Remembering the Past, Shaping the Future
An Educator and Mother’s Reflection on the Fight for Public Education
A month ago, I sent out a wrote about Texans’ victory against efforts to privatize and undermine public schools in Texas. It was an incredible win against a relentless campaign funded by billionaires and other outside forces and a Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, and U.S. Senator, who seem to have no agenda other than to destroy public schools, embrace guns, threaten women’s reproductive health care, menace LGBTQ kids, and attack immigrants.
The vote in the Texas House of Representatives against school vouchers was worthy of the Dillon Panthers' march to the state championship in a Texas favorite, Friday Night Lights. In fact, it was community support for their public schools, their teachers, their coaches, and yes, their sports teams in towns and neighborhoods all across Texas that turned the tide against school privatizers.
Privatizers, despite their repeated losses over the years, are not going away anytime soon. These forces of division, chaos, and district have been at this for years and years. They are well-funded and have chosen children, public schools, teachers, women, and democracy itself as their opponents.
Having grown up in Texas, everybody I know values children and families. But when it comes to its political leaders, Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, kids are nothing more than an afterthought. Even when the issue is about children, as in the case of public education, the policy debates have little to do with kids. The forces of discord, disunion, division, and Dominionism have stoked up culture wars and hate to pursue an agenda that is unworthy of the State’s motto, which is Friendship.
Furthermore, despite Texas’ flagship university, the University of Texas at Austin (which I am proud to have attended), proclaiming “what starts here changes the world,” the Lone Star State’s political leaders seem shockingly unconcerned about how its policies fail children and threaten Texas’ short- and long-future.
The result, due in large part to having vastly underfunded education, child care, child nutrition, child welfare, and health care systems, Texas ranks a dismal 44th in measures of child well-being.
Source: Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2023 KIDS COUNT Data Book
In response, Abbott, Patrick, Paxton, and Cruz do nothing (i.e., neglect). Actually, even worse, they go out of their way to inflict abuse. For example, they have collectively failed to address horrible problems with its child welfare and juvenile justice systems, have chosen to disenroll hundreds of thousands of children from Medicaid despite already leading the nation in uninsured children, provided no new funding to public schools and teacher salaries despite having record budget surpluses, do nothing to address child poverty or child hunger, and promote the proliferation of firearms when it is the leading cause of death of children.
Quite simply, they just do not care or, even worse, delight in imposing harm.
Family favorite cartoonist Ben Sargent has repeatedly highlighted these failures by both current and past political leaders in Texas.
Source: Ben Sargent Cartoons from the Texas Observer
Fortunately, the people of Texas are concerned about their children and their public schools. Now and then, it translates into a public policy win or two, such as the expansion of postpartum care in Medicaid and the defeat of school vouchers this past session of the Texas Legislature.
My mother, Bonnie Lesley, taught me many things and one of them was that progress requires an understanding of history and a commitment to progress. She was an incredible educator and advocate for both women and children throughout her entire life. Even after retiring, she co-founded a non-profit organization, Texas Kids Can’t Wait, which was dedicated to improving both Texas public education and the lives of children.
From her, I learned about the racist original of school vouchers, which were proposed in the 1950s in the hope of maintaining school segregation after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. The initial goal of school vouchers was to fund “segregation academies” and that remains an underlying motivation to this day. Although these efforts die down periodically, they often reemerge in another form (see the John Birch Society, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, White Christian nationalism, and Dominionism) with book banning, censorship, the whitewashing of history, science, and literature, and curriculum control a consistent theme.
Astoundingly, this is often done in the name of “freedom” and “liberty.”
However, as my mother’s favorite political leader, Texas Governor Ann Richards, used to say:
You can put lipstick on a hog and call in Monique, but it’s still a pig.
I have been looking back over my Mom’s career and recall that she often talked and wrote about the forces seeking to tear down our nation’s public schools. I remembered one of her posts had been published by Diane Ravitch and went back into her blog archives to find it.
Picture of my Mom, Bonnie Lesley, with Diane Ravitch
My Mom’s post was from 2013, but it could easily be written today, as it highlights the political agenda and tactics that school privatizers have employed and continue to employ in pursuit of the destruction of public education.
Here is that post…
I worry a lot whether public schools will continue to exist in some states. Our organization, Texas Kids Can't Wait, has felt overwhelmed at times this legislative session about the sheer number of privatization bills, all either sponsored by Sen. Dan Patrick or by someone close to him. We have been battling a big charter (what is in reality the gateway drug to privatization) expansion bill, a parent-trigger bill, opportunity scholarships, taxpayer savings grants, achievement district, “FamiliesFirstSchools”, home-rule districts, vouchers for kids with disabilities, online course expansion, numerous bills to close public schools and turn them over to private charter companies, and on and on. A friend said it is as if they threw a whole bowl full of spaghetti at the wall, believing something would stick.
Every one of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bills we have seen introduced in other states has been introduced in Texas this year.
The privatizers have also held hostage the very popular bills such as HB 5 to reduce testing significantly unless their privatization bills advanced, and advance they have. So lots of folks are playing poker with kids’s lives and futures.
What keeps many of us fighting 20 hours a day and digging into our own pockets to fund the work is our understanding that these bills are not the end game. We’ve read the web sites, beginning with Milton Freidman’s epistle on the Cato Institute’s website, that lay out the insidious plan we are seeing played out. We have also read Naomi Klein’s brilliant book, Shock Doctrine.
First, impose ridiculous standards and assessments on every school.
Second, create cut points on the assessments to guarantee high rates of failure. (I was in the room when it was done in the State of Delaware, protesting all the way, but losing).
Third, implement draconian accountability systems designed to close as many schools as possible. Then W (George W. Bush) took the plan national with No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
Fourth, use the accountability system to undermine the credibility and trust that almost everyone gave to public schools. increase the difficulty of reaching goals annually.
Fifth, de-professionalize educators with alternative certification, merit pay, evaluations tied to test scores, scripted curriculum, attacks on professional organizations, phony research that tries to make the case that credentials and experience don’t matter, etc.
Sixth, start privatization with public funded charters with a promise that they will be laboratories of innovation. Many of us fell for that falsehood. Apply pressure each legislative session to implement more and more of them. Then Arne Duncan did so on steroids.
Seventh, use Madison Avenue messaging to name bills to further trick people into acceptance, if not support, of every conceivable voucher scheme. The big push now as states implement Freidman austerity budgets to create a crisis is to portray vouchers as a cheaper way to “save” schools. The bills that would force local boards to sell off publicly owned facilities for $1 each is also part of the overall scheme not only to destroy our schools, but also to make it fiscally impossible for us to recover them if we ever again elect a sane government. Too, districts had to make cuts in their budgets in precisely the areas that research says matter most: quality teachers, preschool, small classes, interventions for struggling students, and rigorous expectations and curriculum. (See the report, Money STILL Matters, on the Texas Equity Center website at http://www.equitycenter.org).
Eighth, totally destroy public education with so-called universal vouchers. They have literally already published the handbook. You can find it numerous places on the web.
Ninth, start eliminating the vouchers and charters, little by little.
And, tenth, totally eliminate the costs of education from local, state, and national budgets, thereby providing another huge transfer of wealth through huge tax cuts to the already-billionaire class.
And then only the wealthy will have schools for their kids.
Aw, you may say. They can’t do that! My response is that yes, they most certainly will unless you and I stop it!
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