The campaign to sabotage Texas’ public schools

This may be a longer article than many posted on Tildes but I think it is really, really worth not only reading but sharing widely. The author chronicles several years of recent history in a small Texas town when far-right billionaires (some even from out of state) used their money and political influence to undermine the local community and weaken public institutions, in this case targeting the public school system in favor of private or "charter" schools. What makes the article especially valuable is that it lays bare the tactics used to hijack public discourse and turn the local community against itself, with the outcome of public goods being replaced by the ideological and for-profit interests of the billionaires organizing the campaign.

This narrative is especially important because it is a pattern repeated more and more often around the US and probably elsewhere as financial elites don't directly steal from the public but rather manipulate the public into willingly handing public goods over to them. It is part of the broader pattern of privatizing public schools, prisons, transportation, utilities and weakening important institutions like public libraries, environmental protections, and safeguards in the democratic process.

Although the story doesn't appear to be ending well for this town, the article did highlight some important points. Several attempts to undercut public school funding were stopped as the thinking public were made aware of the true motives behind those campaigns. The tragedy though, and the reason this story is so urgent, is that campaigns like this one opposed to public schools are relentless, well funded and adapting. And they increasingly take advantage of social media to stir up outrage in the public and direct it against the public interest instead of in defense of it. The challenge for anyone who agrees with this interpretation of events and thinks it is important is to keep the spotlight on this issue, keep exposing the supporters of these campaigns, and to help organize defense against them.

Thanks for posting this, @AugustusFerdinand. This is one of the best, most important articles I've read via Tildes.

I’ve watched my own district’s school board meetings go from snoozefests to tense and angry. I’ve watched board members I like and support become hardened and disillusioned from the attacks they receive. We had a far-right anti-masker candidate go for the lead position and almost win, and I do not work in a heavy far-right area.

Part of the reason that school board meetings are generally snoozefests is because the work that they do is genuinely uninteresting. Lots of procedures and bylaws and finance that’s obtuse. The hope is that, by putting good people in there — the ones who want to wade through all that kind of stuff in the first place — they will use their efforts and knowledge to make decisions for what’s best for the district.

It is terribly easy to disrupt that though. Just go in to those snoozefests with anger and attacks. Pull focus. Make accusations. At the best you get the outcome you want, but even if you don’t, you stop the actual work from happening and gum everything up. You also exhaust the efforts and goodwill of the people who are there in the first place.

A kid might take hours or days to build an intricate structure with legos. Planning, executing, revising, until what they’ve built matches the beautiful structure they see in their mind.

It takes only seconds for another kid, though, to mess that all up. He can knock it over, or pull off a roof, or just relentlessly insult the kid who made it in the first place.

What we’re seeing right now is that many adults have realized that it is very easy to knock over the legos. It’s trivial to mess up that structure, and it makes their accusations that the structure is unfit sound more compelling.

Also, there are almost no repercussions for them.

Especially if their kids aren’t the ones spending every day inside those structures in the first place.

Boy howdy was this a rough read. I've not been keeping abreast of the contemporary school board wars, and had only hints and guesses that things had gotten this ugly. I have a degree in education, and even though I ultimately decided on a different life trajectory it still hurts to see public schools becoming battlegrounds for acrid, spectacle-raising politics.

The article does a great job at running through the threads of right-wing influence web. I would have guessed these to be more grassroots than they seem to be in reality--which is simultaneously a bit of a relief and a source of dread for me.

It seems like the latter-day Republican machine is just about keeping people as scared and as angry as humanly possible, and pointing that adrenaline towards their political ends. Any possible battleground for this now appears to be fair game.

I am glad to no longer be in Texas. I hope I don't sound too hyperbolic when I say I am scared for where it may be headed.