Author: Sherry Sylvester

The Texas AFT has bullishly pledged that it will never surrender in the war against school choice in Texas. That’s no surprise; I have watched teachers’ unions fight school choice all over this country for more than 20 years, often successfully. Lost dreams and opportunities for millions of children are the collateral damage.

Early in my career I worked in the Northeast. In New Jersey, teachers’ unions blocked school choice proposals over the objections of inner-city parents including a statewide coalition of African-American leaders. It was only years later, when now-U.S. Senator Cory Booker became mayor of Newark, that school choice programs were established, pulling that state’s educational system from the brink of ruin.

The New Jersey teachers’ unions didn’t make demands for more funding in public schools, like they have in Texas, because they’d already won the money war. Even 20 years ago, they had some of the highest per-pupil spending and teachers’ salaries in the country. I wrote at the time that the state of New Jersey was spending about the same amount as parents who sent their kids to Harvard but the money didn’t help. In Newark, the graduation rate was 4%.

Texas teachers’ union representatives said during testimony over current school choice proposals this session that no increase in school funding could induce them to support parental rights.

When I first moved to Texas, I was a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, where I watched teachers’ unions and the newspaper demonize Texas Public Policy Foundation founder, Dr. Jim Leininger, for creating a privately funded program that would pay the tuition of any student who wanted to leave the notoriously low-performing Edgewood Independent School District. Dr. Leininger and others invested $50 million for the 10-year program. The school district is still bitter about it, even though results showed increased graduation rates for those inner-city kids who participated in the very popular program.

In addition to private school tuition, Leininger’s program would also have paid for out-of-district tuition for Edgewood students who wanted to attend another public school. Education bureaucrats wouldn’t let that happen. Applicants from the program were rejected.

Think about that scene. A poor child, probably a Hispanic child, from a bad school showed up at a top performing school in San Antonio with funding to pay out-of-district tuition. The child was turned away.

What kind of school official would do that? What teachers’ union or school board member would allow that to happen? How can some of those same people stand up with straight faces today and pretend that their opposition to school choice is based on their concern for children?

I watched the Texas House block school choice for at least four sessions. One 2015 image etched in my memory is a gaggle of Democrat state representatives—many of them African-American and Hispanic, huddled around the front mic of the House smugly attacking school choice, pretending they had the moral high ground.

Many of those elected representatives were private school graduates. Others sent their own children to private schools. However, by standing against school choice, they denied the children of their own constituents, often trapped in the worst schools in the state, any hope of going to a better school. The level of hypocrisy and elitism was staggering.

This is particularly damning when you consider the results of a study published in the Urban Review in 2013 that found that “high achieving black males who attend private high schools are dramatically more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree than similar students attending public schools.”

A majority of Texans support school choice in every poll including nearly 60% of Black Texans, even though most of them also vote Democrat, and killing school choice is part of the Texas Democrat Platform. Texas parents also know that Florida schools went from 33 in the nation to No. 1 by establishing a comprehensive school choice program.

Most parents are like Texas parents. I lived in New York City in the 1990s when public schools were not only dismal, they were dangerous. Nobody I knew, including the lowly underpaid secretaries and custodians in the building where I worked, sent their kids to a public school, because no responsible parent would do that. They worked as many extra jobs as they needed to in order to pay tuition and get their kids in a school where they would have a chance. There is still no real school choice in New York except charter schools and teachers’ unions work tirelessly to close those down.

Parents care about their kids, but there’s very little evidence that education bureaucrats do. Twenty years ago, I interviewed a couple members of the Newark School Board about why they believed the school district should provide them with a car—which it did. One member told me it was absolutely necessary because he had to get to lots of athletic events and with school district plates, he could park without getting a ticket. He didn’t see any relationship between his car and the 4% graduation rate.

I thought the car story was just a New Jersey thing, until I found out that in Texas today, the superintendent of Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, whose base annual salary is $521,000, also gets an additional $24,000 car allowance. No doubt he has a lot of athletic events to attend too—just like nearly every parent who lives in his district and pays his enormous salary with their property taxes.

Even if you believe that pouring more money into our public schools would make the schools better, and we have mountains of evidence that it won’t make any difference, it wouldn’t fix them in time to impact the lives of the kids who are in school today. If your child is in a school where he or she is not thriving, then you want to find a pathway out of that school and into another that works for your child as soon as possible.

That’s why parents across Texas are fighting so hard for school choice. They know that regardless of what Texas decides to do on the issue of school funding, their child cannot wait for another session or a better political climate.

This is their year. Every class in school now is the class of 2023. They only get one shot.

Nearly 70% of Texas university professors are not recommending Texas to their colleagues in other states, and more than a quarter are considering leaving next year, according to a new poll by the American Association of University Professors. Texas professors told surveyors their dissatisfaction stems from “political interference and widespread dissatisfaction with the state of higher education in Texas.”

(We’ll skip over the hysterical irony of state employees paid with taxpayer dollars being annoyed by the “political interference” in their work.)

Upon releasing the poll, the professors said, “these findings serve as a wake-up call for policymakers, administrators, employers, and other concerned citizens, emphasizing the urgent need to address the concerns raised by faculty members. Failure to do so may result in a significant exodus of faculty, challenges attracting academic talent, and an overall decline in the quality of higher education.”

Wake up call? They are kidding right? Do they think that policy makers, employers and other concerned citizens of Texas give a hoot that a bunch of professors are angry about tightening up tenure rules and ending so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) programs? Senate Bill 17 passed in May; it ensures that going forward, no program or policy will be allowed on any Texas university campus that “promotes differential treatment or provides special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color or ethnicity.”

DEI is a woke policy based on the premise that all American institutions, including our colleges and universities, reflect a white supremacist culture. Dozens of Texas university professors who testified against the anti-DEI bill believe that to see America any other way is also racist. No other viewpoint is tolerated.

These professors believe it is their job to divide students by race, ethnicity and gender and then teach young minority Texans to see racism everywhere. They want them to understand that they are all hopelessly oppressed. They also teach Anglo Texans that their race gives them privilege, regardless of their circumstances and that they are racist, whether they know it or not.

If that sounds nuts, it’s worth noting that Texas professors may not be among Texas’ best and brightest. According to the AAUP poll, almost a third of them, 28.7%, said they hoped to leave Texas. The No. 1 place they want to move is California.

At least they’ll be driving against the traffic. USA Today reported in August that Census Bureau data shows in 2021, 111,000 people left California for Texas—300 people a day. That’s an increase of 36% compared to 2016. Folks moving to Texas had a long list of reasons—taxes, cost of living, red tape, crime and infrastructure. It will likely shock the Texas professors to know that more than a few former Californians also mentioned freedom of speech and tolerance for different opinions in Texas as a reason for their move.

Whoopi Goldberg, Jon Stewart and Samuel L. Jackson, all said they would leave the country in 2016 if Trump was elected. They didn’t. These Texas professors aren’t going anywhere, either. The market for academics is glutted and then some. Academic insiders estimate that while it varies from field to field, there are routinely as many as 50 applications for every faculty opening. In addition, young faculty members in Texas complain that because of tenure, professors never retire and they are unable to advance. If these professors pack up their U-Hauls and head west, their jobs will be filled by tomorrow morning.

Dozens of whiny professors testified in opposition to the anti-DEI and tenure reform bills last spring, predicting that if they passed, Texas would be imperiled because a few left-wing academics wouldn’t want to live here anymore.

Not one of them made a case that DEI or tenure had actually improved student performance or graduation outcomes for minority students—or any student—on any college campus in Texas. DEI has been in place for at least a decade on most Texas campuses and the impact has been zilch, so perhaps a “significant exodus in college faculty” is just what we need.

Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.

TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with famed historian J.P. Bryan of the Texas State Historical Association to discuss the importance of preserving our great state’s history, free from distortion and historically inaccurate bias.

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TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with Texas Public Policy Foundation colleagues Brian Phillips and Sam Pohl to discuss the dozens of news stories where the Texas media creates their own narrative while ignoring the views of the conservative majority of Texans, pushing out daily news reports portraying our state as a bunch of backward, dull-minded, racist, sexist, whatever-ists — while never explaining why hundreds of people move here every day.

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Subscribe to the 9th & Congress newsletter here.

Listen to the 9th & Congress podcast on Spotify.

Subscribe to the 9th & Congress newsletter here.

Shortly after the Texas passage of the strongest DEI bill in the nation, Senate Bill 17, Texas A&M decided to revive its long defunct journalism school by hiring Kathleen McElroy. McElroy is a former New York Times writer and head of the University of Texas Journalism School where she describes her primary skill set on her thumbnail profile as “Diversity & Inclusion and Diversity Training.”

Although news reports indicate there was lots of fanfare surrounding her initial appointment, it’s not clear at this point exactly who hired her. A&M’s Board of Regents doesn’t appear to have been involved.

Judging from the play-by-play report McElroy gave to the Texas Tribune, whoever it was has buyer’s remorse. Her tenured position offer was reduced to a non-tenured position, then to a one-year, at-will contract, which she just rejected. She has announced she will remain at the University of Texas where she is a tenured professor.

McElroy reports that she feels “damaged” by what is described as “DEI hysteria” that has overtaken Texas A&M.

It’s not clear why Texas A&M decided to revive its journalism program after getting along fine without it since 2004. Perhaps it was motivated by the fact that the latest Gallup Poll shows that only 7% of Americans have “a great deal of trust” in the media. That clearly sounds like a problem a bunch of smart Aggies should set about to fix.

Still, it’s hard to see how McElroy is the right person for the job. She likes the journalism most Americans have learned not to trust. She told NPR, “We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore. I think we know that and we have to tell our students that. This is not about getting two sides of a story or three sides of a story, if one side is illegitimate. I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover criminal justice, you can’t cover all of these institutions without recognizing how all these institutions were built.”

So guess who decides which side of the news story is “illegitimate?”

Her former employers, the New York Times, wrote a short news story about McElroy’s recent issues at A&M, where they decided to “just give people the facts.” They quote a dean who implied the change was motivated by racism, but they also quoted one of her conservative critics, so apparently they did not believe the views of a DEI opponent were “illegitimate.”

It’s also important to note that, although she bills herself as a journalism professor, her comments about “these institutions” closely reflect the stated mission of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education:

“Engaging in ongoing ways to incorporate alternative narratives in the curriculum and provide robust learning opportunities on the history of racism, colonization and conquest on how higher education and other sectors of society have been complicit in maintaining systems of privilege.”

As for the “DEI hysteria” at Texas A&M, when their Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs testified before the Texas House regarding Senate Bill 17, he said there were “pockets of DEI at the university” but the administration was unaware of it.

But A&M’s State of Diversity Report in 2020 insists that “racism, hate speech, safety and belonging issues are evidence of systemic cultural problems that are enduring trends at Texas A&M.”

Whether the “DEI hysterics” are the result of only a few isolated DEI programs or “systemic cultural problems,” it will be hard for anyone to know because McElroy would make sure that only the “legitimate” side of the argument will be reported. Those with “illegitimate” views will be ignored.

Importantly, not one DEI officer who testified against Senate Bill 17 made a case that DEI programs have led to successful academic outcomes for minority and marginalized students. In fact, the data show just the opposite. At Texas A&M, 82% of African Americans reported they felt like they belonged in 2015. By 2020, that percentage had dropped to 55%.

Perhaps that’s because A&M’s multicultural service programs have created racially segregated programs that divide students by identity group, which, among other things, has resulted in racially segregated graduation ceremonies for Asian, African American, Latinx and LGBTQ students.

The journalists who make up the Texas media haven’t reported problems with DEI on any Texas campus, likely because the concerns of critics are viewed as “illegitimate.” Indeed, when McElroy chose to go to the Texas Tribune with her story, she picked a reporter who has described DEI opponents pejoratively as “conservative Texans—from locally elected public school trustees to top state officials—[who] have labeled several books and schools of thought that center the perspectives of people of color as ‘woke’ ideologies that make white children feel guilty for the country’s history of racism.” She didn’t quote any of the critics.

At the same time, without any evidence such as increased minority enrollment, improved grades, graduation rates or job placement, the same reporter writes that: “DEI offices have become a mainstay on college and university campuses across the country for years as schools try to boost faculty diversity and help students from all backgrounds succeed.”

Of course, efforts to help students from all backgrounds succeed on Texas campuses will continue, unimpeded by Senate Bill 17.

Texas A&M may want to reconsider if it really needs a journalism school. Unless it can find someone who believes in reporting all sides of the news, it may want to chalk up the McElroy experience as a bullet dodged and take a pass.

Sherry Sylvester discusses the Supreme Court’s ruling that America’s colleges and universities could no longer use race as a factor in determining who could be admitted with Dr. Richard Johnson, Director of the Booker T. Washington Institute at Texas Public Policy Foundation.

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