Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

Texas school board member faces calls to resign after his comments linking failing schools to Black teachershttps://t.co/ePHKVm0vaG

— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 12, 2022

Cy-Fair Independent School District board member Scott Henry this week is facing calls to resign after he linked schools' dropout rates with the number of Black teachers they hire.

During a meeting on Monday, Henry criticized a report that faulted the district for not doing enough to hire a more diverse faculty, and the report said that lack of diversity was harmful to students' learning experiences.

"Cy-Fair has what? 13% black teachers?" Henry said, according to local news station KHOU. "Houston ISD is 36%. Their dropout rate is 4%. I don’t want to be 4%. I don’t want to be HISD. I want to be a shining example. I want to be the district standard."

Henry's comments drew a swift rebuke from many other Texas officials, including Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who called for his resignation.

As a product of Cy-Fair ISD, I’m appalled by Board Member Scott Henry’s insinuation that more Black teachers lead to more dropouts.

Divisiveness and racism are what’s hurting our students. Not diversity.

Resign.pic.twitter.com/Rmv514MA0A

— Lina Hidalgo (@LinaHidalgoTX) January 12, 2022

For you non-Texans and furriners (but I repeat myself), Lina Hidalgo is the "county executive" of Harris County, which includes both Houston (HISD) and Cy-Fair school districts (not a "law judge"). HISD is the biggest school district in the state, one of the largest in the country. It is geographically and ethnically diverse, and came close to being taken over by the Texas Education Agency because the school board and school administration were at such odds with each other. Not a shining example of a model school district, IOW; but then, who is? It's the favorite whipping boy for smaller, much less diverse (i.e., more white) school districts in the area. So the criticism leveled here is not only explicitly racist, it's implicitly racist, too.  There are far more non-whites in HISD than in many of the smaller school districts in the county; as a result, many of the school board members are black, too.

Which was noticed by many white people when HISD board meeting clips were played on the local news when the district was in trouble a few years ago.

The district I live in is a minority majority district in the classroom; but the Board is lilly-white.  A Trumpian/Bannonite crazy got on the board recently (most of the school board elections pass almost unnoticed) because, in part, he ran against a woman with a "Hispanic" surname.  She, in turn, brought a "friendly" lawsuit against the district to eliminate the completely at-large nature of the school board.  It's a sensible move; sooner or later somebody more adversarial is going to come along and force a change few in the district will welcome.  But the board is volunteer, and a noisy opposition has arisen behind the motto "Don't HISD my SBISD".  My district is Spring Branch ISD (SBISD).  HISD, of course, being massive, is divided into districts for board members.  Which is seen as leading to the acrimony in HISD.  The suit is stalled, the opposition is determined to defeat it, and a worse outcome than we might have had is guaranteed.  Ignorance, again, is not strength.  It's just ignorance.

The change won't be a solution to all the district's poblems.  Board members from SBISD come from the south, "rich" side of the freeway that divides the district geographically.  To be fair, most of the people on the north side of the freeway work for a living, and don't have the time being on a school board takes, especially when it's without pay.  So imposing board districts on it won't necessarily lead to more diversity on the school board.  But it couldn't hurt.

Don't know this guy in Cy-Fair, but his defense is that he was defending his district:

I was defending our school district against attacks from an out-of-state political organization that claimed our schools were failing our students because we did not one pre-determined diversity metric," wrote Henry. "This political organization claimed that one metric - the percent of black teachers in our schools - determined the quality of education our students receive. I was simply refuting that by pointing out the fact there is no one metric that determines education quality - there are a number of important metrics that should also be taken into account."

So he’s against “one metric,” but rests his argument on one metric. And he proves the unnamed critic’s point: 13% v. 34% represents a serious deficiency, not a comfortable sufficiency. He seems to think his district has enough, and simply hiring more for diversity would lower the standards. That’s his argument, anyway. He complains that his “words are getting twisted” for political purposes. But his words are plain enough; both the ones he spoke, and the ones he thought about and wrote down.

What’s really happening is the continuation of the argument over “affirmative action.” It’s an argument that’s been going on since the Civil Rights Act. That argument is raised in replies to Judge Hidalgo’s tweet, and in the approvals of the defense quoted from Facebook. We are still fighting out on that line, 60 years later, 160 years later, 400 years later. A nation, a culture, a society begun in such injustice, inequality, and inequity, cannot easily shed its practices.

Such a ponderous weight for so seemingly thin a reed, isn’t it? Or is it that even in small things large things are seen? And revelations abound, both of good and bad.