Category: 9th & Congress

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.

Halloween tourists are making their annual descent on Salem, Massachusetts to visit the real-life site of the supernatural on trial—the 1692 execution of 19 people for witchcraft. Piles of books and movies tell the Salem witch trial story, replete with wild-eyed, sexually repressed Puritan zealots roving the dark, foggy countryside seeking out women to drag into their evil court.

Although it’s no comfort to those who faced the gallows over 300 years ago, in fact, the made-for-Halloween scenes are largely based on centuries-old propaganda repeated by left-wing libertines today, who use it to push the myth that piety is bad and America was, somehow, rotten to the core from the beginning. The truth is the American colonies in 1692 were probably one of the safest places in the world to be if you were a woman—or even a witch.

Records indicate that at least 12,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe during the 17th century, although the estimates go as high as 300,000, during the so-called “Burning Times.” In England, witch executions had slowed down by the mid-1600s, but still, more than 250 women were executed. By contrast, the total body count in the American colonies, including the Salem witch executions, was 35.

Of course, early American colonists believed in witchcraft, just like their European cousins. About 200 people were charged as witches in the American colonies in the 17th century, but almost all of the charges were dismissed.

Equally important, after the witch trials were shut down in Salem in the summer of 1692, no one was ever executed for witchcraft anywhere in America again. Meanwhile, in England, witch trials continued and witchcraft was not decriminalized until 1727. To peg that date to an American benchmark, in 1727, Benjamin Franklin was 21 years old and already writing pamphlets on freedom.

The real history is not easy to uncover, even in Salem, where witch trial tourism is a huge boost to the local economy. (The town slogan is “Stop by for a Spell”).

But what we think we know about the Puritans in general and the Salem witch trials, in particular, comes from some dubious sources, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Salem-born American writer who was a descendant of an early Puritan family. Hawthorne’s great-grandfather had been one of the judges at the Salem witch trials, which was a huge public relations problem for him because of the general shame associated with the trials. To get around it, he changed the spelling of his name. Then, he wrote damning portraits of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts, which helped to distance him from his forebears—and, incidentally, to boost book sales.

This time of year, some secular writers routinely re-tell the witch trials story as one of religious hysteria, blaming the deep faith of the Puritans rather than the virtually universally held superstitions of the times.

Some contemporary Puritan scholars believe that Salem marked an intellectual turning point for the early Americans. Going forward after the trials, the colonists were forced to admit they’d made a horrible error, despite their commitment to creating a new and more moral society.

Historian Paul Johnson noted that in the months following the Salem witch trials, the General Court of Massachusetts passed a motion condemning the Salem judges. The families of those who were hanged were paid compensation and most of the members of the jury signed statements of regret. Many of those who had falsely testified against the victims confessed to perjury.

Samuel Sewall, one of the judges in the witch trials, almost immediately repented his involvement. Churches in Salem convened for days of penance and fasting, a practice that continued annually in Salem churches for years. Richard Francis, Sewall’s biographer, writes that Sewall’s own penance for his involvement in the witch trials was dedicating the rest of his life trying to eradicate slavery in America.

Of course, none of this compensates for the community compliance with the hysteria and mob violence that allowed the Salem witch trials and resulting executions to occur. Still, the American colonies were far ahead of the rest of the Western world at the time in confronting and dismissing superstition.

Their immediate repentance and reparations shows they didn’t hold themselves to a European standard. Instead, the people who had committed to building that “shining city on a hill” when they first landed in the Massachusetts Bay, held themselves to a standard that was higher than anyone in the world had yet seen.

They didn’t realize they were building what would become America, but they did know that their task was to create a place that would come to be called exceptional.

TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with political communications expert Ray Sullivan to discuss what first caused Texas voters to reliably go to the right when they cast their ballots, what policies and issues people cared about in 2002 that they still care about now, and what challenges he sees to ensure that Texas remains a conservative beacon for America and the world.

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Senate Bill 17, which will close down the so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” offices on Texas campuses in January, was not passed to push an ideological agenda on Texas universities. Instead, the priority was to stop a sanctioned system of internal indoctrination that is making students stupid.

Recent protests in Austin make it clear that for many students at the University of Texas, SB 17 is too late. A student group from UT-Austin called the Palestine Solidarity Committee drew hundreds to the Capitol — “double to triple” the number of attendees at the pro-Israel rally earlier in the day, according to Austin American-Statesman reports.

In a battle between brutal terrorists, who killed, mutilated, maimed, and captured hundreds of people in Israel, these University of Texas students chose to march in support of the terrorists. Chanting “Israel is a racist state” and “Free Palestine” on the streets of Austin, they demonstrated no understanding of the history of the region or the latest Hamas terrorism, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Incredulously, one of the demonstrators told the press they were not anti-Semitic.

To understand why these Texas students made such a hateful, ugly, and frankly dumb choice, just look at what they are learning from the DEI programs that infuse every aspect of campus life on the glorified 40 acres.

The National Association of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officers in Higher Education’s stated mission is to teach:

“…the history of racism, colonization and conquest on how higher education and other sectors of society have been complicit in maintaining systems of [white and male] privilege.”

In their view, racism in America is virtually the same as it was in the days of slavery. The meaning of conquest and colonization are distorted by DEI, too. For example, DEI proponents claim that the Pilgrims didn’t come to America for religious freedom – they came to conquer the natives.

Using proscribed propaganda by hucksters like Ibram X. Kendi and the multi-million dollar fraudsters at Black Lives Matter, DEI has created partisan activists on campus who parrot the precepts of critical race and gender theory and view the world as divided between those who are oppressors because they are descended from colonizers, and those who are oppressed because they are descended from those who were victims of oppression.

Words like merit, hard-work, persistence and achievement are presented as illusions to obscure the basic premise of DEI — the deck is stacked in favor of those who were born with what they define as privilege, regardless of their circumstances, and nobody else has a chance at success.

According to them, the American dream is a lie and has been since 1619.

So it is not surprising that when Hamas terrorists attacked and killed thousands of Israelis last week, including women and children, these DEI infused students immediately started marching in support of the killers. After all, Hamas’ mission is also based on lineage — their goal is to kill everyone who was born Jewish.

It is ironic that so much of DEI is focused on the “pretend violence” including so-called “micro-aggressions.” Students tell me there are rooms set aside in the library at Texas A&M to protect so-called LGBTQIA+ students from having to study in close proximity to anyone who isn’t LGBTQIA+. These are called “safe spaces.”

But apparently, the brilliant thinkers studying at Texas universities missed the obvious parallel in Israel. Hamas dragged Israeli families out of their homes on a holiday. They killed children in front of their parents, raped and mutilated women, and abducted hundreds of other victims. UT’s Palestinian Solidarity Committee apparently didn’t notice that on October 7, there were no safe spaces for Jews in Israel.

It was big news the other week when the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) announced that Harvard University had the worst record on free speech of any university in the country. This is particularly sad considering its history. Harvard is where Samuel Adams first began to formulate the concept that the American colonies should free themselves from control of the British Parliament. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Samuel’s cousin John Adams all credit Samuel Adams with being the first to conceptualize the idea of freedom for the American colonies. It was virtually unthinkable idea at the time but it became a reality because Adams and his friends at Harvard discussed and debated it, effectively incubating the idea of independence for Americans.

By the mid-1760s, the British had made Samuel Adams and anyone who agreed with him public enemies, just for talking about independence.

Luckily for us, that didn’t stop them. Those Harvard men moved forward, writing pamphlets and making speeches, despite knowing that their statements would likely ruin their prospects for advancement, at best, or ultimately get them arrested or hanged, at worst.

That’s why it is so tragic that Harvard students today report they frequently are afraid to say anything that might be construed as controversial or politically incorrect. They are afraid of being censured by their professors. One student told researchers that she chose to write on topics that weren’t controversial to avoid censure.

According to FIRE, Harvard’s free speech record is so bad that it actually managed to score lower than zero. It called Harvard’s record “abysmal.”

FIRE establishes its rankings by polling students. It also compiles data on how many students are dismissed for speaking out, how many controversial campus speakers turn out to be dis-invited, and whether or not the university administration has stood in support of free speech or buckled under campus or faculty pressure.

Harvard ranked 248 out of 248 academic institutions surveyed.

Yet, the University of Texas at Austin’s ranking was almost as bad as Harvard’s—near the bottom, they ranked 236, the worst of any school in Texas.

According to FIRE researchers, the majority viewpoint at both Harvard and UT Austin is liberal, which is no surprise. What is surprising is that students at UT Austin outnumber conservatives by a ratio of almost 4-to-1. That’s slightly higher than Harvard, where the liberal to conservative viewpoint ratio is 3.32-to-1.

Harvard, of course, is a private school (although it does receive plenty of federal tax dollars). Still, voters in Massachusetts gave Joe Biden a 33 point victory in 2020, so maybe a 3-to-1 liberal to conservative ratio on the nation’s oldest college campus makes sense there.

But the University of Texas at Austin is located in a state that has elected conservative Republicans to every statewide office for more than two decades. What excuse can there possibly be for Texas taxpayers to underwrite a campus where the liberal to conservative ratio is almost 4-to-1 and students don’t feel like they can speak their minds?

The study also found that UT Austin students were more comfortable than Harvard students when it comes to shutting down speakers they don’t agree with on campus. A larger percentage of UT Austin students gave a green light to “blocking entry, shouting down and physical violence to prevent on-campus speakers from speaking” than those at Harvard.

Harvard students also showed more tolerance for both liberal and conservative speakers on campus than students attending the University of Texas. FIRE didn’t call UT Austin’s record abysmal, but it did call it “poor,” not a term Texans usually find acceptable in any ranking, particularly when describing a multi-billion dollar operation that presents itself as the flagship of flagships.

Both Harvard and UT Austin scored below average on “comfort expressing ideas via writing in class and among their peers and professors”–146 at UT and 144 at Harvard. You can see how this would happen after seeing former UT Dean of so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”(DEI) Skyller Walkes, screaming at a group of students that “an educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor. Which one will you identify as?”

If you watch the video it is clear there’s no room for “What do you think?” or “Speak up if you disagree.”

Also, remember University of Texas Psychology Professor Kirsten Bradbury who asked the following multiple choice question on a test:

“Which sociodemographic group is most likely to repeatedly violate the rights of others, in a pattern of behavior that includes violence, deceit, irresponsibility and lack of remorse?”

The correct test answer was “wealthy white men.”

The student who came forward with that test question did so secretly and took great care to remain anonymous. She did not present it to university officials.

Bradbury issued a non-apology and there have been no reports of repercussions from the university.

Freedom of speech is essential to the primary purpose of a university education. Diversity of thought, and open inquiry are critical to creative thinking and innovation. Without them there is no hope of expanding worldviews that were previously unimagined–like Samuel Adams did.

By the way, Texas A&M ranked seventh on the FIRE survey. WHOOP.

 

TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with acclaimed journalist Mark Hemingway to discuss the 2023 Texas Tribune Festival, which brought newsmakers and news reporters together in Austin.

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TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Chief Executive Officer, Greg Sindelar and Distinguished Senior Fellow for Next Generation Texas, Tom Lindsay to discuss the ongoing battles to stop radically divisive and discriminatory DEI policies in higher ed. These political ideologies are wriggling their way around the law and into culture and institutions — including Greg’s beloved Texas A&M — in the name of social justice.

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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 Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Do No Harm founder and author of “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns – Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors is destroying American Medicine” to discuss the fight to stop the radically divisive and discriminatory political ideologies that are eliminating, among other things, testing and training standards in medical institutions in the name of social justice.

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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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