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March 30th, 2023:

Of course there’s already a Mayoral poll

From the Daily Kos Morning Digest:

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee

Veteran Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee upended Houston’s race for mayor on Sunday when she announced her entry into the crowded field looking to succeed term-limited incumbent Sylvester Turner this fall.

Jackson Lee has represented the Houston area in Congress since 1995, after she won a landslide 63-37 primary victory over then-Rep. Craig Washington, who had opposed projects important to the region such as the International Space Station. During the ensuing three decades, Jackson Lee burnished her reputation as an outspoken progressive and became one of the most prominent Democrats in the city, giving her instant name recognition. She also won’t necessarily have to give up her safely blue House seat (which includes 20% of Houston’s population) in order to seek the mayoralty, since voters will decide this November, with a runoff the following month if no candidate takes a majority.

That seems likely, given the large number of hopefuls already vying to run Texas’ largest city. The most notable of these is state Sen. John Whitmire, a Democrat who’s been running since 2021 and has a $10 million war chest. He also has the support of a number of major Republican donors as well as Democratic Rep. Sylvia Garcia, who represents a district that neighbors Jackson Lee’s.

A pair of conservative organizations, the Houston Region Business Coalition and Protect and Serve Texas PAC, responded to Jackson Lee’s announcement by releasing a month-old survey from Republican pollster Ragnar Research showing Whitmire with a slender 20-19 lead over the congresswoman, with three other candidates in the low single digits and a large 46% plurality undecided. The two groups, however, emphasized a head-to-head matchup between the two that had Whitmire in front 45-33. Both say they have not endorsed in the race, though HRBC has backed Whitmire in the past despite typically backing Republicans.

While the race is officially nonpartisan, almost all of the credible candidates are Democrats. No Republican has been elected mayor of Houston, which voted for Joe Biden by a 64-32 margin, since Jim McConn won a second two-year term in 1981. (Mayors only began serving four-year terms in 2015.) Houston is also a very diverse city, with an eligible voter population that’s 34% white, 31% Hispanic, and 28% Black. Like Jackson Lee, two of the contenders named in the Ragnar poll, former City Councilor Amanda Edwards and former Harris County interim Clerk Chris Hollins, are Black, while Whitmire is white and City Councilor Robert Gallegos is Latino.

See here for the background, and see also my admonition about polling in Houston elections. This same poll was also cited in the updated Chron story about Rep. Jackson Lee’s announcement. Note that the poll in question predated Gilbert Garcia’s entry into the race, which is likely why his name wasn’t mentioned.

I feel like we’re going to have more polling data that usual for this race, and I just want to remind everyone that each poll is a data point and nothing more. It’s possible we’ll see some trends, and in those trends we may see clear signs of how the race may play out. It’s also possible we’ll get a bunch of seemingly random and contradictory numbers that tell us nothing. Remember that we’re still a long way out, the campaigns have barely begun, and that a lot of factors can and will affect the outcome. Don’t read too much into any single poll result and you’ll probably be fine.

Chron editorial board interviews Mike Morath

There’s video and a transcript here. After explaining that he missed the initial TEA community engagement sessions because he was “under the weather”, he gets asked the key question:

Lisa Falkenberg 1:55
Mhmm. Okay, and then, so, we’re trying to figure out what resources will be used – as much as you can say – what resources would be used for the D and F schools that they don’t have access to now?

Mike Morath 2:10
Sure. I mean, this is the grand question: How does a school system – and certainly one as large as Houston ISD – organize itself as a system of 250-plus campuses so that the way that the district works does not allow an individual campus to lack the structures of supports for you know, a decade or more? You can’t have a situation where kids are going half a decade, or a decade, not learn how to read, write and do math at high levels. So you know, what people keep asking us is, ‘how is that going to change?’ And there’s sort of two answers to that question: The core answer of what TEA is doing is actually indirect. What we’re focused on is leadership. So we’re replacing the school board superintendent. My task is to find nine Houstonians of a character and integrity – that are student-focused – to be members of that governing body that will work together as a team and then find a superintendent that also works with that team that can then execute. Ultimately, that’s the sole focus of the agency, the way the law is set up, the way that our oversight structure is set up. It is that group of people that then have to make all of these changes. But that fundamentally doesn’t answer your question ‘what are the changes that you need to make?’ and so this gets you into all the key questions of how do you make schools work for students? Just think of the discipline of reading. So at an elementary school. There’s an elementary school in Houston, whose last acceptable performance was in 2011. So this is two entire generations worth of kids: Kindergarten through fifth grade. They have, never as a group, been exposed to a school that equipped them to rewrite or do math and do it well. So what needs to happen?

Lisa Falkenberg 4:08
What school was that?

Mike Morath 4:09
I’ll let you guys research that. So you think about elementary literacy instruction. So what we know – what evidence tells us – the evidence is compellingly clear on how the human mind acquires the gift of reading. You’ve got to make sure kids learn how to decode. That has to be taught. There’s a very specific way to do that. You do the ‘mmm’ sound before you do the ‘ph’ sound and you do that for a reason. There’s an explicit exposure, in order, to these concepts. You’ve got a bunch of random control trial-based instructional materials out there, and training, that shows this is the most effective way to do it. So you need to make sure that in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, that that kind of instruction is happening and with materials that have that kind of evidence base. That’s only part of the equation that helps kids learn how to read. Reading is also a function of background knowledge. All the words that you know and accumulate. And this is one of the reasons why you see such disparities by class in reading proficiency. Because if your parents are very well educated and have resources to take you on trips, and then you will learn things – a lot of things – outside of school, and much of that is going to affect your vocabulary and background knowledge. And that is a driver in literacy. So the question is, ‘are schools functioning as the great equalizer for literacy?’ Do they have a curriculum that is well-designed and intentional at building knowledge, about building vocabulary and is even designed to do so? So you think, well, what’s the evidence base? I’ll tell you that you need to have an instructional material and in a curricular environment the way classroom works in order for vocabulary to work. We know that if you have a set of lessons that are focused on say, ‘inferencing’ as a skill. You do something on ‘giraffes,’ and then you do something on ‘going to the ice cream store’ and then you do something on ‘World War II’ and then you do something on ‘your thoughts about balloons,’ that will not lead to any vocabulary growth. Instead, the evidence is quite clear. You have to read the same kind of texts over and over and over again. Same subject. So you read about ‘giraffes’ and you read about ‘zoos’ and then you read about the ‘African savanna.’ Then you read about the biology of necks. That sort of thing. That causes vocabulary growth. So the question is: “in the schools that have seen low levels of literacy for a decade, how well-designed is the instructional program in the curricular experience for kids so that that is actually happening?’ And this is not a new phenomenon. This knowledge isn’t even new to Houston. I think about the great Thaddeus Lott. He may be a principal y’all are familiar with. This epically famous principal that served, I want to say, at Wesley Elementary for decades. People came to his school, studied what he was doing, and he had a systematic, direct instruction on phonics. He had a strong, rigorous approach to background knowledge. Curriculum that was well-designed. Then, his approach to recruiting teachers focused on, of course, folks that had extremely high expectations; that if you come to school with a with a broken right arm and you can’t turn in a writing assignment because of it, you know, the teacher says, ‘well, your left arm is not broken.’ The high expectations that says, ‘No, we’re going to learn this. I’m here to support you, but we’re going to learn this’ and he creates a learning environment. He did this for 20 years at that school that got extraordinary results.

Gotta say, that’s an awful lot of words that sound suspiciously like the Underpants Gnome meme to me. To wit:

Step 1: Appoint Board of Managers
Step 2: ???????
Step 3: All schools are now passing!

I had to back away for a few minutes after that. I eventually went back and read some more, and he does get into specifics in a few places, so go read and listen for yourself. One thing he does say is that the Board of Managers is accountable to him, so to answer this question, if there’s a Board member that we the public think is dead weight, we need to convince Mike Morath of that. So, yeah.

The Texas Observer lives again

Now here’s some good news.

The board of the Texas Democracy Foundation, the nonprofit parent organization of the Texas Observer,  on Wednesday voted unanimously to rescind its earlier plan to lay off the 68-year-old magazine’s entire staff and cease publication.

“This is wonderful news,” said Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Arana. “The Observer is indispensable to Texas and to democracy.”

The board issued a statement saying they have secured short-term pledges to bridge an immediate budget shortfall, “thanks to the extraordinary success of the staff’s fundraising this week.” A GoFundMe effort begun on Monday had raised more than $275,000 on Wednesday from more than 3,000 supporters.

The board had formally announced the layoffs and shutdown to the staff on Monday, at a contentious meeting at which they sought to answer no questions. However, most staffers had found out about the decision the previous evening, via a story in another publication.

The statement, addressed to the “Texas Observer Community” included an apology to the staff “for the abruptness of the layoff vote” and said the board “deeply regret[s]” the way the staff found out. The board also apologized to major donors Lynne Dobson and Greg Wooldridge of the Tejemos Foundation and to “our community of contributors, readers and supporters.” The foundation had made a major donation to the Observer last year, but the board said the nature of that gift was misunderstood by the Observer organization.

The change of plan came in the wake of an outpouring of public support for the Observer. In addition to the GoFundMe effort, readers, former staffers and former board members, and prominent journalists from around the country reached out to Observer journalists and allies to express their solidarity with the campaign to keep the magazine afloat.

“I just got chills,” said Gayle Reaves, the Observer’s editor-at-large, when news reached staffers. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of our incredible supporters and my colleagues and the board members who helped us.”

See here for the background, and here for the statement. That statement includes a call that “we work collectively to get through the immediate future—and find a sustainable model to ensure the longevity of our beloved magazine”, so there’s clearly still work to be done. You can click the embedded image to visit the GoFundMe page if you want to contribute to that, I’m sure the more they get for the immediate issue the easier the longer-term one will be to figure out. Whatever the case, at least now they’re trying to figure it out, and for that we can be thankful. The Trib, which goes into detail about those challenges that still need to be dealt with, has more.

Texas blog roundup for the week of March 27

The Texas Progressive Alliance has left its busted bracket behind and turned its gaze towards Opening Day as it brings you this week’s roundup.

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