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March 21st, 2023:

The Book-Loving Texan’s Guide to the May 2023 School Board Elections

Mar 21st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
2 comments

Very much of interest.

Introduction

Basic Background: The Way to Win

This is the third cycle I’ve made this document, and I bring you good news: it is very possible to avoid a pro-censorship school board takeover, even in deep red districts in Texas. Look at what happened last November: Of the 38 red- and orange-highlighted candidates I tracked in the last version of this document, 30 lost. I profiled nine districts, and the good guys won out in seven of them on election day. Seven of the eight Texas candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty lost. If you care about academic freedom and inclusive classrooms, election night in November of 2022 in Texas was a good night.

(That was a turnaround from last May, when pro-censorship, anti-inclusion candidates won the majority of spots on boards in races they contested. I wrote about the lessons from that election here.)

The rules for defeating pro-censorship candidates are simple: organize and inform. Banning books and attacking vulnerable students are unpopular positions, but candidates who support those positions have won way too many races for three reasons: 1) pro-censorship forces have a massive organization and fundraising advantage; 2) voters don’t know who the book-banning candidates are; and (to a lesser extent), 3) pro-censorship forces have been able to activate partisan instincts in red districts by turning non-partisan school board elections into a fight between Democrats and Republicans.

So what do we do? In the last edition of this guide, I called the path to victory the Eanes/Richardson playbook because of the great groups in those districts that effectively fought off well-funded slates of pro-censorship candidates. But last fall gave us many more examples of outstanding community groups doing great work to combat the better-funded, more-established PACs on the anti-inclusion side. Two very different but similarly effective groups that deserve mention are Access Education Round Rock ISD and the “StandUp” groups in the Houston suburbs Tomball, Klein, and (post-election) Conroe. If there’s a group like that in your community, join it now. If there’s not, start one. Reach out to the leaders of successful groups to learn how.

Those groups can help you with the “organize” part of the job. But organization depends on information, and that’s where this document comes in. Share what you see here; make it your goal that every voter going to the polls in May knows exactly who wants to ban books from and attack students in your district’s schools.

The document currently has information about candidates from thirteen ISD elections. There are opportunities on offense, to take out book-banners, as well as a number of good incumbents who will need protection. There are also some opportunities to learn more about an opponent to a known book-banner. Two of the featured ISDs are in the Houston area – Humble and Katy – while the others all appear to be in the D/FW area. I strongly urge you to check these out, to spread the word, to get involved, and to help make Texas’ school boards better places for all. Many thanks to Ginger, our weekly Dispatches from Dallas correspondent who I expect will have her own things to say about this, for the find.

The state’s requirements for HISD

Mar 21st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

It’s their job to make it happen.

After forging ahead with a takeover of the Houston Independent School District, state leaders have outlined three conditions that must be met before transferring power back to the elected school board, a process that will likely take years.

Education Commissioner Mike Morath said he wants to make sure the underlying causes for intervention have been addressed before releasing the district from state control. Morath has outlined the following goals: No campuses should get failing grades for multiple years, the special education program should be in compliance with state and federal regulations, and the board should demonstrate procedures and behavior focused on student outcomes.

Local education experts say those criteria are reasonable and good benchmarks, although it will be important to hold the state accountable to those standards and get more clarity about how those goals will be met.

“They’re definitely achievable,” said Duncan Klussman, former superintendent for Spring Branch ISD. “The state’s now in control. It’s their responsibility to produce that result, and we’ll have to see what happens.”

Klussmann, now an education professor at the University of Houston, said the academic performance benchmark in particular is “a very strict requirement, a very high expectation.”

“The biggest challenge here is producing that level of academic outcome in a system that is as large as HISD, where you have those schools at that level,” he said. “In a system that large, it’s a very aggressive goal.”

The district has made academic progress in recent years under House’s leadership, lifting 40 out of 50 schools from the state’s D and F accountability list.

[…]

Catherine Horn, interim dean at the University of Houston College of Education, said the TEA’s outlined goals are actually similar to the current focus and ongoing efforts by Superintendent Millard House II and the elected school board. 

“Those are really important indicators of the health of schools and the health of a district,” she said about the criteria. “I think that how those goals are achieved is going to be where the real challenge and opportunity lie.”

She said she hopes the appointed board will expand on the district’s ongoing progress and not pivot in a different direction.

Additionally, it will be important for teachers, parents and the community to get more clarity in the coming months about specific plans and decisions, she said.

“Teachers will want to hear from a board of managers their pathway for accomplishing those goals laid out by the commissioner and by the agency,” Horn said.

[…]

“The state is now responsible for their outcomes,” Klussmann said. “They’re now the entity that we all need to look at and say, ‘This is what you’ve said you expect of the system — and we’re going to hold you accountable to those outcomes.'”

Emphasis mine in all cases. For sure, it’s a big win all around if HISD meets these goals – the quicker, the better – and gets out from under the TEA’s yoke. Let’s just keep in mind two things along the way. One is that any delays, failures, hiccups, bumps in the road, what have you, are 100% the responsibility of the state of Texas. You wanted this, you got it. And two, HISD had already done a lot of the hard work to make this task easier for them, while already doing most of what the TEA says they need to do. The TEA will get credit if and hopefully when they succeed. But they’ll deserve a lot less credit for that success than blame for any failure that we all really hope doesn’t happen.

We finally have a reason for the timid police response in Uvalde

Mar 21st, 2023
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

It was because the shooter was using an AR-15, and the cops didn’t want to get slaughtered.

Almost a year after Texas’ deadliest school shooting killed 19 children and two teachers, there is still confusion among investigators, law enforcement leaders and politicians over how nearly 400 law enforcement officers could have performed so poorly. People have blamed cowardice or poor leadership or a lack of sufficient training for why police waited more than an hour to breach the classroom and subdue an amateur 18-year-old adversary.

But in their own words, during and after their botched response, the officers pointed to another reason: They were unwilling to confront the rifle on the other side of the door.

A Texas Tribune investigation, based on police body cameras, emergency communications and interviews with investigators that have not been made public, found officers had concluded that immediately confronting the gunman would be too dangerous. Even though some officers were armed with the same rifle, they opted to wait for the arrival of a Border Patrol SWAT team, with more protective body armor, stronger shields and more tactical training — even though the unit was based more than 60 miles away.

“You knew that it was definitely an AR,” Uvalde Police Department Sgt. Donald Page said in an interview with investigators after the school shooting. “There was no way of going in. … We had no choice but to wait and try to get something that had better coverage where we could actually stand up to him.”

“We weren’t equipped to make entry into that room without several casualties,” Uvalde Police Department Detective Louis Landry said in a separate investigative interview. He added, “Once we found out it was a rifle he was using, it was a different game plan we would have had to come up with. It wasn’t just going in guns blazing, the Old West style, and take him out.”

Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was fired in August after state officials cast him as the incident commander and blamed him for the delay in confronting the gunman, told investigators the day after the shooting he chose to focus on evacuating the school over breaching the classroom because of the type of firearm the gunman used.

“We’re gonna get scrutinized (for) why we didn’t go in there,” Arredondo said. “I know the firepower he had, based on what shells I saw, the holes in the wall in the room next to his. … The preservation of life, everything around (the gunman), was a priority.”

None of the officers quoted in this story agreed to be interviewed by the Tribune.

That hesitation to confront the gun allowed the gunman to terrorize students and teachers in two classrooms for more than an hour without interference from police. It delayed medical care for more than two dozen gunshot victims, including three who were still alive when the Border Patrol team finally ended the shooting but who later died.

Mass shooting protocols adopted by law enforcement nationwide call on officers to stop the attacker as soon as possible. But police in other mass shootings — including at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida — also hesitated to confront gunmen armed with AR-15-style rifles.

Even if the law enforcement response had been flawless and police had immediately stopped the gunman, the death toll in Uvalde still would have been significant. Investigators concluded most victims were killed in the minutes before police arrived.

But in the aftermath of the shooting, there has been little grappling with the role the gun played. Texas Republicans, who control every lever of state government, have talked about school safety, mental health and police training — but not gun control.

There’s more, so go read the rest. That includes a note that the House committee report on the law enforcement response to the Uvalde massacre didn’t include any of these quotes from the officers present, and it also includes a deeply stupid and offensive quote from the deeply stupid and offensive Sen. Bob Hall. While the news of the cops’ hesitation to run into AR-15 fire is something we hadn’t heard before, the rest of this isn’t new at all. Mostly, we know what we’re not going to get from this Legislature and our state leaders. It’s just a matter of what we do about that.

Look, if we banned AR-15s and anything like them today and then began an aggressive program to buy them back and/or confiscate them, there would still be AR-15s and other guns like them out there. But there would be fewer of them, and that would lower the risk. If even the so-called “good guys with a gun” don’t want anything to do with a bad guy with an AR-15, then I don’t know what else we could do that might have the same effect. Like I said, it’s up to us. Daily Kos has more.