What would the ‘father of Texas education’ think?

“Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth,” predicted Ashbel Smith, soldier, physician and the Texas Republic’s charge d’affaires to England and France (as well as an avid collector of erotic art).

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, soldier, poet, painter and the second president of the Republic of Texas, expressed similar sentiments (when, that is, he wasn’t smiting Native Americans). “The cultivated mind,” he proclaimed, “is the guardian genius of democracy and, while guided and controlled by virtue, the noblest attribute of man. It is the only dictator that freemen acknowledge and the only security that freemen desire.” Setting aside three leagues of land in each county for schools, Lamar earned the sobriquet, “Father of Texas Education” while bequeathing his name to elementary schools, middle schools and high schools around the state, as well as a university.

Despite the carved-on buildings reverence we ascribe to the inspiring words of our forefathers, we descendants haven’t always acted as if we believed them.

Approaching our bicentennial, we can say that Texans have been wielding the rod of knowledge for years with decidedly mixed results. Despite the dedicated efforts of countless educators at every level — often in the face of middling respect, inadequate resources and paltry pay — Texas school rankings always have been and continue to be mediocre. EdWeek’s 2021 Quality Counts report ranked the Lone Star State 42nd among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, weighed down by an “F” in school funding, despite our many advantages (including “fountains of unstinted wealth”).

The unsettling decision by the Texas Education Agency to remove one of the largest school districts in the nation from local control, a move that feels suspiciously political despite the Democrat-sponsored law that triggered it, is at least partly a consequence of our traditionally penurious, fickle and short-sighted approach to the vital challenge of educating young Texans.

“It seems fundamentally unfair that Texas has underfunded its public schools decade after decade and then blamed and punished the schools that most needed help in bringing their mostly minority and low-income students up to speed,” Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, told the editorial board recently.

“Fourteen of the 15 school districts taken over by the TEA in recent years have been majority-minority,” Jillson reminded us. “Seems pretty clear that those are the schools that need most help.”

Those are the schools that always have needed the most help, whether they were one-room country schools open during the few months of the year when fields lay fallow or chronically underfunded urban schools segregated by law from their privileged white counterparts.

Texans have founded schools from the beginning, either locally funded or church-related, but a statewide public school system didn’t begin in earnest until after the Civil War. School planning and supervision remained localized and attendance sporadic at first; funding into the 20th century was spotty and inadequate. Schools serving Black and Hispanic students in post Reconstruction Texas were an afterthought, with hand-me-down books and equipment and poorly paid teachers and principals.

Jillson, author of the book “Lone Star Tarnished” (a new edition will be out next year), also pointed out that we have gone through spasms of reform through the years but have had difficulty sustaining the results.

In 1949, for example, lawmakers approved the so-called Gilmer-Aiken legislative package in an effort to raise school standards overall and eliminate inequalities among property-rich and property-poor school districts. Gilmer Aiken also raised teacher salaries and established the Texas Education Agency.

Statewide concern about declining test scores in the early 1980s prompted then-Gov. Mark White to appoint Dallas billionaire H. Ross Perot to head a select committee to investigate and implement school reform. In 1984, House Bill 72 strengthened teacher certification requirements and initiated competency testing. A “no pass, no play” requirement for extracurricular activities — think the high school quarterback in street clothes under Friday night lights because he flunked biology — cost White his job in 1986.

Our so-called “Robin Hood” plan, brainchild of former Republican state Sen. Bill Ratliff, began redistributing property tax wealth and narrowing funding inequities among districts in 1993. It’s been cussed and discussed ever since.

However the money gets distributed, the Texas problem through the years has been the reluctance of lawmakers to adequately fund our schools. “During good times, they talk about tax cuts. During bad times, they talk about budget cuts,” Jillson notes.

Now, in the midst of good times, the TEA has moved to take control of Houston ISD after the district failed to improve chronic low-performance at a high school seven years in a row and other worrying factors, including past dysfunction among school board trustees.

Given the heightened rhetoric from Republicans vilifying public schools and eroding local control these days, we can understand the suspicions of Houston leaders such as Mayor Sylvester Turner: “This is about Austin and the leadership in Austin wanting to run local government, and they want it their way.”

We also share the frustration of state Rep. Harold Dutton, a Houston Democrat who sponsored the takeover legislation: “I live in the neighborhood, and I have to look at all these students,” he said last week. “Particularly, when you look at the students who are coming into our criminal justice system, they’re coming from the ZIP codes with the failing schools, and so why shouldn’t we fix these schools?”

Dutton is well aware that HISD can boast some of the finest schools in the nation. He’s also painfully aware that HISD also includes schools burdened with the special challenges that accompany entrenched poverty (and with it, information poverty), multiple languages, health challenges, food insecurity, frequent dislocation, persistent crime, violence and gun proliferation. Meeting those immense challenges demands an all-encompassing, sustained full-court press. That means money. And more money, spent on things that actually work: innovative learning approaches; well-paid and trained teachers who are among the best and brightest; strong, experienced administrators and support staff; a wrap-around medley of services that involve the broader community.

TEA must employ best practices when it takes control of HISD. This board believes that our community has a vested interest in cooperating with the state intervention and helping ensure that struggling schools come out better off than they went in.

Smiting the rocks of hard challenges, wielding sledgehammers of hope and persistence, Houston could be a beacon. Is the TEA and its soon-to-be appointed board of managers up to that challenge, in partnership with us? We can only hope — and prepare for the day when Houstonians regain control of our schools, those institutions that, in the words of the late teacher and writer Mike Rose, “embody the reward and turmoil of education in a democracy, that celebrate the plural, messy human reality of it.”

TEA must employ best practices when it takes control of HISD.