Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

sounds a bit off >>> Texas GOP Proposes Bill To Allow Sec Of State To Overturn Election Results In State’s Largest Blue County https://t.co/clyxEY9TqM via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 30, 2023

The home schooling comment brought me up short. A part of the far right has moved beyond hostility for public schools, to hostility to the whole idea of schools, even religious or private. Twenty years ago now, I had a legal colleague that was deeply conservative. He and his wife had moved their two daughters out of public school into a very conservative evangelical run school. After a few years they weren't satisfied with even that and decided to homeschool their girls so as to keep them away from influences with which they disapproved. He and his wife had attended public schools, he was Ivy League educated and had a law degree, yesterday they rejected any type of formal schooling. Looking back they were the leading edge of today's conservative trend.

Growing up as a kid of the 70's, my middle school science and math teacher had a pile Mother Earth News magazines we could read if we were done with our work. Mixed in with the fun articles on how to raise milk goats and turn an old lawn mower and car alternator into an arc welder (yes this was a real article I wanted to build but my dad was rightly concerned about a 6th grader and enough electrical energy to melt metal). Mixed in were articles of hippies and back to earthers that had pulled their kids from schools so they wouldn't be indoctrinated and could run through the trees rather than sit at a desk. It was the beginning of the home schooling movement. I've mentioned before, but our commissioner of education Frank Edelblut in New Hampshire home schooled his 7 children. He also actively working to gut the public schools in the state and funnel what little education money there is to private (particularly religious) and home schoolers. 

This congressman, our commissioner of education and my former colleague are very different from those back to the land hippies of the Mother Earth news. Whereas the hippies wanted no structure, these latter day home school advocates want absolute control over their children. They all seem to also share a certain nihilism about society and institutions, a rejection of community and any collective action. Looking at that utterly depressing Christmas scene, it's barricading yourself away from the world with literal guns to greet anyone unfortunate enough to show up at the door. For the commission and the congressman, there nihilism isn't just personal, but extends to pulling down the world about them. Be that defunding schools and loading them with onerous requirements, or refusing to make them safer by even the most minimal of gun control (I just finished an article today that seriously questioned if limitations on high capacity magazines could withstand SCOTUS review). 

The current fight is about the existence of public schools, the deeper fight will be about whether we have schools at all. My own faith calls for me to go out into the world, to be in communion and community with all, to hold myself accountable and responsible for others, particularly those with the least. At the same time we have a whole culture that is moving in exactly the opposite direction. This culture controls our state government (a minority of votes but a majority of power through extreme gerrymandering). People that previously weren't concerned with the school budget, or votes for it because it helped local children, are being told the schools are riddled with CRT, teaching children to be trans, teaching socialism and more. They now are energized to tear down the schools. Yesterday our school budget failed, as did the bond issue for a new elementary school to replace the one that regularly floods in the rain and had kids in trailer classrooms in the parking lot. Somehow the two conservative school board candidates that wanted to cut the school budget even more lost to two more reasonable candidates. I am thankful for small miracles, but also yesterday the school emailed everyone they are looking for two community members to be on a committee that will review high school books objected to by parents. 

It's hard to feel hopeful under the current circumstances. 

The same thing is happening in Texas.  The Lege is considering (who knows what will be decided?) giving every parent who wants it $8000 to pull your child from public school and put them in private school.  Mostly this will help parents who already have kids in private school, i.e., the ones with money.  $8000 a year won't pay for much private school, and certainly won't buy you a slot in a private school, so it's a boondoggle and aid to the rich (funneling more money upwards).  If it passes.

Texas currently takes local school tax dollars, which are supposed to stay local, to Austin and applies it to the general fund.  Which should violate the state constitution, which prohibits a statewide property tax.  But the Texas Supremes ruled a few years back that was not a statewide property tax, so carry on (they started this 40 years ago with a ruling that the school funding system violated the State constitution.  So Austin took the money and "redistributed it," realized no one was looking, and started keeping some of it.  The State Supremes didn't want to get in the middle of that fight, so they punted.)  The state pays districts based on attendance.  Remove more kids from the classroom to public schools, lower the state funding.  Most urban districts get less back from Austin than they put in, already.  So let's lower it some more.  (I have my doubts this "voucher" will pass, or last very long.  Rural districts see themselves getting screwed, and they have the Texas GOP by the short hairs.  That and they did this about 20 years ago, and it was such a disaster I think there was a special session just to end it.  But we'll see....)  There's also talk of cutting state payments to schools by $1000 per student.

The local school district here is in serious trouble of going broke.  Literally.  A state agency running out of money.  And the school board is so worried about CRT or what the people who put them on the Board care about (whatever the latest shibboleth is), they won't pay attention to the looming financial crisis.  I guess they can't believe a government entity can run out of money.  But in essence, it soon will, maybe by next fall (when the laws passed in this session usually start taking effect).

If this district is in trouble, so are many, many others.  Mostly in urban, "blue" areas of the state.  (Yeah, the Lege particularly wants to fuck with Houston, and not just by taking over the largest school district in the state. That's why I put that tweet up there.)  It will be interesting if the state has such a large surplus it cuts property tax rates (the taxes collected by cities, counties, and school districts) as a reward to taxpayers, and ends up running several school districts into, well, propbably not bankruptcy; but complete financial inability to operate.  That'll be popular.  I'm not sure they aren't dumb enough to do it, too.

I do think the intent is to destroy the public school system.  I just don't entirely think they'll get away with it.

There's a current controversy at the local school district.  The district is being overwhelmed with demands for book reviews from one parent or another (or probably often not parents, just residents of the district).  This prompted a backlash of people challenging perfectly anodyne books in a (misguided) attempt to show how foolish the (let's call it) first group was being.  Caught in the middle are layers of administrative staff and the Board.

There are two levels of review (initial and appeal) before there can be an appeal to the Board.  One of these recently went on for months because the Board and the complainant couldn't agree on a schedule for the final hearing (it can be like herding cats).  So the Board President proposed a Solomonic solution, and cut the baby in half.  Well, to hear the local news tell it, that's what he did.

The Board decided (4-3) to suspend (for now) the regular review process and set up a single review:  with the Board.  Ordinarily I'd be opposed to this (FWIW to the Board) because it's a 4-3 conservative crazy board.  But reports are they, too, are sick of books and book controversies.  This new process will establish one review, one day for review, you show up to make your case (pick your time, but be there), and it's an up or down vote.  The only result will be the book is "reserved" so it can't be plucked off the shelf by eager fingers (which, in my long experience in school libraries, never enter such libraries).  At worst entire school libraries will end up “reserved."  But books will not be "banned". (That was the problem with local news coverage.  One TV station came to the Board meeting for that vote, reported on it, and never talked to anyone in the district about the backstory.  They just reported the controversy, speaking to a few people in the audience, and presenting it as a review to "ban" books.  As shoddy a practice of "journalism" as you can imagine.)

Of course, the way state school finances are going, the libraries may be shut down anyway, the librarians laid off.  It's that bad on the horizon.

The ray of hope is that parents and residents are sick of this fighting, and even the school board is getting tired (if not more enlightened.  Too few of them seem to appreciate the real problems of the district are financial, and that such is their fiduciary duty to be concerned with.  They aren't functioning, IOW, as a responsible school board.).  A true crisis might galvanize both reform and support for the public school system, despite the best efforts of the GOP.

But even if it does, the cost will be very, very high.

On the statewide level, Dan Patrick (Lite Guv, ruler of the Texas Senate) wants to eliminate tenure at UT.  Not just Austin, but the statewide system.  Rick Perry tried to mess with education at UT (requiring the hiring of more adjuncts; the academic equivalent of peonage).  UT Alumni made sure that didn't happen.  I suspect the same people will squash Patrick like the cockroach he is (he's unkillable politically, but he is often thwarted.  Like a cockroach.).  But there is a concerted and undeniable interest in destroying public education; for reasons I can't quite make sense of.  The anti-education GOP can do a lot of damage, but they can never reach their goal.  What I don't understand is why they are trying to.

I suspect it has to do with Brown v. Board, and the inability to ensure a white public school system that is separate and unequal.  Old times there are not forgotten, after all.  The two high schools in my hometown were both named for racists:  Robert E Lee and John Tyler (Tyler was the President who pushed to get Texas into the Union, so there would be another slave state on the roster).  They've both been renamed because Lee was more notoriously racist than Tyler.  John Tyler is now just "Tyler High School."  Lee is now "Tyler Legacy."  The new building even looks rather like a Greek Revival Southern Plantation house.

Old times there are still not forgotten.  I remember the "legacy" of the race riot at Lee the year after integration took effect.  It wasn't really a "riot," but we took it as one at the time.  I remember the racism aimed at black students by white students before and after that. "Legacy" is a helluva choice for a name.

At least it's still a public school system.  How much longer we'll have that is anybody's guess.  The state Constitution requires the Legislature establish a public school system.  The state Supreme Court will undoubtedly not require that school system to be adequately funded.  Not anymore, they won't.