Why was Texas’ Takeover of Houston Schools pulled under Congressional Scrutiny?
Stakeholders attribute the origins of the decision to take over schools in Houston, Texas, to political strife, racism and a desire for revenge against an urban community that stood up to the GOP governor’s culture war tactics.
The Texas Education Agency’s decision on Wednesday to take over the Houston Independent School District, the state’s largest and most diverse education system, drew attention as it coincided with a period of constant disagreement between the school board and Republican Governor Greg. Following this decision, a call went up from the Biden administration demanding that this incident be examined from a civil rights perspective.
Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, an official who represents many of Harris County’s districts, called on the Biden administration to question this takeover decision. His own office cooperated with the offices of Democratic state legislators in Austin, providing tons of data and information on this issue to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for review.
“Hopefully we can get a good result and we will be able to properly investigate how this was achieved,” he said.
“I am requesting the Ministry of Education to examine the existence of discrimination based on questions of equal protection of the law and due process and whether a solution can be found by cooperating with local schools. I believe that a fair solution should be found before the district completely eliminates local school management.”
Commissioner Mike Morath on Wednesday announced that a new board will take over control of the 195,000-student district by June 1 at the latest and plans to appoint a new superintendent in the near future. In a letter to district leaders, Morath explained the reasons behind this decision, stressing that it was necessary to appoint a high school with a long-term low academic achievement and an interim administration for two consecutive years.
This announcement comes after an ongoing rift with Houston school leaders over district control since 2019. The takeover process had long been deadlocked, and ended in January when the Texas Supreme Court ruled that Morath’s intervention was legal.
Questionable Motivations
The Ouston Independent School District is known as the eighth largest school system in the country, with 62% of students being Hispanic, 22% Black and 10% white, according to recent enrollment data. About 80% of families in this region are facing economically difficult conditions.
Like many other urban districts, Houston schools are struggling with a variety of challenges, including poor performance, Gulf Coast hurricanes and infrastructure deficiencies. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has recently been added to these problems.
Texas does not usually stand out for its education system; in fact, it is often rated by experts as one of the states with the lowest education levels in the country and one of the states that dedicates the least resources to the education system. However, the Houston area has been making remarkable improvements in recent years. In the last two years, in the evaluation conducted by the Texas Education Agency, 40 out of 50 schools have achieved a D or F rating. The state even gave Houston schools a grade of B in its last evaluation, and even the school that Morath triggered the takeover decision received a grade of C in the last evaluation conducted by the state.
Is it Education Policy or Election Policy?
Parents have adopted this strategy as a practice tactic in Republican-controlled states across the country, proposing radical changes to the K-12 education system. These proposals are not limited to providing instructions only on what parents can know and what they can say; in fact, they aim to make education policies more intertwined with and more in line with general party policies. This strategy looks like it will continue at a time when Republican presidential candidates are entering the race to capture the field ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.
“This is a concrete example of the general trend towards more integration and linking of educational policies with general party policies in textbooks,” says Jeffrey Henig, professor of political science and educational policy at Columbia University Teachers College.
In past years, there have been battles over accountability standards, evaluations, teacher performance evaluations and other education-related issues. But now the situation has become more complicated.
“It’s hard to Decouple what’s happening in Houston right now from a general conflict between conservative state legislatures and governors and blue cities,” Henig says. “Conflicts over electoral laws and their implementation, conflicts over abortion, conflicts over sanctuary cities… So the real story here is not about educational performance or capacity in Houston, but actually about the fact that we are politically polarized, and in many states partisan polarization has appeared in the form of red states and blue cities.”
Red states have Decently faced divisions for many years between statewide elected conservative leaders and the liberals who make up their majority. Recent disputes over abortion have led some city officials to announce that they will not implement strict regulations imposed by the state. Also, governors in some red states during the pandemic issued orders that not only avoided the mask and vaccination requirements that cities had adopted, but also prohibited them from accepting the new restrictions.