Grading Texas

Some prominent people continue to blame an alleged failure of civics education in our schools for the partisan gridlock and turmoil that is increasingly paralyzing our federal government and spreading to many states, including Texas, as well.

The latest to raise the issue is Robert Gates, the former defense secretary, CIA director and president of Texas A&M University. In a recent virtual conference and a follow-up interview with Politico, Gates suggested that if students learn more about how our system of government was designed to work, maybe they, as voters, will be less partisan and elected officials will rediscover the necessity of compromise.

“It seems to me that unless people understand how our system of government works – and the role of the Congress, and the role of the president – we can go astray,” Gates said.

The main problem, however, is not in our educational system. The biggest danger to our democracy right now is being orchestrated by well-educated politicians who know very well how our system of government is supposed to work but are undermining it by convincing misinformed and ill-informed voters that they can’t trust our elections. Faith in elections is the backbone of our democracy, but to them, the health of our democracy is less important than their own ideological or partisan advantage and their own political careers.

After Donald Trump started the big lie that Joe Biden had “stolen” last year’s election, Trump’s enablers – including some Texans in high office – immediately started helping him give credence to the lie in the minds of his angry followers.

Only hours after the deadly Capitol riot, 17 of the 25 Texas Republicans in Congress voted against certifying the election results that legitimately put Biden in the White House. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz tried to delay the certification by calling for an “emergency audit” of elections results from Arizona and Pennsylvania. All these votes and delaying actions served to entrench Trump’s lie even deeper, feeding the conspiracy theorists and right-wing commentators, even after numerous judges and Trump’s own attorney general had attested to the validity of the election.

Cruz, incidentally, graduated cum laude from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in public policy and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He has had plenty of instruction in U.S. civics.

Perpetuating Trump’s lie even more, another well-educated Texan, Gov. Greg Abbott, recently signed a so-called “election integrity” law that was designed to make it more difficult for many of his political opponents to vote. And redistricting maps being advanced by Abbott’s well-educated allies in the Legislature will deprive millions of Texans of color of the level of political influence to which they are entitled because of their population growth as counted in the recent federal census.

This will undermine democracy even more, and it has nothing to do with how many civics classes anyone took in school.

Robert Gates: How civics education became a national security issue

Clay Robison

Virtual charter schools claim to specialize in education, but mostly they specialize in making profits with our tax dollars, and the pandemic is proving to be a windfall for them. Or, as one virtual charter executive put it, a “lasting tail wind.”

Contributing to that tail wind is the state of Texas, which has expanded its investment in virtual education through the Legislature’s recent enactment of SB15, which will allow school districts to receive state funding for virtual instruction for as much as 10 percent of their enrollments this year. The new law has some other restrictions, but – if the Legislature renews it in 2023 — it also will open the door to a broader expansion of virtual instruction after the pandemic subsides.

A recent report by the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center found that 63 percent of virtual for-profit schools – most of which are charters – were rated unacceptable by their states based on the most recent data available. They typically lagged behind other schools on such critical measures as student academic outcomes and graduation rates. And they had high student turnover.

But those failures haven’t dimmed the corporate enthusiasm for the tax cash cow, and that enthusiasm only increased after the pandemic struck in the spring of 2020.

“We believe the effects of COVID-19 will be a lasting tail wind to online education and especially to K-12’s business model,” one virtual company’s chief financial officer said in a call with investors at the outset of the pandemic, according to report by the Washington Post and the Hechinger Report.

The COVID resurgence has added to the virtual industry’s optimism. “A lot of the states that have spikes in delta variant, places like Texas, we just see sort of unprecedented demand,” another industry executive told investors in August.

For-profit virtual schools are spending millions of dollars marketing themselves to parents and seeing many more millions on tax dollars in return. Parents, concerned about their children’s safety while the pandemic remains dangerous, are signing their children up for virtual classes. Many, however, end up being disappointed and shortchanged. And their kids’ educations suffer because of minimal online instruction, under-staffing and other cost-cutting steps that emphasize profit over academic results.

Students learn best with in-person instruction. But while expanding online learning, Texas – namely Gov. Greg Abbott – has made in-person learning more dangerous for students and educators alike. Despite the advice of health experts and pleas of many local school officials, the governor has refused to rescind his order banning mask mandates in schools, even though some districts are defying him.

The more dangerous Texas schools remain, the more profits virtual schools will make.

Despite mediocre records, for-profit online charter schools are selling parents on staying virtual https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/online-learning-for-profit-schools/2021/09/23/8e4ecff2-1be3-11ec-8380-5fbadbc43ef8_story.html

Clay Robison

We now have laws in Texas and several other states, dominated or heavily influenced by the Trump wing of the Republican Party, which seek to whitewash part of our history by limiting what educators can teach about racism. So, is it too much of a stretch to fear that someday, if Trumpism continues to control the GOP, that similar ideological efforts will be made to require teachers to describe the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters as patriotic defenders of the American way of life?

Donald Trump has called his supporters who stormed the Capitol at his bidding to try to stop Congress from certifying his election loss to Joe Biden “very special…peaceful people…great people.” Republican members of Congress who were forced to flee before the mob are now doing everything they can to undermine and discredit an official investigation of the riot.

And Trump’s supporters in Texas, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, continue to actively court the racists, conspiracy theorists and malcontents who attacked the Capitol, while doing little or nothing to dispel Trump’s lie that the election was “stolen.”

Former President George W. Bush has been one of the few prominent Republicans throughout the country to speak the truth about the election and Jan. 6, and he did so again last Saturday during an event remembering the Americans who died in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he was in office. In remarks delivered in Pennsylvania, at the crash side of United Airlines Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked that day, he called out the Jan. 6 rioters for what they were – “violent extremists” – as he likened them to the Sept. 11 terrorists.

“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit,” he said.

Politically, it is easier for former presidents to speak the truth than for politicians who are still trying to hang on to public office or climb the political ladder. But the efforts by our current crop of Republican elected leaders, including the governor, to downplay the truth, whether about racism or election outcomes, for political gain are pathetic – and dangerous for our democracy.

The question is how low will they go before they start losing their own self-respect – if they have any left.

George W. Bush perfectly tied 9/11 to the January 6 attack

Clay Robison

The real health experts – not the internet phonies – say the best defense against the spread of COVID-19, besides vaccines, is masking. So why did Gov. Greg Abbott order a crackdown on immigrants as an alleged protection against COVID and refuse to let school districts impose mask requirements as fall classes resume on campuses?

This is because Abbott is more interested in winning reelection next year than he is in protecting the school children and educators of Texas and their local communities. And he knows the votes of the science-deniers who are still pretending the pandemic is a liberal conspiracy and the fearful Texans who blame immigrants for all their troubles are important to his reelection prospects. That is why he continues to court them at every opportunity.

If the governor really cared about solving the immigration problem, he would insist that his partisan allies in Congress, beginning with the two U.S. senators from Texas, take steps to finally enact a fair, sensible and enforceable immigration law.

Stopping drivers who are suspected of transporting immigrants who may be infected with COVID will do little, if anything, to protect school children or anyone else from COVID. But it will win Abbott some votes in next year’s Republican primary, as will his wasteful proposal to finish building a border wall.

Instructing state troopers to stop immigrants also will lead to abusive racial profiling and the inconvenience or worse of lawful American citizens that some troopers think may look like immigrants. The U.S. Justice Department has filed a lawsuit to block the governor’s unlawful directive.

Meanwhile, Abbott keeps pronouncing that it is time for Texans to be “personally responsible” for their own behavior during a pandemic that remains dangerous and deadly.

Actually, it is time for the governor of Texas to be officially responsible and allow local governing bodies, including school districts, to require masking if they believe that is necessary to protect their local communities. Remember, as the American Academy of Pediatrics pointed out in recommending mask use in schools, children younger than 12 are not yet eligible for a COVID vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued similar guidelines.

Responding to the federal lawsuit against his order to make highway stops of immigrants, Abbott said he would not retreat because his “duty remains to the people of Texas, and I have no intention of abdicating that.”

The sad truth is that he already has abdicated that duty.

Clay Robison