Texas Tech Public Media helped organize a Public Education Panel on September 9 about the current state and potential future of public education in Texas. Topics covered in the discussion include teacher retention, religion in public schools, behavior and attendance, vouchers and funding, and more.
The panelists included Lubbock ISD School Board Trustee Beth Bridges; Founder and Executive Director of Pastors for Texas Children Reverend Charles Foster Johnson; Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at Texas Tech University Dr. Patricia Maloney; District 28 Texas State Senator Charles Perry; Senior Director of Policy for Raise Your Hand Texas Bob Popinski; and District 50 Texas State Representative James Talarico.
The event was a collaboration with American Association of University Women, the League of Women Voters, The American Association of University Professors, Tech the Vote, and The Museum of Texas Tech University.
We have a full video and audio recording of the panel and below you will find a transcript of all of the panelists’ responses to the questions posed.
For further context on public education in Texas, visit the resource page assembled by our KTTZ news team.
Prompt: Take a moment to introduce yourself and why you’re on tonight’s panel. (4:20)
Beth Bridges, Lubbock ISD School Board Trustee:
Well, it's nice to see such a large group out here tonight. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Beth Bridges. I serve as President of the Board of Trustees for Lubbock ISD, and I've been on the board for six years. So, I believe that the health of our district is the health of our community, and everything that we're going to be talking about tonight directly impacts what our teachers, what our students, and what every campus has to deal with on a daily basis. And I feel like these are relevant, pertinent discussions for us to have so that we can move forward with doing what is right for public education. Thank you for letting me be here tonight.
Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Pastors for Texas Children:
Well, I think it's fantastic that all of us are here tonight, and you give the gift of yourself. You could be doing lots and lots and lots of other things right now, but you've chosen to be here. I think it's marvelous that these students have put this together and all the organizers of this because civic responsibility is key to the healing of this nation, and that's what you're doing now. That's what Representative Talarico and Senator Perry do legislatively. I honor them, I want to recognize that and the great service that they provide their neighborhoods, but also call us – as Beth has just done – to the service of our own neighborhood too. I’m delighted to join the professor and my friend Bob Popinski on this panel, and let’s see if we can have a good discussion about providing universal education for all of our children, high quality, and we’ve got a long way to go in that.
Dr. Patricia Maloney, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University
Hi, I'm Dr Patricia Maloney. I think my job tonight actually has three different parts. Number one, I'm a scientist. I'm a sociologist of education. So I'm hoping that you guys may have gotten one of these bookmarks, because being a professor, I made slides. They're right there. You should look at them. There's homework. Number two, I was a teacher, middle school science and reading, so I've spent a lot of time being with some really at-risk children who were just pleasures to be with, and who I've kept in touch with over the years. Third and most importantly, I'm a mom, and my kids are here in LISD, and most importantly, my fourth grader is here. We didn't think the kindergartner could sit through it. But I think my job tonight is really to provide as much research context for you as I can. What does the evidence say? Not just what we want it to say, but what does it say? And so thank you very much for being here, particularly to my students. I see some of you, you're awesome. You're there. I see you. Look forward to your questions.
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
Well, thank you guys for being here. I welcome an opportunity to talk to people in person and actually answer questions, hopefully a little bit later, rather than the social media narratives that get out there ahead of the uninformed and sometimes just mean and hateful. But we will have a – I think – a constructive conversation today. I don't think I'm going to probably change anybody's hearts and minds in a lot of ways, but I hope you can gain perspective and adjust how 30 million people in a state and what they need and what we try to fulfill. And so with that, I work with representatives there on a lot of healthcare stuff. We had a great session last session. So, you know, contrary to some of the stuff you see in DC, the D's and the R's in Texas still work really, really well on big things, education is one of those. I'm going to do something I shouldn't do. Adam, would you get me your phone number before you leave tonight? I have been trying to get it from several but I want to have a visit with you, and so I see you sitting there, but I need, I need, we need a visit. Okay, all right. Appreciate it.
Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas
Good evening. I'm Bob Popinski. I'm the Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas. Raise Your Hand Texas was created about 17 years ago by the owner, Charles Butt of H-E-B, to elevate public education. This will be my 12th legislative session coming up, so a little over 20 years in the education and policy realm. Think of my role tonight as that animated paper clip on the old Microsoft Word, right? If a question pops up, acronyms you don't know, things you want to explain, call on the paperclip, right? I will explain to school finance the best I can. How about 1000 pieces of public education and policy try to make their way through the legislative process each legislative session, and only about a hundred of those bills pass. We have a large public school education system, 5.5 million kids, 371,000 teachers. It is complex. So my role: the paperclip.
James Talarico, Texas State Representative - D
My name is James Talarico. I have the honor of serving as state representative for House District 50 in Central Texas, right outside of Austin, and it's a true honor to be here with all of you and this distinguished panel. Before I was a politician, I was a public school teacher, and I taught at Rhodes Middle School on the west side of San Antonio, and I often joke that teaching middle school was the best preparation for serving in the Texas legislature. And I like to think we have reserved seating in heaven, those of us who taught middle school. My experience in the classroom is what set me on this path of public service. I taught in an underfunded school. I saw my students slip through the cracks, and I promised them, I promised God, that I would do everything in my power to stop that from happening again. And that's why I serve in the legislature. I know we're going to talk about education all evening. I do just want to echo what Senator Perry said. He has been a friend of mine, an ally of mine, on a lot of these important issues, even though we're in different parties, and we certainly have disagreements. But I had a bill last session that would allow Texas as a state to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, because Canadians pay half of what we pay for the same prescription drugs, and not everybody was into such a dramatic idea, but Senator Perry took a chance on it, and he passed my bill through the Senate, got it signed by the governor, and it's now law in the state of Texas. And hopefully, hopefully, hopefully the federal government will do their job and approve our plan here in Texas, we can get something done and start bringing down costs for everyday Texans. So it is possible to work across the aisle to get things done when you have servant leaders like Senator Perry, so honored to be here with him and be here with all of you all. Thank you.
Prompt: What are your major items of concern for public education going into the school year and this upcoming legislative session? (12:00)
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
I'll start with what I have worked on in public ed. You know, how you get taken off of the Education Committee as you vote against a voucher bill one time, and that's okay. It wasn't a good bill. I’ve voted for and I’ve voted against vouchers. That's it. I'm neutral in a lot of ways. I don't see it having near the detrimental effect, but I don't see it moving the needle very far either. But I will tell you, next session, there will be a voucher bill passed. The voters clearly indicate that they have cleared house to where those votes will be there. My job is, and they don't need my vote in the Senate anymore, – they did last year – is to make it a good policy. Specifically, accountability standards ought to be the same. They just have to be. Secondly, I think that there ought to be some online instruction caps on those dollars. I don't want our kids staying at home with online instruction. It benefited 10% of the total population, but it clearly did not have a good benefit for the majority of the kids. And I think there's more to public ed, you know, conflict resolution and just social interaction. We've lost a lot of that just by organic – parents sticking iPads in front of kids and moving on. So those are two things I require.
I will tell you my focus, though, in the area of public ed, and I have a whole lot of other jurisdictional committees that I spend more and most of my time on, specifically in the water arena, but I will file a discipline bill again and just so happens – God is, if anything providential – I was setting up my three year old girl granddaughter's soccer game on Saturday. I was in earshot of three individual ladies. Best I could discern, one was still teaching, one had quit teaching. I think the other one was sympathetic. They were, number one, leaving or had left because of the childhood discipline issues in the classroom. We have lost our discipline in the classrooms. Second: in a poll – the last few surveys – discipline is running our teachers off. Secondly is perceived, and it's unfortunate, I get this: the districts are not as supportive of the classroom teachers as they need to be. And I get teachers that call me and say, I'm retiring now I can come talk to you and tell you what's going on. So those are the top two issues. It's why teacher retention is in crisis mode.
I had a superintendent in an honest conversation that heard me say it before, not all kids belong in a public classroom. And he admitted to me the other day – with video to support it – that these two kids do not belong. They're violent and they're littles, they're the 10 years old and under variety. So my public education arena will try to make a voucher policy, good policy that has an intended objective that may be needed for some schools. Most superintendents tell me there's a class – there are certain kids that won't be reached. They can't reach them, haven't reached them. So, you know, we gotta have a level playing field. Competition would mean that the discipline factors are not unique to public school, they're identical across the board. So I will refile that discipline, I don't think it'll go anywhere, child advocacy groups over the last three decades are kind of why we got here. There's just some kids that are too violent, disrespectful and are a detractor from 99% of the kids in the classroom. They can't stay that way. We got to find a different arena for them. So that's where my public education will be next session.
Dr. Patricia Maloney, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University
So I'm most worried about chronic absenteeism. We know that ever after covid, chronic absenteeism is up across the country. I think nearly 16% of children are chronically absent, which is defined as missing more than 10 days of school per year without some sort of medical issue at play. Schools and teachers cannot help children who are not there. Flat out, it's not possible. And we know – you can see slide one – we know that schools are actually doing fantastic jobs, particularly when looking at low income children. If you look at their learning rates during the school year, they are very close to the learning rates of high income kids. It's the summers when the schools just cannot affect those kids. So that's the first issue that I'm really, really worried about, particularly post-Covid. The second one is actually a little weird, because it's external to education. I'm really worried about rising inequality in this country. I'm really worried about it, and I'm really worried about all those externalities: food, clothing, hygiene, constant shelter that schools cannot affect yet are being asked to deal with. And I think that really, as a sociologist, this is a mass concern to us as a discipline.
Beth Bridges, Lubbock ISD School Board Trustee:
I'll jump in and say I agree with all of those. But from the district perspective, what some of that comes down to is funding. And if we don't have basic allotment increase, in additional funding to pay our teachers what they deserve – to stay in the classroom, to have additional classroom support for any discipline or behavior issues and provide those wraparound services – then we're at a problem. We have a problem. We are at a problem. So we have to advocate if we're in a trajectory where vouchers are going to be a thing, and it sounds like that's where we're headed, then we have to advocate for that additional funding. Increase the basic allotment per student. And not by $50, $100 a student – substantially, so that we can make a difference for our teachers and for our students and all of our families.
Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Pastors for Texas Children:
We’ve got a massive budget surplus, 30 billion plus, we're sitting on that. We need to create the political will to release that money in the next session. I do agree with what Beth said, the disciplinary problem that Senator Perry mentions is very real. All you have to do is go talk to your public school teacher that you live next door to. I appreciate Senator Perry flagging that, but we have made such draconian cuts in public education, by the way, the last time we had a real structural increase in our funding for public education was HB3 in 2019, was it, Bob? And Senator Perry helped us and Representative Talarico – were you in the legislature then, James? – helped us. You look so young. We had a real consensus about that funding.
I don't agree with Senator Perry that vouchers are a done deal. We have a November election coming up. We have Democrats running, challenging Republican incumbents in some marginal races, in some races that are pretty small margins. Democrat to Republican, vouchers will be the number one electoral issue in those races by those challengers. We had – and I know this is always dangerous – but I had three House members who voted for the voucher last session because of the governor's arm twisting, texting me as they cast their vote: 'Don't give up on me. I'm not a voucher proponent. But I didn't want my having a target on my back from the governor.' And we don't need to litigate the governor here. He's not here to take up for himself, but we do need to note his dramatic… attack, there's no other way to put it, on our faithful conservative Republican House members. Who are our good friends. 10 million dollars from Jeff Yass, a Philadelphia billionaire. Philadelphia billionaire. I didn't say Texas billionaire, although we've got some of those too, pushing for this voucher. I agree with Beth. We don't need to start down this road of privatization. We need to lead the country in investing in our children, and we need to see that every child can be adequately educated, even as our constitutional covenant calls for us to do. Alright, I've got my flock over here too, so the professor’s recognized her students. So do I hear an ‘amen’ from the Second Baptist.
James Talarico, Texas State Representative - D
I also want to echo what’s been said. Funding is my number one educational priority for this next legislative session. You know, I mentioned that I taught in an underfunded public school on the west side of San Antonio, and for those that aren't familiar with San Antonio, the west side is a beautiful, historic Mexican American neighborhood. It's also one of the poorest zip codes in the state of Texas. So every day, my students struggled heroically to overcome poverty, overcome racism, overcome systems that were designed to hold them and their families back. And our school was so underfunded that I taught 45 kids in one classroom, and there weren't enough desks for all those kids, so I had students sitting on the air conditioning unit in the wealthiest country in human history, in one of the wealthiest states in that wealthy country, children sitting on the air conditioning unit. That should be unacceptable to every single Texan, regardless of your political party.
Our schools should be second to none. They should be the best in the country. I'm an eighth generation Texan. I don't like us below average in anything. And right now, Texas ranks 43rd in the country in per student education funding. Texas Teachers are making less than they did 10 years ago when you adjust for inflation. Now you may hear the Commissioner of Education say that we're spending more money than ever. Again, remind him to adjust for inflation, because once you do, you see that funding has been flat, and in some ways, it's declined over the last decade. And so we have a school funding emergency in this state, and it is the fault of our state government. And actually, I should be more specific, because there are Republicans and Democrats alike in the legislature who tried to get school funding passed, and it was our governor who said no. I know vouchers are his number one issue. The Texas House offered a deal on vouchers. It had guard rails in place. It had those appropriate measures to ensure accountability for taxpayers. It was a good deal for the governor, and he said no. He said he would veto it. And so this hasn't been a good faith negotiation. I just want you all to know that, because you sometimes don't get all this from the headlines, in the paper, or on the evening news. I'm just telling you, as someone who's there on the floor, that there have been efforts on our side, at least, to try to meet in the middle and do right by kids. And I hate saying this about someone like the governor, who's not here to defend himself, but I don't believe that he is operating in good faith. And I think that some of this out-of-state billionaire money was used to go after some of my colleagues in the House, on the Republican side. And these are not liberal Republicans. Let me just tell you, these are some of the most conservative Republicans that I've ever met. And I just want to make sure the record is clear, that out of state money that flooded these districts, it wasn't about vouchers in these campaigns. The mailers weren't about vouchers. The TV ads weren't about vouchers. They were all about immigration. They lied about their immigration records, even though all these Republicans voted for every border bill that came through the house. So in my opinion, this wasn't a referendum on vouchers. There were a lot of lies told about these members, and some of them lost, although some of them won and withstood that flood of money from out-of-state.
So I also agree with the Reverend that I don't believe that vouchers are a done deal. And in fact, I'll take one District in San Antonio on the north side of the city – Steve Allison, Republican who was against vouchers – Greg Abbott flooded that district with money, and he lost his primary. But now that district is up for grabs in the November election, because Steve Allison, a pro-public education Republican, is no longer there. And there's a good member of my party who's running to win that seat, and I think she may win. And so I'm not trying to make this a partisan thing. My point is that Texans in both political parties, they're going to have their say in November. And I pray every night that we can overcome our partisan differences and remember that we are all committed to our students. We are all committed to our teachers, and we're all committed to Texas being number one in the country, not 43rd. And so I'm hopeful that we will win the day this November, and when we come back to the session in January, we can all get back to work doing what we were elected to do, which is make this state a better place for the next generation.
Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas
I think it's the first time I get to be the animated paper clip. I spent 16 years helping school districts try to navigate the school funding system. Yes, we are in the bottom 10. We've been in the bottom 10 of school funding for quite some time. We're about $4,000 below the national average in per-student funding. We're about $8,800 below the national average in average teacher pay. And so Texas has a long way to go. We mentioned some words up here that I kind of want to clarify and make sure you understand. We mentioned the word ‘basic allotment.’ The basic allotment is the building block of our foundation school program. What the total entitlement of the amount of money per student a district gets. That’s $6,160 that hasn't been updated since 2019. Inflation has gone up 22% since then. That means you need to add $1,300 to $1,400 to the basic allotment just so the districts have the same purchasing power they did in 2019.
It is a perfect storm for school districts out there, right? Not only do you have double digit inflation, not only is the covid era of kind of federal stimulus funding ending, not only is there enrollment decline in a lot of districts, but there's some other technical issues at play – that I won't get into today to bore you – that are making it awfully difficult for districts to navigate. Not only trying to pay their teachers well, but make sure the buses are running on time, making sure the air conditioning is running, making sure that there's food service for the kids in the morning and the afternoon. And so that's just part of it right now. About 50 to 60% of the districts out there had to either adopt a deficit budget or cut programs, and we're going to see that continue here if the legislature doesn't do anything. And there is, there's a $21 billion budget surplus going into the next legislative session. 4.5 of that is carried over from what they passed in the House budget, in the Senate budget, General Appropriation Act last session, that was $4 billion to flow through the foundation school program to increase things like the basic allotment and teacher pay, but it was also $500 million for a school choice or voucher program. None of that got spent because pieces of legislation didn't get passed, and so that kind of gets carried over into the next session. We are needing upwards – just to keep up with inflation – of $7 billion per year. It's biannual math, right? So we need $14 billion just to keep up with inflation. And that is a heavy lift, because – as Senator Perry knows, and will probably talk about here in a minute – that State has a lot of different infrastructure needs as well. And so public education is competing with a lot of other needs in our state, but we need to gradually become best in the nation, right? We need to make up that $4,000 that we have that we're behind and per student per student expenditures. We need to make up that amount that we’re $8,800 below in teacher pay. And so the foundation school program is incredibly difficult to explain, but the basic allotment is the building block, $6,160. When you start adding in all of the other allotments that students and school districts get – whether you are a special education student or dyslexic student, or a gifted and talented student, or depending on the type of district characteristics you have, whether you're small and mid sized district – once you add in all of that, on average, students get about $10,500 to spend. That's what makes it down to the school district level, to pay teachers, to pay staff, to pay the bus drivers. That's what we need to work on in this next legislative session.
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
I hate to cut in, but before we finish, I got to clean up. You did say it correct. We're going to have a $21 billion surplus, roughly, could be 20, 19 to 21. In that 12 billion is a carryover from the last session, meaning it was one time money. And we were trying to be good stewards with the $30 billion we had, and we did. We had that bill passed, $7 billion including a basic allotment adjustment of $6,700, would have been in that mix. It's still in the account.
Here's your challenge – and this is what I try to educate to the best of I can – it usually don't get any better than today. So next session, we got $21 billion surplus. There's already $5 billion committed to the grid. We're under capacity in our electric grid, and it takes about 10 years to catch that up. We're woefully under capacity, we need 20,000 megawatts just to get even to manage the 1200 people that are moving here every day. I've got a $5 billion ask for a water plan, a water grid that literally brings water to 254 counties. We're 20 years behind on water supply. It has to start next session. So you take 10 billion out of the 21, we typically leave somewhere between five and 10 in the checking account going forward. So it's going to be a real challenge to fit any big ask in the middle of that again. So last session, as much as it was hated and voted down, ultimately because of different things in the governor doing different things, there was 7 billion in there that could have added to this. And to be truthful, if we're here to give perspective, it's 6700 basic allotment, but we add a lot of grants and specific funding on top of the basic allotments to districts, it's direct funding. So it's not just 6700.
Now I for one – being on finance and being a CPA by trade — it makes no sense that we don't have an inflation adjustment formula. We just build a problem. If we eat that element about at a time as inflation goes through every session, we come in knowing we had 3% inflation. That's automatic. I don't know why we can't get that bill passed. I've asked. I've done it. I've pitched it. People have pitched it. So maybe out of this we get an inflationary bump built back into the form that just makes good, common sense. Texas budget: 144 billion dollars general fund. That's money we can decide how we spend it. 35% of that goes to public ed. The largest lion's share of funding goes to public ed. 31% goes to Medicaid. 66% is decided by formula before we ever step foot in that door of money that we literally can decide how we fund. That's before we start funding corrections, our border. We did fund, last session, 1.6 billion in additional safety allotment package. We need go back and get more money for safety. We did find a COLA for our retired teachers, that was multi billion, I think 4 billion. Don't hold me to that. 1.5 billion went into broadband, another one billion into water, another five being into the grid, a total of 7 billion in total. So a lot of that surplus was spent well, but 35% of the GR – the money we get to decide – goes to public ed. It is still our largest expenditure. Medicaid, health care cost, is crowding that out. It has happened since ‘11 to where now – I've been serving for 15 years. It used to be 23%. We also put $12 billion into mental health services this session. We've expanded beds in Senate District 28 by over 200 beds. It was 700 million for my district, woefully behind in bed space. In three to five years, mental health looks totally different.
So we spend a lot of money in a whole lot of different areas. We got caught up in some things last year. The $7 billion that was on the table. It doesn't exist in the budget anymore. Where we go to how we do next session is determined. The other saying, I would say – and it's not popular, and I'm not advocating that I think this is a good thing – that there's $18 billion in property tax relief baked into our base budget now. And you know why there's $18 billion in that base budget carried over that we've got a fun next session? Is because the people said 'We've got to have property tax relief'. I could argue I'd rather spend 8 billion, 18 billion on water. Because we don't get any love for property tax relief. In two to four years, you never see it. But we've got an $18 billion baseline increase for property tax reform. So when I say the people are engaged, $55,000 minimum income households? We've got to do all of these things and try to keep the working poor from getting poorer. And that's the balance we have when we do our budgets and what we fund, and how we fund, it's all of those factors together.
Truancy. We changed truancy’s law back in ‘15. Kids don't show up for class because parents have no recourse for not having their kids there.
Dr. Patricia Maloney, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University
Oh, that's not the only reason. There's more going on. There’s a lot more going on there.
Prompt: For Ms. Bridges, Texas schools are facing a lot of criticism with decreased teacher retention and morale, lower test scores and struggles with budgets. With all of that in mind, what is there to be proud of in Texas public education and in Lubbock Independent School District specifically? (35:44)
Beth Bridges, Lubbock ISD School Board Trustee:
Well, there's a lot to be proud of for our teachers. And as I said before, absolutely how we can show them love is to reward them appropriately with a salary as we are able. You know, one of [LISD Superintendent] Dr. Rollo's key pillars is to develop leaders, to value data, and to love people. And by doing that, we can show our teachers how we appreciate them. We have come up with some creative ways to reward them financially. That's not the only answer, but we, through the ESSER funds, were able to give some one time grants and bonuses to our teachers because of the extra work and duties that they were given during that three year period to recover from the pandemic. We participate in the Teacher Incentive Allotment, TIA, and our teachers can earn additional salary, additional bonus, basically annually based on performance. So we really encourage their participation, and have even started including our paraprofessionals in some of that allotment as well. So as to reward those teachers aides there in the classroom. So, you know, really just trying to love on our teachers, provide the resources it is increasingly challenging every day, every year.
Prompt: For Rev. Johnson, when it comes to students' mental health, is there a benefit to chaplains and other religious and spiritual counselors on a public school campus? (37:24)
Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Pastors for Texas Children:
First of all, I think Beth made a great suggestion. Do we have any school teachers here tonight? Would you stand please? Let's love on our public school teachers right now. You do God's work, no question about it.
The chaplaincy issue is complex, as Senator Perry and Representative Talarico know. A chaplain's role in a military setting, an institutional setting, a hospital setting, requires extraordinary training. We were referencing that even backstage. Representative Talarico is a seminarian, he is preparing for the ministry. Maybe I shouldn't have said that, James, but I think that's fantastic. And we were commenting on how Clinical Pastoral Education is a very involved program of study. So when you have a hospital chaplain who comes to your room or the hospital room of your loved one, when your daughter or son is in the United States military and seeks a military chaplain, those are very well trained professionals who know how to listen, who know how to meet the individual where she is in her own perspective. So I would say, as so many public commenters do, on the issues of our day, yes and no. That if we have trained chaplains who are who undergo a certification, which means a four year college degree, it means a three year master's degree, it means post graduate work on top of that, who are from every conceivable religious tradition – as is the case in our in our military institutions and in our, in our in our other institutional settings – yes, Pastors for Texas Children would be generally in favor of that. That is not the way the statute has read.
We oppose ministers coming in willy-nilly into the schools. Dr. Rollo has a God-given responsibility to protect all our children in Lubbock schools. She and her staff and her teachers, part of that means to preserve and protect the sanctity and dignity of each individual to voluntarily pursue their own faith. Now, children come under the authority of their parents. They're not 18-year-old citizens. We have deemed in our society that they're not quite yet authorized in a full fledged way to make these decisions. And so we would oppose that kind of institutionally based, coercive way of – let's just be very clear about this, friends – a certain representation of the Christian faith is pushing this policy and it's for political reasons. And at the same time we're doing this, we are defunding the social and emotional support that our teachers need in our schools. So this is a complex issue. I think the way the law reads, it's a voluntary thing, is it? Dr. Rollo? On the part of the districts? Yeah. And you know, the Texas Tribune called me and asked me 'What superintendents do you know are doing this?' I couldn't find one and they couldn't either. They called me back. It wasn't the Texas Tribune, it was the Fort Worth Report. Called me back. They called all of those 50 Fort Worth school districts and they couldn't find any because it's not good for our children.
Prompt: Senator Perry, you were a co-author on a bill that permitted chaplains to act as mental health counselors in public schools. Do you have anything to add to Rev. Johnson’s response? (42:37)
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
Well, you can't really answer this without personal faith experience, and I don't mean to step on anybody's toes. We took prayer out in 1962 and how has that worked out for us? You guys can go to social media and do your thing in a minute. But here’s the deal. Here’s the thing. If you really want to point to what's going on in the classroom that's screwed it up, it's the disengagement of parents, and it's affluent parents chasing the American dream, and it's the poor kids that didn't have parents, so they've been left to their closest relative – hopefully, in most cases. It goes back to – Pastor – Original Sin. We are searching for self, and we're letting that other stuff go, and our kids are caught up in that, whether you agree or disagree with it. And so at the end of the day, I believe that there are sins in the Bible that are clearly, truly described. I believe that Revelation is going to happen. I believe that Isaiah and Daniel are going to basically tell us how that's going to come about. But I also believe that John 3:16, and John 14:6 are true, and this is going to not be good, but I'm not going to allow my faith to be challenged, no more than y'all want yours to challenge. But at the end of the day, it has a lot to do with it, because if we've had parents that weren't just doing the parent thing and letting kids stay and do whatever they want to do, we would have a different experience.
So here's the deal, though: those words spoke never return void when they're done in love. But there's two things that are missing in this: repentance and obedience. And that's where I'm at.
I will agree with you [Rev. Johnson], I don't want people in classrooms coercively. I don't want untrained people doing it. With respect to the mental health chaplain, I’m sorry, I don’t remember that direct correlation. I know we put $12 billion into mental health, which has conjunction with school districts. These deficit budgets that we hear about in these school districts, I can speak to one district’s budget, half of that was clawback of Medicaid by the federal government for ineligible charges for mental health services. So that’s not all the state.
Prompt: Dr. Maloney, based on your research, do you see a role for religion in public schools? (45:18)
Dr. Patricia Maloney, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University
Okay, look at the last slide. So, I went to the Pew Research Foundation, which – I don't know if you know any of it – is a fantastic polling organization that looks not just at politics, every once in a while it does that, but really at the social issues of the day. So if you look at the last slide there you can see that. It surprised me, a surprising number of parents actually want teachers leading their children in prayer. I was stunned by that. You have the numbers in front of you right now, but I want to say it was about 25% of Democrats that said that, and it was more than half of people who identified as Republicans said that. And that stunned me. I did not think that we would see those sort of numbers in a classroom setting. I, without bringing my personal religious beliefs in here, happen to believe that freedom of religion also means freedom from religion. And that is particularly the case in a public good setting. If somebody chooses to go to a private school, whatever religious orientation you are, that is your choice. It is a correct freedom that we have in this society. But I also don't want my 10 year old having to come home and ask me about lots of different terms that I perhaps don't want to talk about with her yet, that she's perhaps not ready to talk about, right? And so this is something that I think is fascinating from a sociological standpoint, and something that I care deeply about as somebody who's got kids in school right now.
Prompt: Senator Perry, your district is composed of mostly rural towns which are built around schools, socially and economically. How has that affected your decisions on public education? (47:04)
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
I legislate to rural, be it health care, be it schools, be it roads, be it water, whatever the subject matter is. If it fits in rural and can work in rural, I would assume it's going to work for the bigger cities. And that's always been that way. 38 of my 51 counties are under 10,000 people for 10 years. So it's all rural. Everything in rural is hard.
On the voucher system conversation, the holy grail in these rural communities is Friday Night Lights, and it’s probably the biggest protector for school districts against vouchers. And most of my rural guys last session saw the package and said ‘You know what? That’s pretty good. We can live with it.’ I will say, I think you will see a large number of specifically – not naming them for any other reason – Catholic churches will move into rural districts. I think that, well, because they’re already kind of there in their footprint; they do have an interest in public education. So to say it won’t impact rural districts, I think, I don't believe it will, because I don't think people leave the football program. I mean, it’s just that way. But it could impact it. If you would look at my legislation and amendments on the Senate floor, I had provisions that if a kid left the rural district for a private voucher system, they were rewarded. The district was rebated $10,000 for five years. So there was no economic loss, because rurals are different. Their fixed expenses are capped. And if you lose one and you needed one to make the bus payment, you're done
So I wanted to protect the rurals on the funding side. So my legislative pattern is to protect the rurals. The bigs will survive, probably figure it out and get through it. And I don't see the mass exodus in rural. Everything is rural from healthcare up. And if you look at my legislative history, between Medicaid funding for rural districts, between water supplies for rural districts. Between last session, I got basically a billion dollars, with majority of that going to under 150,000 or under, or a majority of 10,000 or under communities for water supplies. So it's always been about rurals.
Prompt: Mr. Popinski, with more than 20% of campuses in Texas in rural areas. How has this affected your outreach and the kind of advocacy you work for in the state? (49:29)
Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas
Yeah absolutely. We have 13 regional advocacy directors across the state. We have one in Lubbock, Skylar [Gallop], who is here and really is trying to support our public schools. And so our goal is to help impact all school districts. Like I mentioned, we have 5.5 million kids in our public schools. It stretches. We have 62% of those qualify for free and reduced lunch. That means in a family of four, you're making under $42,000 per year. And so we have a long way to go. Rurals are impacted. They do have some funding elements that kind of boost them up in the funding formulas, but it's not enough, and this is where I get to be the animated paper clip again. At the end of the day, it's the legislators authority to set how much per student funding is. Period.
There is an analogy, and it's been around for 20 plus years, the water bottle analogy, right? And this, as I mentioned, is about $10,500. It's made up of two different revenue sources: it's made up of your local property taxes and it's made up of state revenue. The size of this bottle has not changed one bit. But guess what has changed? Right? The amount of state revenue going in. But it's not to increase the size of the bottle, it's to pay school districts hold harmless to give the property tax relief. So $17.8 billion went in to fill up this statewide bottle last legislative session, but the size of the bottle didn't change. So it's squeezing school districts out whether you're rural, whether you're suburban, whether you're urban, in a way that that impacts everything. So yes, you can get in there, and you can kind of adjust some formulas for small and rural, but we want to lift all boats, right? And to do that, you have to increase the size of the water bottle. And $10,500 as I mentioned, is about $4,400 below the national average. So we have a long way to go.
But as far as our advocacy, we want to support public schools. We have public school choice in our state. We have 5.5 million kids in our schools, but we have 400,000 plus in charter schools. Charter schools are public schools. In addition to that, we have inter and intra district transfers. And guess what? They are all held accountable, held accountable under the A through F school rating system. They're held accountable under the financial integrity rating system. All of those kids have to take the STAAR exam. And so when we're talking about vouchers, and what's coming to rural districts and suburban districts and urban districts, if they do pass a voucher, is bad policy. You are setting up a parallel system where you're giving state funding – $10,500 or whatever the number happens to be, if this bill passes – to private schools that don't have to follow any of the state accountability, and that's when it becomes a huge problem. And the receipts are in, we know it's bad policy by looking at what's happening in Arizona, by looking at what's happening in Iowa. Arizona has a billion dollar budget deficit. Why? Because they passed a universal program with no guardrails on it. At the same time they passed tax relief, so now they're a billion dollars in the hole. And guess who's getting those vouchers? 60 to 70% of those kids were already in private schools. Right? So you're giving the voucher to kids that were already in private schools. Those kids don't have to take the state exam. And guess what? The kids that were in public schools that transfer into private schools, those good seats aren't available at the best private schools. So guess what pops up, right? You have pop up, fly-by-night voucher programs. And you have Covid-era kind of education declined that first year because they're in those schools. So the receipts are in on voucher programs, whether it's in rural, whether it's in suburban, whether it's in urban areas.
Prompt: Many of the concerns in public education right now are rooted in what parents want. On the other side, what do Texas kids deserve out of a public education system? Both from your perspectives professionally in your work and also as parents. (53:55)
Dr. Patricia Maloney, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University
Well, I mean, we got one in the audience. Why don’t we ask her? Sweetheart, come here. What do you want out of your education?
Katherine Hamilton (Dr. Patricia Maloney’s Fourth Grade Daughter)
I want teachers who not only care about what I learned. Let's just say like two plus two. I want them to also care about – talk to me and make sure that I’m not bullied.
Dr. Patricia Maloney, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University
I mean, that was a pretty clear answer about wanting academics and somebody who like, cares. Which like, when you get down to it, she’s right. Like that is the essential nature of a teacher.
Beth Bridges, Lubbock ISD School Board Trustee:
I would say, as a parent and as a board member, as a community member, I want my child to be met where they are. Not every child is at the same place. They may be athletic. They may have no athletic ability. They may be fine arts. They may need special services. They may need a little extra attention. Maybe they want to go get a skill or trade, and they want to go get a job immediately after high school graduation and not go to college, are not the college kids. So, I wanna meet those kids where they are. Our kids are coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and circumstances and challenges, and it's our job to make them feel loved and valued at our campuses.
James Talarico, Texas State Representative - D
I thought that was a great response. I had a mentor teacher my first year of teaching, and she gave me really good advice, very similar to what you just said. And she said, ‘students don't care what you know until they know that you care.’ And I think that's true for all of us, whether you're a little kid or you're a full grown adult. And Texas teachers are doing that difficult, necessary work every single day in our communities. I often say that the most important job in the world is being a parent. The second most important job in the world is being a teacher, because without the teaching profession, you wouldn't have any other professions. And we've talked about discipline, which I agree, is an area we need to focus on next session. But I also want to point out that you have some of the most powerful politicians in the state and in this country who are disrespecting educators every chance they get. So my question is, how do we expect kids to respect our teachers if our politicians don't respect our teachers? And you can't respect teachers when you're accusing them of indoctrination, when you're accusing them of grooming, when you're calling— our Attorney General, who has his own problems, he called Texas teachers glorified babysitters. I also want to point out, if you paid teachers the hourly rate the babysitters make, times the number of students they have in a class, it would be about $300,000 a year. So maybe we should, maybe we should pay our teachers like babysitters. My point is: we have got to get back to a place where the adults are respecting educators and the work that they do.
The last couple of conv– because we've had a lot of conversations about property taxes – local property taxpayers are trying to stop the bleeding during this school funding emergency, as the state government fails to do its fair share of education funding. And you're seeing that around the state. In my community, in this community, districts adopting deficit budgets and increasing property tax rates. The only way, because I think Senator Perry is exactly right, that some of these gimmicks that we passed – property tax relief – aren't true relief. Any property taxpayer and taxes will tell you it's not true relief. The only way to get true property tax relief is to fully fund public education in this state. Those two are inextricably linked, and vouchers, make no mistake, will raise your property taxes in addition to defunding public schools. Last point, the first voucher was proposed in this state in 1957 that was three years after the Brown versus Board of Education decision. Every decade they've been brought up, Texans of all backgrounds have said no, because Texans love their public schools. It is enshrined in our state's constitution. And the senator’s right, there is nothing more Texan than Friday Night Lights. Schools are much more than academic institutions. They bring us together in a time when we're so polarized and divided. Public schools bring us together. That's why they are a threat to those who want to undermine democracy, like the two West Texas billionaires that were mentioned earlier.
And so the folks who are bringing up vouchers like to say, this is about choice. I'm all for choice. I think you should decide who you marry, what you read, what you do with your own body, where you travel. I'm all for choice. And I'm also for choice in education, we need more academies, more magnet schools, more early college high schools, more programs, more offerings. It should be easier to move between public schools. I'm all for choice, but vouchers are not choice. Vouchers are actually the school's choice, because private schools get to deny admission to any kid for any reason they want. So how can it be choice if the school has all the power? How can it be choice when 151 counties in Texas, a majority of counties, don't have a single private school? How can it be choice when private schools don't have to provide transportation to kids whose parents can't drive them to school? How can it be choice when private schools don't have to provide special education services to kids who need it? This is not about choice. And how can it be choice when the cost of the voucher doesn't even cover the full cost of tuition at most private schools in Texas? As was already mentioned, most states that have tried this – it doesn't improve student performance, of course – but it does help wealthy parents who are already sending their kids to private school. This is welfare for the wealthy. We are transferring wealth from the poor kids that I used to teach on the west side of San Antonio, and now we're giving it to rich parents on the other side of town who don't need it. And I can't – we're talking about religion – I can't think of anything more un-Christian than that.
Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Pastors for Texas Children:
Now let me comment on that too. Anytime you hear a good sermon, Representative, you want to preach a good sermon. So look, vouchers are a private school subsidy for affluent people, it is an entitlement program. The governor knows it. It is completely political. As the representative said, it's been a bipartisan opposition to this policy for a long time. Senator, I appreciate the way you have maneuvered this in the Senate for the time you've been there. Senator Perry has not pushed this policy. He has been truthful with us tonight, and I appreciate that, and we've always appreciated that in you, Charles, and I want my friends to hear me say that. It's the legislature, as Representative Talarico and Senator Perry know, is very complex. It's hopelessly complex. It's a management of a lot – look, it's easy for me, in an ivory tower position, to make this statement – democracy is a management of corruptions in a lot of ways. And you know, Reinhold Niebuhr is a theologian that James is going to read – he's going to burn, he's going to burn the midnight oil – who said human goodness makes democracy possible, human evil makes democracy necessary. And this is what these two legislators, who are very dedicated, extremely hard working, decent, moral Christian men, are doing all day long, every day. They're taking calls at seven in the morning and at 11 at night and all hours of the day. I want to say, also, I feel compelled to share that I share Senator Perry's Christian convictions. The third chapter of the Gospel of John, the 16th verse is a keynote piece of spiritual wisdom, for me. God loves the world. I could go on and on about that I'm not, because we're in a public setting where the context is not your voluntary choice to hear that message. The context is we believe in something called freedom of religion in this country. Now, I also appreciate Senator Perry's implicit reference that teachers have that freedom also and education is a spiritual enterprise, friends. It is. It should not be a specifically religious enterprise. Do you understand the difference between the two?
This fourth grade, beautiful, brilliant Katherine has just incarnated for us how education is a spiritual reality. Our hearts were lifted up when this child spoke. Everybody was unified in this moment. She's the hero of the night. Y'all know this. Teachers know it, every single teacher. In this room knows it. Our 5.5 million school children are very well represented by Katherine tonight. Our poorest children, our children that don't have parental engagement, that don't have proper nutrition, that live in food deserts, that don't have adequate housing, that don't have social and emotional support. I'll close with this story. I know I get heated up about this. A little boy showed up a few minutes late for free and reduced breakfast at his school. Look, we don't just teach children to read in schools. We feed them, we clothe them. An early childhood educator bending over a child who's had an accident and restoring that child's dignity. And for the most powerful person –I got to tell you – I'm indignant for the most powerful person in our state to target those Godly servants for attack. Christopher Rufo is a man of the Manhattan Institute in New York that said, in order to get universal school choice, we must first produce universal school distrust. And Greg Abbott ain’t the only one following that playbook. It's political. As Senator Perry's already said, and Representative Tallarico, it's not all Republicans, by any stretch, and it does include some Democrats, by the way, that needs to be said. This little boy showed up a minute late. He began to cry, weep. His teacher pulled him up close, and she said, ‘It's okay, sweetie, it's okay.’ He looked up. He said, ‘It's not okay. I am so hungry. Last night was my night to miss supper.’ Because the kid was on the lottery about who would eat. That's Texas, y'all, that makes me want to throw things, now that's not very Christ-like. We've got to change that. We've got to change that. We've got to get off this ridiculous voucher subject. It's utterly nuts. And y'all are all wonderful, solid citizens. And Senator Perry represents you and he's been decent enough to come tonight. All your representatives need to hear from you. The governor needs to hear from you. The lieutenant governor needs to hear from you. We need to go get 10 of our fellow citizens to do likewise.
Prompt: You all mentioned public schools and the funding of public schools accept children of all abilities and needs. With the recent cut in reimbursements for special needs education, how are schools continuing to serve their whole student bodies? And for the legislators, how can the state continue to support public school’s mission to educate all students? (1:08:08)
Beth Bridges, Lubbock ISD School Board Trustee:
Well, on the campus level, it is still a huge need. The special needs population is growing. Those needs are growing and what we see that we lack the most of is the teachers and the classroom support to do that. A lot of those students have to have special attention and special plans and all those things in place to be able to serve them as a public education institution. So it just takes additional funding for that. And we do get some increased funding for special needs programs and children, but there is more need there, and it is growing exponentially.
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
Yeah, and I would say, looking at some school districts, budget classifications, those 504 kids, the IDDs, the ED, those kids, they're extremely challenging and I don't think we fund some of those extremes, probably where we should be. But back as I mentioned earlier, SHARS was a federal Medicaid clawback, and it's part of that population base that serves those services. Again, we put $12 billion in mental health services. Those do filter down into those ISDs. So, I think probably more need it. Specific classes, I saw a list – the district was very informative, meeting with them – a list of kids and there's classifications that meet in there. Some of them are funded well, but the intense, the really intense ones that take a lot of some of the discipline problems. And I want to be clear, I'm not talking about 504s or IDDs. I'm talking about those that don't have classification are just violent, just to be violent. Now that's a different student than what we had when I went and it's ones that are running that. You know, I want to say we have 5.5 million kids that get through high school in the state and the majority of them go on in life and do well. It's almost, our successes give us the ability to focus on the ones that are not. Right? We kind of look at, sometime, the inverse. We care about that bottom tier, and we're able to do it because we are fortunate to have the resources to go after those. But also – and it goes back to my deal – we've allowed teachers, or we've effectively laid it at their footsteps, to be surrogate parents, counselors, mental health experts, and that really crowds out the majority of the kids' experience for getting where we think they need to be for life.
So I don't have that answer today. I wish I could come and tell you, other than I know until we get back to the basics of parenting and support, as you spoke to, none of this is going to change, and it's just probably going to get worse. But it starts with just basic rules and basic rule of law. Our society has diminished the rule of law. You can't have a learning environment where kids are not boundaries. You know, I can look back at some of my teachers, and there's four or five that are the reason I'm probably not wearing a county jumpsuit today. And I can say that with honesty, they took an interest in me, but there was always boundaries. And it came from the home. You had boundaries, but when you got to the classroom, you had boundaries. And if you violated either boundary, there was consequences. So I feel for my teachers that were called to teach, that are not being able to teach, and are getting frustrated and leaving. On this retention – those teachers don't survive very long. They get out pretty quick. And so we don't have any new energy. We got older teachers that are getting, frankly, tired. And so we gotta change the conversation from ‘what can we do to bring it back to where we need to be,’ or you're just gonna let the whole thing suffer, and that's where I find ourselves. Teachers aren't made for surrogate parenting. To their credit, they do it and do it well.
I had a similar experience. Kiddo sat in my lap at Owl Elementary. She just kept wiggling. I said, ‘Sweetie, what's wrong?’ And she said, ‘I'm hungry.’ She missed free lunch that day. So we do feed kids three times a day, we send lunches over home on weekends, we have summer programs now. There's a lot of community support for a lot of these kids, but sometimes I don't even have a parent to get them there. So there's a challenge. I don't have it. The teachers can't solve it. But you better get back to what we know to be right, and I only know one absolute moral right that never changes, and that book tells you how to handle all of these issues we face from cover to end.
Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Pastors for Texas Children:
I want to say amen to a lot of that, Senator. Let's get to that. Get off privatization of our public trust through vouchers and get to the real problems. I really appreciate your courage, and I want to say before my fellow church members and my fellow Lubbockites that Pastors for Texas Children will help you do that in any way we can, now our little, teeny, tiny sliver, but you're sitting next to somebody with some influence right there [Bob Popinski].
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
This [Raise Your Hand Texas] is one of those advocacy groups that works well. They don't come in with ultimatums. Don't come in with threats. They don't get involved in political campaigns. They come in with solutions because they had a founder that was committed to public education.
Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas
It goes to the point 78% of our teachers have considered leaving the profession. And so this isn't going to be solved with one single policy item that passes. This is a myriad of items that need to pass. The Charles Butt foundation started this years ago. The Charles Butt Aspiring Teacher Scholarship Program provides $8,000 a year towards aspiring teachers to go towards traditional educator prep programs. Four years where you get to student teach, you have a residency program. That is rare today. Why is it rare? Because over 30% of our new teachers are uncertified, not just alt-certified, uncertified coming into the profession. Our alt-certification teachers, which is over 60%, they only need 15 to 30 contact hours before they become a teacher on that first day of school. We need to lift up this teaching profession. Yes, it is salary, it is support, it is mentorship, it is professional development, it is a lot of things. The teacher vacancy task force from two years ago had dozens of recommendations, and yes, salary was at the list, but support, and all of the different supports that you need were on there too. First and foremost, we need teachers that are ready day one. And how do you do that? You need time. You need time with kids in the classroom before you become the teacher of record. You need to be able to afford that if you're doing a residency program for a full year at your four year college, guess what you're not getting? You're not getting paid to do that, right? And so in order to do that, the state needs to have multiple programs going. And they passed something last session based off of the Charles Butt Aspiring Teacher Scholarship Program for $10,000 a year for teachers to go towards traditional educator prep programs. Guess what they didn't fund in the budget, though? They didn't fund the money. They passed the program, but they did not fund the money for the $10,000 a year. And so we have a lot of work to do with our teachers. My wife is a teacher, my parents were teachers. We understand that we want great teachers in the classroom, not only doing the academics, but aspiring our teachers to do better. Because how many can raise your hand and remember your favorite teacher? I know mine was Professor Weiss, who inspired me to enjoy politics and to enjoy education policy and to think deeper into the world. We all have that one teacher, and it's time we elevate that profession once again.
Dr. Patricia Maloney, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University
Alright, listen, in the interest of me making it home tonight and my students not murdering me, I have to ask y’all a question. Do you want to know what the research actually says about school vouchers? My students and I got together and we looked at close to the 60, yeah, just about 60 most cited articles written over the last 30 years about school vouchers. We went through one by one by one. You can see them in the spreadsheet. It's linked on your slides. If you want further reading, I'll give it to you. And the research is really, really interesting, because the results of it change almost entirely by the dependent variable. What does that mean? It means what the outcome was trying to be, right? And so some of this research looks at student achievement scores, which – I have some problems with standardized tests, but moving on. Some of the research looks at high school graduation rates. That's a better metric, in my opinion. Some of the research looks at things like parent satisfaction. We're getting a little gray area there with some of this stuff, right? And some of it looks at the dependent variable, how much money was saved or spent by a given school district or by a given state. So it is completely unsurprising to me that a lot of this research comes out as mixed, because, of course, whatever you're measuring is going to affect what somebody thinks about it.
Looking at these 60 or so articles that we put together that looked at more than a total of about 2 million different school children across America over the last 30 years. And again, scientists peer review. We can see really clearly that vouchers do really well for middle class and rich kids, they do. They do less well for poor kids, usually because of a lack of information about how to necessarily use it, and because the support systems in the schools are perhaps not as robust and not as helpful as the support systems that we have built up over the last, what four or five hundred years that there's been public education in America, right? That started in the Massachusetts Bay Colony a long time ago, right? I also want to underline something that Representative Talarico said, there is a long history – and you can look at the law review articles for this one, those are also listed for you – about the use of vouchers to deliberately keep children of color out of white schools. That's morally wrong. It is, straight up. There's no getting around that one. You need to look at the history of that. It comes under lots of different costumes over the years, shall we say, right? So, thank you for letting me be a professor, and thank you for letting me reach my home so my students don't murder me for making them do all this work this week. Good job, guys, well done!
Prompt: Senator Perry, you mentioned that students can't have a learning environment without boundaries. And for parents, there's often times a constant uneasiness in sending their kids to school, and sometimes, as we just saw in Georgia, that threat is realized. What would you say to a parent who might not want to send their child to school due to this increased sense of danger? And anyone can answer this. (1:20:10)
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
I don't think that's just unique to parents. I mean, nobody wants kids in a dangerous environment. We live in a very dangerous world. For all the things I've talked about, that are politically unpopular to talk about. We're in a fallen state. We're going to have those tragic events. Our job as legislature is to prevent them as much as possible, knowing that they're always going to be that one instance. I will give you, the Uvalde conversation. There were six different times that morning that that shooter never had should have been in that classroom, had the six different stops along the way, those people would have done what they had been trained to do. So it goes back to a lot of things that's wrong. We can teach people on what to do. We can ask them to do it, but if you don't follow through, bad things happen.
So to the parents that have that concern, I get it. I have five grandkids. Four of them are now in pre-K, kindergarten and public schools. I worry very much about that, but I also know that there's more good than bad in this world, and I'm going to have to embrace that and teach them how to be smart. And I just hope that the training the state has done and the locals have done, and the police, people in all of the reinforcements and facilities that we've done will actually be engaged. We caught somebody. I'll tell you a story real quick. Kid in the East Texas area, was on deep, deep internet, the dark Internet, and he was telling he was fixing to kill his family in the house and go to school the next day and finish it off. A kid in Germany caught that thread, reported it back to Texas crime line. We have a very sophisticated tracking system at the DPS level, and they went to that house the next morning, unfortunately, they heard a gunshot. Kid committed suicide. Had already killed his parents, but did not get to it. So we are working hard on trying to prevent and catch those things before they happen. But I'm not going to be here to tell you that it's going to be 100% stoppable, just not the world I live in. I wish it wasn't true.
Beth Bridges, Lubbock ISD School Board Trustee:
I can say, on behalf of the school district, we take it very seriously. I mean, our students’ and our teachers' safety is of utmost concern. So in 2018 we passed a bond and we just finished successfully that bond and every campus was touched with safety and security measures. So every entry vestibule is hardened now, and if you've tried to go into any school, it's you have to do lots of little checks to get in. So making that more secure, to panic hardware, to cameras and audits that happen daily, almost from our safety and security department and director. And we have a team that is committed to being on top of this. So I agree. I don't know that we can ever stop 100% of someone who wants to do something bad, but we are doing our best to make sure that our campuses are safe and secure.
James Talarico, Texas State Representative - D
Well, I just want to make sure we're all clear that we are the only country in the world that allows this to happen. I don't want to get too lost in the complexity. We are not an outlier as a country in mental health. We are not an outlier as a country in school security. We are not an outlier as a country in the number of doors on an elementary school. We are an outlier in one thing and one thing only, the number of readily accessible weapons of war in our community. And I believe in the Second Amendment, I believe in your right to carry and defend yourself in your home. I believe in all those things, but I think it's not a controversial statement to make that an 18-year-old should not be allowed to buy a weapon of war at Walmart. And if we had just done that, if we had just raised the age to 21, we could have stopped what happened in Uvalde. And those 19 babies and those two teachers would still be with us today.
And so I want us to summon the courage to do the things that the vast majority of Texans want us to do. Polling shows that it's 90% of Texans want universal background checks. 90% of Texans want red flag laws. 90% want us to close the gun show loophole. They don't want guns in the hands of terrorists or criminals or abusers. I mean, these are common sense steps that we can take to protect our kids. And every amendment in the Constitution has exceptions. We have a freedom of speech, but you can't yell fire in this crowded building, right? We have a freedom to protest, but you can't just start gathering without a permit. The same is true of the Second Amendment. You have a right to carry, you have a right to bear arms, but you don't have a right to create this lawless system where anybody can get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction and carry it into a school that should be unacceptable to everyone in this room and everyone across the state.
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
I'll just say a couple of things. Again, there's a shooter out that went to El Paso, got his gun in Lubbock. The guy had a federal permit. He did not check the background. That guy's now serving time. Again, the system was in place, but that person chose not to do the system. I believe it was the Sutherland shooter had a military record that prohibited him from having guns and they didn't take interest in that individual. We have federal background checks and there is a backlog at the FBI on checking those background checks, so we have a lot of laws, but laws not enacted or acted on are as if we have no laws at all. So that's, that's the challenge.
Audience Question Prompt: The Texas School Guardian Program designed to train and evaluate educators to carry defense handguns on school campuses, has been active for a while now. Has it been effective? (1:27:22)
Dr. Patricia Maloney, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University
Oh, I know this one. I know this one. I did research on it. Okay, so the Texas Guardian plan 2013 was when it was passed, right? So we're at about decades or so worth of data at this point. So I went around and spoke to close to 50 teachers, superintendents, SRO school resource officers – those are school police – in various districts across Texas. And it's fascinating the diversity opinion about this one.
We initially assumed that younger teachers would not be in favor of this, right? It turns out that the group of people who are most in favor of it are actually young female teachers, like first year female teachers in elementary level, which again, stunned me, another piece of research that was interesting.
The older, more experienced teachers were very concerned about the chilling effect that the possibility that they might have guns would have on their relationships, particularly with their students of color. We already know that students of color, and this is an indisputable fact, students of color are disciplined – according to the Federal Department of Education definition of that – at rates of about five to six times those of white students. Discipline could be detention. Discipline could be in-school suspension. It could be out-of-school suspension. It's an issue, and the Office of Civil Rights looks at this in detail. And so the older, more experienced teachers were really concerned about that chilling effect.
The superintendents, when we spoke with them, were really worried about the diversity – I'll back that up – the lack of guidance about what the training was supposed to be in different districts. Because even though we have the Texas Guardian plan, which allows teachers who are over 21 who have a CHL, to carry a gun, because they're supposed to be the first line of defense against school shooters. Even though we allow that, it's really up to the district to say what that training is supposed to be in order to carry a gun. Which is for me as a parent nerve wracking, right? That makes me very, very nervous, okay?
The SROs, the school resource officers, who are actually police officers who we spoke to, were universally against this. They were not a fan of this, because they were really worried about friendly fire, as you might assume, right? And if we have trained police officers who go through more than the – in some cases – eight hours of training every five years that these Texas guardians were getting, if we have trained police officers who are having problems with this, who are not knowing who to shoot, who are not knowing who to defend or not knowing how to defend, that's a problem, right? And so while this research is ongoing and we're looking to publish it really soon, in my opinion, I have some qualms about the Texas Guardian plan, and in particular, the way that it could, in a very scary situation, I say this, as a parent, I've had that little thought every morning – I do – about who's going to get hit. Who am I going to have to identify? You know what I mean? You know, there's that little thought in the back of my head every day that makes me really nervous about this, particularly after the SROs were not in favor.
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
This program originated out of a rural school district in Senate District 28 before there was a law, basically, and part of it is in rural Texas you may have one Sheriff that may be on a call 20 miles away from school. So that district said most of our kids, and back in my day, you would have your deer rifle and your shotgun on your window, on your truck to go hunting at the end of the day. So it's that kind of culture. So what I would say there is, I don't think it's been utilized much, but there are applications. And it comes down to, is there an educated, comfortable level with guns? This is not something that probably fits in HISD in Houston. That's not probably where this belongs, but there are, as in Texas, what you'll find out is there's no one stop shop that fits everybody, and our schools are no different, but that's where the origin came. You don't have access to a police officer or an enforcement officer in rural counties, and that's kind of the origination. I think that district may have actually stopped that program, not because anything is bad, but just they didn't have any real compliance.
So I do agree that training is critical. Districts get to determine the level of training, and I don't think districts that are not comfortable with the level of training will have the program. But, first line of defense. I'll give you another Uvalde story. A teacher across the hall from the room that guy was in was a CHL carrier. She hid out in that room. She did not have her gun, because that district did not have that program. She begrudged and bemoaned and spoke to Representative [Dustin] Burrows that was the lead on the commission for that shooting, and said, I wish on that day I would have had it, because I might have been a different outcome, maybe not, but I just there's always those situations where it may or may not apply, and it's up to the individuals. It's not forced, it's not required, it's not mandated to decide.
Prompt: A recent Gallup poll showed kids losing interest in motivation in school. How can we renew an interest and a sense of enthusiasm for kids in education? (1:33:25)
Beth Bridges, Lubbock ISD School Board Trustee:
I think it's different for every child. Like I spoke about earlier, we have to meet that child where they are. So what might work for me in fine arts or an orchestra, won't work for someone who wants to get a welding certification. So we really had to provide a variety of opportunities for our kids in a safe environment, in a loving environment, as our young friend here reminded us. So it's complicated, and that's a very short answer for a hard problem. But I do also want to say for Lubbock ISD, we talked a little bit about school choice and how vouchers are purportedly for school choice, and in Lubbock ISD, we do have school choice. We encourage that. We have early college high school, we have the IB program, we have Project Lead The Way, STEM programming, and each feeder pattern, each high school, has its own almost identity and specialization. And we have intentionally done that so that our children can find their place.
Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Pastors for Texas Children:
I'm grateful for this opportunity tonight, and y'all have been a terrific audience and my colleagues on this panel, the panel asking the questions and the panel answering the questions have been splendid. We've got to recommit ourselves to God's gift of quality education for all children. It is a human right. We have to be unified as the community behind it. It is a public trust it is accorded to everybody through the responsibility of everybody. Jan and I have three grandchildren in public schools, one in Texas public schools, two in Kansas public schools. Our daughter in law is a public school teacher. We have skin in that game. We don't have children in Fort Worth schools. By the way, 90% of whom are poor. Let that sink in, 90%. And really the debate that all of my distinguished friends on this panel have addressed themselves too, is this: how do we educate poor children? This is what it all boils down to, the parentally engaged child. I'm glad Senator Perry did mention that there are some affluent children whose parents are pursuing some sort of material satisfaction gratification in life, who are also lacking parental engagement. But every educator can tell us that the challenge is for poor children. If we will unify as a community, forsake these exotic attempts to divert the public trust to a private interest. We've got to get rid of that.
We hadn't set a syllable about charter schools, I could be just as passionate about charter school education under the public sphere, a little bit, not with the same standards of accountability as the traditional public school. They're not exactly the same standards. Any charter school or public school teacher will tell you that they're not the same standards. Charter school education is the privatization – and I'm gonna make everybody mad tonight, I guess – is the privatization scheme for the Democrats, like voucher schools of the private privatizing scheme for certain Republicans.
We have to unify around Public Education, full accountability, full transparency, turn the classroom back over to the teacher. Pay the teacher well, which means ninety or a hundred thousand dollars a year. Pay that teacher well, train teachers. The Home School Association website says 750,000 Texas kids are homeschooled if all of them take a $10,000 voucher, and the 250,000 private school kids take a $10,000 voucher. I'm not a mathematician, but we're talking about a $20 billion biennial budget item. We can't do that. Not going to do that.
We've got to recommit ourselves to our covenant that we've made as a society: a general diffusion of knowledge being essential for the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people. The legislature of this state shall make suitable provision for an efficient system of the operation and maintenance of public free schools. And we've got to be completely – that’s got to be the consensus. Bipartisan. Quit making it a political issue. We do that and this child, we'll make good on our promise to this child and 5.5 million others like her.
Dr. Patricia Maloney, Associate Professor at Texas Tech University
So I'm in agreement with Reverend Johnson that as a sociologist, I don't judge a society by how well the middle class and the rich are doing. I judge a society by how well the lower income people are doing, how the disadvantaged, the disempowered in society are doing. That's who I look at as a litmus test, as an indicator variable. You're gonna let me geek out, I promise 20 seconds. Fourth through eighth grade is often ignored. Fourth grade in the research literature we refer to as the ‘watershed year,’ because it's a really, really important year in schooling, because children should move from learning to read to reading to learn. You see the flip there? And if they can't do that, good luck with your history textbook. Good luck with your science textbook. Good luck being an informed citizen in a democracy.
I am 100% right with you on the importance of early childhood education, but as a former middle school teacher, as somebody who's got skin in the game with a kid in fourth grade, we need to pay a lot of attention to that fourth through eighth grade, because I don't know if you've seen it, but that's when the light starts to leave their eyes a little bit in school, and that, oh my god, I'm going to get emotional. That's a tragedy. We need to spend a lot more time on them, and I think it includes smaller class sizes.
Charles Perry, Texas State Senator - R
Well, I would agree that class size matters, but unfortunately, we have such a population growth, and we're building classrooms of 25, 30 kids, 600 on a campus, two grades. So you can't get that one back. At the end of the day, you don't have capacity. You can't keep just building classrooms. At the end of the day, though, the question was, how do you make education relevant, right?
[Moderator clarifies it’s ‘how do we revive a sense of enthusiasm’]
Yeah, I translate that to ‘make it relevant.’ And so kids mature faster due to exposure to a lot of things quicker. And I think they hit that classroom sometimes, and they're just bored. And I think a lot of times it's, you know, electronics and things like that. They’re visuals, and your brain is wired organically to respond to that stuff. So getting a kid into a classroom where something's new and it's always fresh, it's 100% contingent upon that teacher.
My grandson is in first grade. He loves math. He don't like reading. Kind of back to your point, find them where they're at. But I think it's just the challenge of the times we're in with all the technologies, with all the distractions and all the extracurriculars. You know, they're playing soccer at three, they're playing flag football at four, and so we've just consumed every minute of their day. So it's go, go, go, go, go. And then you put them into a classroom that says, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit. Does that really make a lot of sense in today's world? So how you keep it fresh, and how you make your kids want to be there is a real challenge of the day. And I think it begs the question, what are they going to need to know? If AI is real, unfortunately, and it's coming, it becomes the tool of a lot of things that we used to learn. So how are you going to incorporate that into the process where it's a tool and not the determiner? It's a real challenge we have because kids today are more sophisticated in things that I probably didn't even begin to master in middle school and we didn't have the electronic culture then.
So it's a real challenge for the education conversation to begin with, on what are they going to need to be successful. Is it the basic math? Is it the basic sociology? Is it all of that, or is it just strategic? If that guy really loves welding at 16? Let him go. I mean, I don't know. I don't have that, but I think that's where education in general is: what's relevant? Because kids are really good at what they find relevant to them and the things they're not – we've stymied and we've frustrated for generations, a lot of kids that don't do well in life after high school because they never found the relevance, or we didn't provide them an opportunity to have relevance. That's the challenge I see.
I'm a career tech guy. I think that I wish – boy, I'm gonna get, Pastor, everybody, I know everybody's mad at me anyway here, that's okay. I'm good. I'm good with that. – I wish school boards would look at, when they're asking bonded debt, 50 cents on the top dollar, to the citizens of that community to vote for something, that it wouldn't be a choice of a $50 million athletic facility, but it might be a $25 million stem facility that replaces first generation of microscopes. Because there's good in all of it, but we seem to have gotten out of whack and out of balance, and needs to come back.
Bob Popinski, Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas
We're always going to have challenges. We're a big, huge, diverse state, but think of the amazing things our 9000 campuses are doing. We tend not to focus on that sometimes, right? CTE programs, extracurricular activities, fine arts.
I went to my son's open house. He's a freshman in high school now, and I got to go through all eight periods. He is on the school newspaper. He is a journalist, right? Everyone has their story. We are doing amazing things and sometimes we need to focus on that. We're going to have our problems. We're going to have our policy debates at the legislature, but our kids deserve to feel our pride for them as well.
James Talarico, Texas State Representative - D
I would not be sitting on this stage if it wasn't for public schools. I was born to a single mom who didn't get to go to college, but because of Texas public school teachers and Texas public schools, I got to earn degrees from the University of Texas and Harvard University. How? I know we got to end, but I want to just ask folks to raise their hand if they would not be the informed, active citizen that you are today if it wasn't for public schools.
I firmly believe, with every fiber of my being, that there is nothing that Texas public schools can't do if they're given the tools and the resources to be successful there. Our teachers work miracles every day in all of our communities. And if we were a society that truly loved our children, every school would be a palace, every teacher would make six figures, every child would have the chance to fulfill their God-given potential.
And so there is nothing magical about a private school. They just have more funding and less testing, two things the legislature could do tomorrow for our public schools if we truly cared about all kids. So instead of passing a private school voucher scam that will siphon off billions of dollars from our already underfunded public schools. Why don't we fully fund our neighborhood public schools? Why don't we spend some of this record surplus to give our Texas teachers the long overdue pay raise that they deserve? This is possible. Anything is possible in Texas. We have big dreams in the state, and for some reason, over the last 20 years, we've stopped dreaming. And I think that there is so much that we can do for our kids and for our schools if we do it together. And so I'm honored to be here with all of you, and honored to be in this fight with all of you.