Taking Back the Texas Board of Education
While you’ve likely never heard about this year’s Texas Board of Education candidates, these seemingly-small-time races could have a national impact come November. As the Washington Post recently explained, with such a large textbook market in Texas, "books assigned to the state's 4.7 million students often rocket to the top of the market, decreasing costs for other school districts and leading them to buy the same materials."
In recent years the Texas Board of Education has been moving to the far right. The Board has come into the national spotlight for attempts to promote conservative ideology and remove textbook references to the civil rights movement, leaders like Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall, and words like “justice” and “equality.”
That’s why Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Meteru are running for the State Board of Education, and why they joined over a hundred supporters for this morning’s Back to School Block Walk in Austin. Both women have PhDs in education, and are Democrats who want to take politics out of the classroom and leave important decisions with teachers and experts. And they both know that to be successful this year, they'll need the help of grassroots organizing like today’s event, where supporters went door to door talking with voters.
Bell-Metereau is running against an insurance businessman who has no background in education, and ran unopposed in 2006. This time he’s got a serious challenger on his hands. Bell-Meterau got the crowd fired up before the block walk:
“We are fighting for our love Cheap Cialis of our children. You’re going to go out there and reach out into your shoes for that leather to go out and block walk—reach into your dialing fingers to make phone calls, and reach into your hearts to talk to those voters—make them catch your enthusiasm.”
I joined Jennings as she went door-to-door in the West Austin area to meet voters this morning. The streets were quiet, but the first person home was receptive. She was a mother of a two-year-old son with another child on the way, and said she’d been meaning to educate herself on the races and thanked Jennings for stopping by.
As Jennings told the crowd today, this “one-on-one contact, combined with their spirit for love of kids across Texas, is how we’re going to make it happen.”
