To save schools, back candidates, not party
Our Texas public schools are in crisis, and because we’re headed into a general election suddenly our incumbents are making headline-grabbing promises for teacher raises and school funding. Voters, beware!
Many past sessions of the Texas Legislature have been filled with grandstanding and unproductive fighting, yet we’ve seen zero fixing. Texans have gotten bathroom bills, not classroom bills.
My husband and I have two children in public school in The Woodlands. This is personal for us. Across the state, public school advocates like us are saying: Enough.
Public schools need our help, so why don’t elected officials step up? To find the answer, just follow the money.
The Texas public education system is being systematically undermined by farright politicians who are bought and promoted by Empower Texans, a small but wealthy political action committee in west Texas.
Empower Texans supports limiting state spending on public education, reducing educators’ rights and benefits, and redirecting taxpayer dollars to fund private schools. The group is bad for Texas kids, and like the bathroom bill its members lauded, it is bad for business and our economy, too. Their policies have contributed significantly to the shortages and frustrations we see in our public schools and they will continue to do so.
Texas is one of the fastest growing states in the country, attracting 850,000 new students to our public-school system over the last decade. Yet in 2011 the state cut $5.4 billion from our public schools, and recently the Texas Education Agency announced it will cut another $3.4 billion over the next two years. The state contributes less than 36 percent of the Texas public education budget, forcing local taxpayers to fill the gap.
Additionally, high-stakes standardized tests have been utilized as the key indicator of student and teacher merit. This reliance on testing forces creativity and love of learning out of our schools, and frustrates underpaid teachers, parents and students alike. We are all fed up.
That’s why advocates like Troy Reynolds are stepping up. Reynolds founded Texans for Public Education, an advocacy group with 27,000 members.
“The #TxEd community has formed a strong coalition between rational Republicans, Democrats and independents to push back against the far-right’s plans to undermine our public schools,” Reynolds says.
The statewide group plans to vote as a bloc for candidates — Republicans and Democrats — who prioritize state funding for public schools. They routinely rate Empower Texans candidates as “Unfriendly.”
“Empower Texans will try to frame this as the ‘liberal media’ pushing a publicschool agenda, but in reality the media is reporting on anger brewing across the state. This mess is a barrier to retaining and attracting talented teachers,” Reynolds says.
Meanwhile, Empower Texans tries to argue that the biggest problems facing our schools are overspending by individual districts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just look at the cold, hard numbers.
The National Education Association ranked Texas 36th for per pupil spending in 2017-2018, one of the lowest in the country. The Economic Policy Institute reports that on average, Texas teachers are making $6,500 less per year than other college graduates — one of the largest wage gaps in the country. Overall, Texas’ public education ranks an unhealthy 37th in the United States.
It’s no wonder starved school districts issue new taxes or bonds to try to cover the funding gap left by our Legislature and the Texas Education Agency.
Property taxes can be maddening, but let’s be clear: Our public schools are not the bad guy. That hardworking teacher who just helped your child to a major breakthrough in his reading is not the bad guy.
The bad guys are in the Texas Capitol. Property taxes have gone up because our legislators, lieutenant governor and governor have slashed the budget, created problems that didn’t exist and blamed the schools.
Meanwhile, Empower Texans employs a brutal win-at-all-costs strategy to invest millions into candidates who lack knowledge on policy and issues, but have a unique talent at parroting talking points. If candidates deviate from the talking points, Empower Texans turns on them.
Legislators are starting to wake up to the problem.
“They want total control, and they want robots in Austin. … They don’t care about districts. They don’t care about anything local. It’s all about their agenda,” former state Rep. Jim Keffer, R-Eastland, told the Amarillo Globe-News in February.
Former Granbury ISD trustee, Chris Tackett even built a website, www.christackettnow.com, to show who influences state candidates and elections. Check it out and see for yourself just how much Empower Texans spends to influence your state legislators. The raw data comes directly from the Texas Ethics Commission. It’s no wonder the group wants to abolish the TEC and the transparency it provides voters.