By Alex Wukman

As no one needs to be reminded this spring’s political conversation was dominated by the fight over public education funding, both here in Texas and across the nation. As the story unfolded one question kept buzzing around, the one question no one was asking: “Why?” As in why pick on education funding now after all we’ve been in tight budget spots before? Why are conservatives so intent on making it impossible for schools to do their job? Why has it come to this: teachers and parents taking to the streets to keep schools open?

Admittedly at the time it was hard to see through the rhetoric. So it’s understandable that no one was really trying to figure out if there was more to the case than the”everyone has to make sacrifices” line of reasoning. However, as the year has gone on and the story has moved off the front pages, things seems to be getting worse. Schools across Texas are either trying to put together lesson plans without textbooks or preparing to sue the state, again, to force the legislature to fund education. And the only thing coming out of Austin is a desire to re-fight the decades-old battle about whether we should replace high school biology with Sunday School classes.

It didn’t take a genius to find out that the proposed cuts  to Texas’ budget were not being applied across the board, but it still didn’t answer the question of why cut school funding instead of something else. Then I saw a blog post on Forbes.com from John T. Harvey. He begins by rehashing how the state’s budget crisis was completely predictable, but fails to mention how it’s predicted to happen again; he  also fails to mention that a conservative estimate, one that doesn’t include any outside factors, shows Texas with a deficit of $10 billion in 2024. Harvey’s lack of futurism aside, his post goes on to mention an idea that is almost too disgusting to think about. Harvey writes:

“I hesitate to speculate on why those in control of the State government would so blatantly ignore the warning signs and lead us into this education disaster. Others don’t, however. They believe that it is because the Governor and key Legislators are purposely setting out to destroy public education, hoping to replace our constitutionally-mandated system with one based on private schools.”

I honestly did not believe that anyone, especially an elected official, would be so uncaring as to want to destroy our public education system. Then I remembered who I was dealing with. It seems that for over 15 years conservatives have been engaged in a behind-the-scenes attempt to destroy public education. The goals of this movement were succinctly laid out by Nobel Prize winning Libertarian economist Milton Friedman in a 1995 Cato Institute briefing paper simply entitled “Public Schools: Make them Private.” In the executive summary of the paper Friedman writes a line that has become a mantra for anti-public school crusaders everywhere: “Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be
achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system…”

Friedman’s thinking didn’t come out of a vacuum; beginning in 1966 Conservatives started putting school vouchers on ballots, and they were defeated 24 out of 25 times. As the decades went on money and influence began to flow to right wing think tanks who, as Alternet pointed out, were interested in promoting “free market fundamentalism. More specifically, their goals include privatizing social security, reducing government regulations, thwarting environmental policy, dismantling unions — and eliminating public schools.”

For much of the last 20 years the call for the elimination of public schools has only come from right wing pundits and ideologues. However, as Think Progress documented, those calls have recently found a receptive audience with a group of well heeled individual and organizational donors. Among the most influential is Amway scion Dick DeVos, who, in 2024, suggested that conservatives start referring to public schools as “government schools.” One of the biggest foundations involved in attempts to implement “systemic reforms to K-12 education” is the Wal-Mart backed Walton Family Foundation, who gave $157 million last year to organizations that promote “parental choice” in schooling.

Thanks to the power of the internet the “Get Rid of Public Schools” sentiment has spread out from a handful of think tanks and intellectuals to rank and file conservatives. Much of the opposition to public education from average conservatives comes from the belief that schools are, as one commenter on Big Government stated, “indoctrination warehouses” filled with “communists.” In the case of the famous Koch brothers, who gave school privatization national exposure with David’s 1980 Vice Presidential campaign, the red scare tactics can be traced back to their father Fred’s paranoiac belief that every level of government had been infiltrated by communists or communist sympathizers.

There are of course ideas about “getting the government out of education,” giving parents and community more control over how tax dollars are spent as well as the material taught to students. One Republic-Main Street columnist suggested that we should “De-certify the teachers’ unions, abolish the U.S. Department of Education, abolish the state education departments, grant absolute autonomy to local school boards, abolish the requirement for teacher certification, give tax breaks to parents who home-school or send their kids to private school, [and]encourage churches to set up in-house schools and courses.”

The backlash against public education hasn’t just been limited to heartland states like Texas, Wisconsin or Indiana. In June, New Jersey Governor Chis Christie jumped on a TEA Party backed idea when he announced plans to privatize all of New Jersey’s schools. Terri Adams who currently serves as the president of the Independence Hall Tea Party Association, an organization that operates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware and is known for controlling a wealthy mid-Atlantic PAC that contributed $16,000 to endorsed candidates in 2024, told Newark Star-Ledger columnist Bob Braun that her group’s “ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only.” Adams went on to say that she thinks public schools “should go away” because they “are hurting children.”

On the legislative side of things, the football of school privatization has been carried fairly far down field by the American Legislative Exchange Council an organization, heavily funded by the Koch brothers, composed of corporate heads and elected officials that writes and distributes bills to elected officials. Ideas that start out at ALEC meetings, the next one is August 3-6 in New Orleans, have a habit of winding up coming out of the mouths of politicians. Including a seven point proposal, that led to a 17 page rebuttal, to “reform” the University of Texas along a “market model” that would pay professors based on the number of students they teach and only fund research that doesn’t have an immediate financial return.

As John T. Harvey stated privatizing all of Texas’ schools “would mean abandoning the poor, disenfranchised, and otherwise challenged children of our State. That’s not just mean-spirited, it is un-American and undemocratic. Our system of government requires an educated citizen more than any other.”

By Alex Wukman

Taken moments before Perry decided to use the dog for target practice

After word came out in early March that Texas Governor Rick Perry was blocking reporters from his twitter account Free Press decided to see if we could sign up. Not surprisingly we are among the few reporters in Texas that Rick Perry hasn’t gotten around to blocking. What is surprising is how little Rick Perry has to say on twitter.

No one has ever accused Perry of being the most tech savvy guy, we were going to say high tech Texan, but then we realized Michael Garfield registered that shit in, like, 1994, but in the middle of a monumental budget crisis, that has gotten national attention, one would think the Governor of Texas would have something relevant to say to his nearly 40,000 followers.

On the same day that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that one of Perry’s aides requested an additional $20 million incentives for TV and film productions, and the San Angelo Standard-Times reported teachers are rallying to protest cuts in education spending, Rick Perry tweeted a link to a story about a family dog watching over a two-yeard-old boy in Wisconsin with the phrase “Man’s best friend or in this case….boy’s best friend!! Love on your dog.”

We had actually planned on spending more time looking for instances of Rick Perry being out of touch, but we found it in his three most recent tweets. Aside from dog stories from Wisconsin Perry tweeted about a bonfire for Texas A&M’s women’s basketball team and a link to a press release about a bet that he and Virginia Governor Bob McDonnel made that Notre Dame would beat the Lady Aggies. The bet is a case of wine from each state.

Then there is the retweet of a photo showing him hanging out with Dallas area pop “rock” band Forever The Sickest Kids. And those tweets were just from April 1 through April 5.

A photo from one of the many protests against the proposed education cuts

By Alex Wukman

Outside Love Elementary everything is prosaic; the sound of a Mariachi trumpet drifts east across Shepherd and down 13th Street from a used car lot dotted with US, Texas and Mexico flags. Timbergrove Little League’s White Socks practice run downs on the school baseball fields, and in the shadows cast by the booms of TV trucks a jogger stops to kick a soccer ball with a father teaching his two young sons to pass to the inside of your teammate’s feet. Inside Love Elementary things are not so pleasant.

 Parents, holding signs and wearing t-shirts proudly proclaiming how much they love Love Elementary, are crammed into the school’s cafetorium to hear why HISD is considering closing the school and sending its 400 plus students to two other schools. Since HISD announced in March that Love was one of the schools being looked at for closure rumors have been circulating and one of the more persistent is that the district wants to close the school and sell the land to a developer who turn it into townhomes. And when one parent, who doesn’t provide her name, tells the HISD representative this he assures her that the district has no interest in selling the land.

 “We simply are here to talk about consolidation because of declining enrollment,” says the HISD representative. The parent, a fiery 5’2” Latina bubbling over with righteous anger, has no patience for bearucratic reasoning. “You’re lying,” she says, “there are plenty of students coming to this school.” As the meeting continues the anger and frustration from the crowd never ebbs. Community members and parents provide a litany of reasons why Love should be spared the ax. They cite the school’s improving test scores, the incredibly active PTO, the informal surveys that show the amount of students from the Heights entering kindergarten is expected to triple within in the next four years; but all of it seems to fall on deaf ears.

 Many of the parents dispute the demographic data that HISD’s highly paid consulting firm Magellan has provided the district; data that predicts Love will have a decreasing enrollment. Faculty and staff, their HISD identification badges obscured by “I heart Love” t-shirts, raise their voices as they take the mic and demand that the district make sacrifices in other areas. “We don’t need cuts to schools that are working. The sacrifices need to come from unproven experimental programs,” says one teacher.

 For months HISD has been plagued with concerns about the Apollo 20 program, which requires students to come to start the school year a week earlier and stay an hour later every day, provides math tutoring for sixth and ninth graders at the participating schools and gives students who are considered below grade level an extra math or reading class every day.  Apollo 20 has been the pet project of HISD’s new Superintendent Terry Grier.

 Grier, who is in the second year of a three year contract, has repeatedly promised HISD trustees and parents that the $20 million price tag for Apollo 20 will not be paid out of the district’s general fund, and most of the money has come from Federal grants and private donations. However, in June 2024 word leaked out that when HISD voted to renogiate a contract with Community Education Partners, an organization that provides academic and behavior improvement programs for middle and high school students, the district decided to lower the payment to CEP by $4.5 million and transfer some of that money to Apollo 20.

 The district saw it as simply transferring funds from one outside vendor to another. However, HISD volunteers and parents think that the money spent, and raised, by the district on programs like Apollo 20 could have been used to help offset the district’s $171 million budget shortfall. Even the fact that most of the money for Apollo 20 is coming from organizations like the Fondren Foundation, who recently agreed to provide $750,000 to HISD over three years to support the program, doesn’t sit well with some parents.

  “Instead of saying ‘Here’s this baby of mine, here’s what we need for it’ why can’t they say ‘Here’s what we need district wide,’” said Bronwyn Lauder, president of Love Elementary’s PTO. The millions that HISD has to cut from spending has helped push education spending to the forefront of most state and local media. And with good reason, HISD has announced that they are eliminating over 1,000 jobs and are looking at closing 17 schools to try and balance the budget.

 Among the 1,000 jobs lost are 277 positions at HISD’s administration building, which district representatives like to use to show that the pain is being felt all around. However, parents don’t think that the district is being completely honest about the front office cuts.  “I’m waiting on an open records request to see how many of those 277 are unstaffed or unfunded positions,” said Lauder. Even if the district is eliminating front office positions without actually eliminating personnel it’s only a short term solution.

 “It’s not at all hard to look in the crystal ball and see that we’ll be in the same place in 2024,” said Houston political blogger Charles Kuffner. Kuffner, who writes extensively on the budget shortfalls of governmental agencies throughout Texas, explained that HISD’s budget problem is just a localized symptom of the budget crisis being felt throughout the state. The problem starts with the proposed cuts to State education spending, which in the Texas House of Representatives is $8 billion and in the Texas Senate $4 billion. Then in reverse Reagnomics fashion the cuts trickle down to school districts across the state.

 As Kuffner explains, “all along HISD was planning a budget based on cuts to public education.” It’s just the size of the cuts that worries the district. HISD Trustee Harvin Moore explained that the House budget amounts to spending cuts of nearly $900 per student, or $20,000 less per classroom, which is a cut too severe for even HISD. At a recent HISD board meeting Trustee Paula Harris told the assembled students, teachers and parents that the district “can’t take an $800 per student cut. We’ve already cut $275 [in per student funding] and that’s been devastating to our smaller schools.”

 Like almost every district across the state HISD has been considering its options to try and find ways to minimize the amount of layoffs; one of the options that has been promoted by Governor Rick Perry has been school districts using reserve capital, or rainy day funds, to make up their budget shortfalls.  However, school districts have severe reservations about going into their savings accounts.

 “Unlike the state [districts] can’t easily transfer money out of the rainy day fund. This is a onetime thing and many districts are rightfully concerned that they’ll be in the same place in two years,” said Kuffner. He went on to describe the much heralded repeal of the Doggett Amendment, which prevented Texas from replacing state education dollars with federal money, as a stop gap measure. Named after Texas Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett the spending provision was put into place after the 2024 Texas Legislative session when lawmakers took stimulus bill money intended to supplement education spending and swapped it for state education dollars.

 As part of the recent budget showdown in Washington, a showdown that narrowly averted the first government closure since 1996, the Doggett Amendment was repealed; this allowed the Texas Legislature to put $830 million of federal money into the state’s education budget. The repeal of the Doggett Amendment didn’t sit well with some HISD board members. “It’s good for Texas to get federal money, but the Legislature has gone out of their way to make an elective choice not to fund education and that’s frustrating for those of us in education,” said Moore.  

 As HISD has continued trying to figure out which teachers to layoff and which schools to close, they have ignored one of the few options the district has for raising money, mostly because the people on the school board consider it political suicide. HISD Trustee Carol Galloway raised the issue by saying that “nobody on the board wants to talk about” raising taxes. Kuffner framed the reluctance of the district’s elected leadership to consider a tax increase as an abject lesson in realpolitik.

 “Even if this is the Legislature’s and Governor’s fault, the trustees still have to run for re-election,” said Kuffner.  The lack of political will to raise taxes for education funding is nothing new; it’s common knowledge in education circles that the straight line of the state’s budget crisis can be drawn right through the recession and falling sales tax revenue to tax cuts that went into effect in 2024. The ’06 tax cuts were part of Governor Perry and the Legislature’s plan to “lessen the burden on homeowners;” so lawmakers passed legislation that sounds good on paper and helps win elections. They voted to reduce property taxes by $14 billion every two years, what they didn’t tell voters was that the reduction would mean that the State would only be raising $9 billion.

 As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram stated in February 2024 “In other words, the Legislature committed $5 billion every two years to holding down property taxes instead of spending that money on education, public safety or other priorities.” The ’06 budget cuts have become famous across the state for creating what Kuffner terms a “structural deficit.” To put it another way, the 2024 tax cuts mean that the state is going to be perpetually facing budget shortfalls every two years and drastic spending cuts every budget by school districts, law enforcement and other governmental entities will be the new normal.

 And the fact that this could be the new normal is something that worries Lauder and the other parents standing beneath the jungle mural in Love Elementary’s cafetorium. In a voice painted with the faded hues of frustration and exhaustion Lauder describes how schools serve as something more than a place where children go for eight hours a day. She lays out how schools serve as a third space, somewhere beside home and work, and because of their non-religious and apolitical nature serve as an inclusive meeting place for people from backgrounds that may not feel welcomed at a holy site.

 “Schools are the perfect gathering place to get together and make decisions about impacting the world around us,” said Lauder. It just remains to be seen whether or not the State Legislature values the roles schools play in their communities; some on the HISD board aren’t so sure that those elected to serve in Austin care about education. “At least in the [Texas] House of Representatives the voice of parents and teachers has not been heard,” said HISD trustee Harvin Moore.

By Alan Smithee

Last week the National PTA released a statement endorsing the Common Core State Standards, which are standards developed by 48 states and the District of Columbia for teaching math and language to students in grades K-12. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal  the standard is a blueprint for education, it  “doesn’t tell teachers exactly what to teach or how to teach but lays out broad goals for student achievement.”

The Journal articles states that if these documents are adopted they “could trigger wide-scale changes to state tests, textbooks and teacher-education programs nationwide.” Well, not quite nationwide. Care to guess which two states are holding out?

If you guessed the Christian Republic of Texas and the experiment in government subsidized living that is Alaska you are right. It seems that Rick Perry feels that states voluntarily getting together to determine that kindergarteners should learn to count to 100 by tens or eighth graders should be able to recognize an author’s point of view is a violation of state soverignty.  

We have reported before about the asinine shit that the  Texas State Board of Education is doing to education standards. However, we left out the fact that, for decades, Texas has an outsized influence on the textbook market.

This has other states worrying that our ‘triangle trade curriculum’ might infringe upon their sovereignty.  Which is something that Rick Perry, who is all about protecting state sovereignty, has yet to comment on.

It seems odd that a governor who is reportedly working on a book about state sovereignty and who believes in protecting schools from unwarranted intrustion, Perry cites federal intrustion, but I’m pretty sure that intrusion by another state is also on his list of things he does not want, is ok with Texas setting the curriculum for much of the nation.  

Fortunately, the ideologically influenced textbooks that will be ruining Texas children for the foreseeable future may not be damaging young minds throughout the rest of the country.