Podcast
TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with nationally and internationally preeminent pollster Mike Baselice to discuss the electoral trends that turned Texas red and what he predicts for the future.
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TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester sits down with renowned political and public affairs consultant David Weeks to discuss his experience on the Texas Quarter Dollar Coin Advisory Committee, where he contributed to the design and creation of the Texas state quarter that is in circulation today, the current state of Texas’ political climate, and all things in between.
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As Israel fights to destroy Hamas and violence in the Middle East threatens to escalate, the collaboration between radical progressive “woke” groups in America and radical Islamists is becoming glaringly visible with a resultant surge in anti-Semitism. The present unrest in America has its roots in identity politics and its ongoing war against Western ideas and moral order.
TPPF hosted a livestream discussion of this dangerous partnership and the vulnerability the radical progressive groups are exposing America to at every level. TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester, Chuck DeVore, and Erin Valdez, along with Rabbi Dan Ain, have everything you need to know about the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States.
Speakers
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.
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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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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