It sounds more like another significant step toward returning our country to its dark, racist past.

Consent decrees force schools to desegregate. The Trump administration is striking them down.

Clay Robison