Grading Texas

I don’t know if Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick thinks he sees a communist in every public school, but one of the bills on his list of top 40 issues is Senate Bill 24, which would require Texas schools to teach students in fourth through 12th grade about communism and its evils.

Some of Patrick’s supporters apparently see a communist in every classroom, as well as behind every tree on the playground. That’s because many right-wingers like to characterize anything they dislike or fear about public institutions – including public schools – as that old bugaboo, “communism.”

This would include the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that public schools and universities established to make all their students feel welcome and achieve success. Playing to ignorance, racism and fear among their political base, Patrick, Gov. Greg Abbott and President Trump have declared war on DEI programs – as well as teaching the often painful truth about our history and culture — to undermine public education and promote privatization.

I suspect DEI was part of what U.S. Sen Ted Cruz’s father –Rafael Cruz – was talking about last week when he appeared as a witness for Senate Bill 24 before the Senate Education K-16 Committee.

“In many instances our classrooms are failing us because they’re following an agenda,” the elder Cruz testified. “It is not our agenda. It is a communist agenda that has, like tentacles, immersed itself into our education system. So, we need to retrieve our educational system from that evil agenda.”

Dictatorial practitioners of communism have hurt a lot of people, including Rafael Cruz, but DEI isn’t communism, nor is it evil. Neither is public education, the backbone of our democracy, which is now under serious attack by President Trump, aided and abetted by the likes of Abbott and Patrick.

Rafael Cruz, who is a minister, also spreads the myth that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. It wasn’t. The founders believed in the separation of church and state and the freedom to practice any religion or no religion.

Texas students should learn about communism, although the biggest threat to democracy in the United States right now is not communism, but authoritarianism. They can be practiced together, but they are not the same thing.

Trump, whom Patrick adores, is not a communist, but he gives strong indications of yearning to be an authoritarian, someone eager to ignore the constitutional restraints on his office if necessary to enact his agenda. “Long live the king,” he recently posted on social media.

Trump has issued many illegal executive orders that the Republican majority in Congress has ignored, but federal judges have blocked some of them. Trump is trying to see what he can get away with, how far he can go toward an authoritarian state, and the big test will come when and if the Supreme Court issues an order that he ignores, creating a constitutional crisis. He already has ignored or not fully complied with some lower court orders.

Adolf Hitler was an extreme authoritarian, a totalitarian, who led a Nazi regime that started World War II, causing the deaths of many millions, including in the Holocaust.

Trump is no Hitler, but he is a nationalist, alienating long-time free world allies, exacerbating political differences in our country and stirring up some of the same passions that brought Hitler to power – racism, fear, hatred, bigotry against people who are perceived as “different.” That’s what Trump’s campaigns against immigration and DEI programs are largely about, bolstered by a steady stream of lies and misrepresentations.

His political attacks on education, which are threatening to spread, are attacks on democracy. Abbott, Patrick and their allies are operating from a similar political playbook in Texas, and, until there is a change in power, who knows where it may end.

No, communism isn’t the biggest threat to our country now. That distinction belongs to the man in the White House. Texas students also should be taught about all authoritarians and how they come to power.

Clay Robison

Gov. Greg Abbott now wants to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in K-12 public schools, as he and his legislative allies did two years ago in state-supported higher education.

“No taxpayer dollars will be used to fund DEI in our schools,” he said in a recent post on the social media platform X. “Schools must focus on fundamentals of education, not indoctrination.”

What he means by indoctrination, of course, is not indoctrination. What he really is attacking is how our public schools address the cultural differences and historical truths that he and his right-wing followers and admirers find uncomfortable.

They want to forget about slavery, segregation and a host of other undesirable facts that mar our state’s and country’s history, leaving scars that still haunt us today. So, he attacks public schools for teaching these truths, something schools were created to do.

Abbott also panders to many in his political crowd who are fearful, even angry that most of the children in our public school classrooms aren’t white, many aren’t citizens and many are of sexual orientations or gender identities that some people love to bully. Our public schools accept and teach all of them because that also is what public schools are supposed to do. But Abbott turns this diversity into an opportunity to attack and weaken public education, the backbone of our democracy. He does so without an ounce of concern over the harmful impact it may have on the lives of the students and their teachers.

DEI is a fact of life in Texas, America and our public schools. It’s a strength that the governor and his allies (including the new president) have turned into a political target for fear and hate. In this case, Abbott is using it to undermine public schools to try to build more support for a taxpayer-paid voucher plan for private schools

Does Abbott really know what the word, indoctrination, means? I am sure he does, which means his use of it against public schools also makes him a hypocrite.

Over the past couple of years, he has visited many Christian schools to promote his voucher campaign. Christian schools, which could receive hundreds of millions of tax dollars next year if Abbott’s voucher plan becomes law, routinely mix indoctrination (in the real sense of the word) with their education offerings. Some of these schools offer more indoctrination than education, but that’s their business, as long as they don’t use tax dollars to do it. Abbott, however, wants to give them big tax giveaways while underfunding the public schools he apparently would rather attack than adequately support.

Gov, Greg Abbott wants to extend Texas’ DEI ban to K-12 schools

Clay Robison

Gov. Greg Abbott made it clear two years ago that the Legislature must pass a universal voucher program, one that gives taxpayer-funded subsidies to millionaires – as well as people of lesser means — for their children’s private school tuition and related expenses.

So far, he has given no indication that he has changed his mind as the Legislature convenes another session, with vouchers again at the top of the governor’s education priorities list. And political donations from super-wealthy school privatization advocates were instrumental in the governor’s successful campaign to unseat anti-voucher legislators in last year’s Republican primaries.

Nevertheless, there is still talk among voucher advocates of giving priority to students from low-income families. But what would that realistically mean for many of those families?

A few years ago, Arizona enacted a universal voucher program like the one Abbott is advocating for Texas, and soon it blew a multimillion-dollar hole in the state budget. It also is being used at a faster rate by wealthy families than by low-income parents in the Phoenix area, the most populous part of the state, according to an analysis by the ProPublica news site.

This is because many low-income families, even with vouchers, can’t afford tuition and the transportation expenses to send their children to private schools, most of which are outside their neighborhoods and, unlike public schools, don’t have to provide bus service. Meanwhile, wealthy families with children already in private schools are eager to scoop up the welfare payments.

ProPublica’s analysis of Arizona Department of Education data for Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, revealed that “the poorer the ZIP code, the less often vouchers are being used. The richer, the more.”

The story noted: “In one West Phoenix ZIP code where the median household income is $46,700 a year, for example, ProPublica estimates that only a single voucher is being used per 100 school-age children. There are about 12,000 kids in this ZIP code, with only 150 receiving vouchers. Conversely, in a Paradise Valley ZIP code with a median household income of $173,000, there are an estimated 28 vouchers being used per 100 school-age children.”

If you think something similar wouldn’t happen in Texas, think again, even if a Texas voucher program tried to give precedence to low-income families.

The voucher allowance proposed in the bill killed by the Texas House in 2023 was $10,500 per child. That is close but still short of the average tuition — $10,906 for elementary schools and $12,442 for high schools – now charged by private schools in Texas, according to the Private School Review. But many of the more popular private schools charge $20,000, $30,000 or more a year.

As in Arizona, most are not in low-income neighborhoods, and most don’t provide transportation, which adds to a family’s costs. There also are many low-income kids but few private schools in rural Texas.

Some voucher advocates also want to give priority to students with disabilities, but this is even more unrealistic. Public schools must provide special education. Private schools are not required to do so, and most don’t. The private schools that provide those services charge tuition much higher than a voucher payment would cover. Tax money diverted to vouchers, meanwhile, would worsen funding problems for special education programs in public schools.

Had it passed, the final voucher bill offered in 2023 would have cost Texas taxpayers – and public schools — $2.3 billion by 2028, the Legislative Budget Board forecast in a fiscal note. Much of that spending would have amounted to “welfare for the wealthy,” Democratic voucher opponent Rep. James Talarico said at the time.

He was right.

In a state with school vouchers for all, low-income families aren’t choosing to use them

Clay Robison

Donald Trump won’t move back into the White House for several more weeks yet, but Gov. Greg Abbott and Trump’s other leading supporters in state government already are chomping at the bit to assist the president-elect – and share some of the dubious limelight – in carrying out Trump’s long-promised plans for “mass deportations” of immigrants.

In the process, they aren’t above spreading Trump’s often-repeated, hate-tinged lie that many, if not most, immigrants are dangerous criminals whose forced departure will make America safer again.

A few days before Thanksgiving, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham was down in Starr County on the southern border, where she already had offered the incoming administration use of about 1,400 acres of newly acquired state property to use as a site for migrant detention centers.

In a letter to Trump, subsequently reported by the news media, Buckingham said her agency was “fully prepared” to enter into an agreement with the federal government for the property to be used for the “processing, detention and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.”

Baloney.

Buckingham cited the death of a 12-year-old girl from Houston, who police say was killed by two men who were in the country illegally. A murder is a tragedy regardless of who commits it. But murders – as well as other crimes — in the United States are much more likely to be committed by a U.S. citizen, not by an undocumented immigrant, the National Institute of Justice concluded in a study published in September.

The study, based partly on arrest records in Texas, found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.

Looking at Texas alone, the Cato Institute reported that undocumented immigrants make up about 7.1 percent of the state’s population but accounted for only 5 percent of all homicide convictions in 2022.

Trump may give priority, at least at first, to deporting convicted criminals. But if, as he has promised, the forced removal continues, most of the deportees will not be violent criminals but people guilty only of seeking a better life in the United States than they or their parents had in the countries from which they came.

They will include construction workers and other laborers who have been helping to fuel our economy – often taking jobs most U.S. citizens won’t touch — after escaping poverty, strife and/or danger in their home countries. They also will include students in our public schools whose families came to the United States – often on difficult, dangerous journeys — to build a better future for their children.

And if Trump succeeds in ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as he has threatened, the deportees will include thousands of schoolteachers, health care workers and other professionals, as well as successful businesspeople, most of whom have made significant contributions to the only country they have ever called home.

In other words, they will be people like the rest of us, trying to take care of their children and other loved ones, plan their futures and peacefully live their everyday lives – until they became Donald Trump’s targets.

Clay Robison