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Tag: texas schools
Gov. Greg Abbott

Texas Schools Are Defying Abbott's Mask Ban-- And Winning

In July, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) fanned the flames of the GOP culture war against mask mandates, signing an executive order that barred government agencies, including school districts, from requiring masks to quell the rapid spread of the delta variant. Luckily, schools in the Lone Star State fought back, and a ruling from the Texas Supreme Court may have finally put the nonsensical and dangerous ban of mask mandates to rest-- after the court struck it down earlier this week.

The decision to rescind the order was based on a technicality, not the legality of the rule, as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the state's high court to overturn a bevy of temporary restraining orders that allowed schools to mandate masks. Since a state appellate court didn't get the chance to hear the case, the Supreme Court left those restraining orders in place.

And on Thursday, the Texas Education Agency announced they would stop enforcing the ban due to "ongoing litigation," adding, "Further guidance will be made available after the court issues are resolved."

This has left many to question how long the win for Texas schools will last. But legal challenges aren't the only way schools can require masks, as one clever Texas school district found.

Paris Independent School District made masks a part of their dress code, and they note in a statement that "nothing in the Governor's Executive Order 38 states he has suspended Chapter 11 of the Texas Education Code, and therefore the Board has elected to amend its dress code consistent with its statutory authority."

Texas Republicans are battling masks while the state struggles to contain the virus. The Texas Tribune reports, "Out of nearly 12,000 people hospitalized with COVID in Texas on Monday, more than a quarter of them are in the state's ICU beds." NPR adds, "With more than 16,000 new daily cases, Texas is one of the states with the highest risk of COVID-19."

Abbott should know firsthand just how threatening the Delta variant is, as the fully vaccinated governor tested positive for COIVD-19 on Tuesday. And guess what? Per the New York Times, Abbott attended several crowded events in the days leading up to his positive test, and "photographs from the events show that few of those who met with the governor wore masks, and neither did Mr. Abbott."

Breakthrough cases like Abbott's are occurring, but public health officials note that the vaccines are still proving effective at reducing the severity of COVID-19. Masking up is another simple and effective way to slow the spread of the virus -- and as the number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 hits record highs, they are an absolute necessity at schools.

New Texas Social Studies Textbooks Draw Fire During Public Hearing

New Texas Social Studies Textbooks Draw Fire During Public Hearing

By Terrence Stutz, The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN, Texas — Too much negative about former President George W. Bush, too much positive about Hillary Rodham Clinton, and way too much coverage of Moses.

Those were among a long list of complaints — from both sides of the political spectrum — during an all-day hearing Tuesday on new history and social studies books for Texas public schools.

Most of the complaints centered on alleged biases in the textbooks and e-books that the State Board of Education will vote on in November. But more broadly, the hearing demonstrated how pitched battles over culture and politics are reflected in Texas’ schools and their curriculum. The materials will be distributed to schools in the fall of 2015.

Southern Methodist University history professor Kathleen Wellman told board members that several of the books on U.S. government and U.S. history exaggerate the influence of biblical figure Moses on America’s Founding Fathers.

“These books make Moses the original Founding Father and credit him for virtually every distinctive feature of American government,” Wellman said. “Moses shows up everywhere doing everything.”

She said publishers are trying to follow an ill-conceived curriculum requirement approved by the state board four years ago that called for more coverage of Moses and Mosaic Law in textbooks.

“This epitomizes the wrong-headed idea that the United States was founded on biblical law. The publishers are trying to conform to a standard without knowing how to do it,” Wellman said.

If the books are adopted as now written, she added, Texas schoolchildren will grow up “believing that Moses was the first American.”

On coverage of political figures, Emily McBurney of Temple said the Worldview company’s world history book has virtually nothing good to say about Bush, including the “increasingly low approval ratings” during his White House tenure and his continued resistance to evidence of human-caused climate change.

But Clinton, the former secretary of state and first lady, receives 38 lines of glowing descriptions in the book, McBurney told the board.

“Her roles as secretary of state (2009-2013) has often been seen as having a dual purpose: to improve the image of the United States and its relationships with foreign nations that were seen as damaged by the Bush administration, and as an advocate for the impoverished and the hungry around the world,” the high school textbook read.

Extended criticism of the Worldview books led board member David Bradley (R-Beaumont) to remark: “Do you own any Worldview stock? Because I would recommend that you sell it.”

Bradley was part of the social conservative bloc on the board that in 2010 pushed through new curriculum standards for U.S. history and other social studies courses that reflected a much more conservative tone than the previous standards.

Several speakers who criticized the books Tuesday blamed many of their problems — including factual errors — on the standards adopted four years ago over the objections of Democrats and mainstream education groups.

But board president Barbara Cargill (R-The Woodlands) warned those in attendance that complaining about the standards now won’t do much good because they are now required in classroom instruction, achievement tests, and textbooks.

“We are not here to dive back into the curriculum standards,” she said. “That was over in 2010. We are here now to discuss textbooks.”

Other people testifying Tuesday cited unfair treatment of Muslims, Latinos, American Indians, and various minority groups.

Mustafaa Carroll of the Council of American-Islamic Relations told board members that some of the books unfairly blame the rise of international terrorism on Muslims and Islamic fundamentalism.

“Terrorist groups with nationalist and political agendas have formed in every part of the world,” said Carroll, who has headed the regional CAIR office in Dallas and Houston. He cited the Irish Republican Army and “Jewish-Zionist terrorist groups who committed acts of terror in their quest to establish a Jewish state.”

Jacqueline Jones, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, criticized the Pearson U.S. history text for encouraging ideological biases “that are either outside the boundaries of established mainstream scholarship, or just plain wrong.”

The authors, she said, “seem determined to shield impressionable (high school) students from some of the unpleasant facts of our history.”

That includes former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, whose opposition to school integration and glorification of white supremacy is watered down, she said, to make it sound “as if he was appealing to those who did not like the Beatles’ music or their haircuts.”

“We do our students a disservice when we scrub history clean of unpleasant truths, and when we present an inaccurate view of the past that promotes a simple-minded, ideologically driven point of view,” she told the board.

Karin Gilliland of Garland, who said she spent more than 130 hours reviewing some of the books this summer, criticized the world history books that are now using B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) to replace B.C. and A.D. when citing historical dates. Some scholars use B.C.E. and C.E. to avoid using the central figure of Christianity, Jesus Christ, as the reference point for the important dates.

She also said that one of the books devalues the good in America. “I don’t see people flocking to Russia or Arabia or Africa. I see people flocking to America,” she said. “Our values are what make us great.”

Texas last adopted new social studies books in 2002. As one of the largest textbook purchasers in the nation, the state has a strong influence on books marketed in other states.

Photo: Pesky Library via Flickr

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Texas Schools Pressed To Accommodate Influx Of Young Immigrants

Texas Schools Pressed To Accommodate Influx Of Young Immigrants

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

HOUSTON — A year ago, the Las Americas Newcomer Middle School in the low-income Gulfton neighborhood started the semester with 150 immigrant and refugee students. When the new school year began last month, enrollment skyrocketed to 325 students, most of them newly arrived from Central America.

“It’s put a burden on me because I’ve run out of space,” Principal Maria Moreno said of the school’s dozen portable classrooms set up behind another middle school. She hired five new teachers and a social worker, converted a teachers lounge and school police office into classrooms, and used surplus money to buy projectors, laptops, and desktop computers.

But she still had to turn away more than 100 students.

“That’s not going to stop,” Moreno said. “Since I can’t handle them, they’re going next door. But is next door equipped to handle them?”

That’s a question facing educators across the country. School districts from California to Georgia and Maryland have had to add bilingual programs and social services to help new immigrants, with Oakland hiring an “unaccompanied minor support services consultant.”

Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida, home to one of the country’s largest Honduran communities, has requested federal assistance after enrolling 1,469 Central American students since the past school year, including 901 from Honduras.

But nowhere is the impact of the recent surge of immigration felt more strongly than in Texas.

More than 66,000 unaccompanied young immigrants crossed into the United States illegally in the past fiscal year, most entering through Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

Of those, 37,477 had been released to sponsors across the country as of July 31, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. California received 3,909 children, while the largest number — 5,280 — went to Texas. Of those, 2,866 have been placed in Houston and the surrounding county.

Texas had long served students who were in the country illegally, and a 1982 Supreme Court case held that the state could not deny them an education. Texas also absorbed 35,000 students after Hurricane Katrina.

The current wave, though smaller, presents special challenges to educators. Many of these students, Moreno said, are fleeing countries in turmoil and need counseling and other social services.

There’s the 12-year-old student at Las Americas sent north by her mother from El Salvador after her cousin was gang-raped. The 11-year-old Salvadoran girl who persuaded a priest to smuggle her north without her mother’s consent. And the 14-year-old Honduran boy whose mother brought him as far as Guadalajara, Mexico, and then ran out of money and told him to hop cargo trains the rest of the way.

Most students don’t speak English. Some indigenous children barely speak Spanish, like the Honduran boy who spoke Mayan Quiche and kept asking Moreno in Spanish, “How do you say this in Spanish?”

The Las Americas school, which serves grades 4 through 8, has students from 23 countries who speak 17 languages. Arabic, Nepali, and Swahili were more common than Spanish until recently. Houston public schools, which plan to expand the Newcomers program, have already enrolled 1,825 new students from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Some Texans fear that the schools cannot afford the newcomers. But Texas Education Agency officials, who oversee the state’s more than 1,200 school districts and charters, say they already budgeted to cover the extra students and can draw from a state fund with a $263 million surplus if new costs arise.

Agency officials estimate that it will pay districts $9,473 to educate each bilingual student this academic year. That’s $1,573 more than it paid for the typical student.

If most of the young immigrants placed in Texas enroll in school, the total cost of educating the newcomers could top $50 million.

Federal officials say that it’s difficult to estimate how many of the young immigrants have enrolled in schools. The U.S. Department of Education has released guidance to schools, but has not tallied costs.

“The financial impact of unaccompanied immigrant children is an incredibly complicated number to calculate in a particular state, district, or school, much less nationally. It depends on a range of local factors,” department spokeswoman Dorie Nolt said.

Those factors include the number of English-as-a-second-language students already in a school and the level of community programs and state support. Also key is existing enrollment, Nolt said, adding that some urban districts are underenrolled and may have extra capacity.

“There was this concern at first that there was going to be this flood of kids,” Nolt said. “Some urban districts have seen a lot, but the vast majority have not.”

But Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and other Texas conservatives complain that the migrants will place new demands on already overcrowded schools.

“Regrettably, American taxpayers will be asked to foot the bill for the burden on these school districts,” Smith said.

In the Houston area, Liberty and Galveston counties and the cities of Magnolia and League City recently passed resolutions condemning federal efforts to house migrant children in temporary shelters, or directing officials not to cooperate with federal authorities to maintain the facilities. One resolution branded a shelter a health risk.

Moreno has spoken to conservative community groups and tried to allay such concerns, noting she screens birth certificates and proof of immunization.

“What’s better than having an educated child who can get a job and pay taxes?” she said. “You want them to be educated and fend for themselves.”

As Moreno walked among classrooms recently, she stopped to talk to the 14-year-old Honduran boy who rode the trains north and has transformed himself, in a few short weeks, from class clown to dedicated student, she said.

In a math class of 30 students, a girl with curly brown hair and dangling gold earrings gave Moreno a shy wave. It was the 13-year-old Salvadoran who had been struggling with her father.

Moreno bent low, whispering to the girl that she would catch up with her later. The girl’s father had not telephoned the principal for help this weekend. Moreno took that as a sign of progress.

Photo: Los Angeles Times/MCT/Molly Hennessy-Fiske

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