Sometime in the early 2010s at a teacher prep for our state’s high-stakes test at my old high school, one voice stood out. After we’d weathered the administrators’ obligatory pep talks, Kirk Ninemire’s hand shot up. As nervous titters ran through the audience, the visiting administrators exchanged wry looks. They had been clued. They knew what was coming. Even so, they tried to put it off, but finally they had to call on that big arm that was straining to the ceiling.
And when they did, the big man made quite a production of it. He knew all eyes were on him. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, exhaled a big sigh, then said with his best stentorian teacher voice, “We’re being set up, people. The state is setting us up for failure.”
On the word “failure,” his big hand slammed the table. What my fellow teacher said back in those bygone days was not only true but scarily prescient.
The state of Texas, governed by a right-wing clique, set public schools up for failure with its unfunded mandates, high-stakes testing, constant underfunding, and the over-the-top denigration of educators the past few years. Someone who gets this is former award-winning Fort Worth high school teacher and current candidate for Texas House District 97 Beth McLaughlin, who has pointed out, “The ‘crisis’ in public education has been managed and amplified for political gain and profit.”…