Prior to last week’s election, it was likely the State of Texas, under Governor Greg Abbott, would continue functioning as an extension of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign—using levers throughout the state bureaucracy to help the president round up hardworking Texans, perhaps most notably through the Department of Public Safety (DPS)

Abbott has spent his nearly 12 years in office expanding his gubernatorial power through executive orders and disaster declarations, particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of that, in the era of Operation Lone Star, was directed at enforcing so-called border security at the state level, sending millions to contractors for building walls and other pricey services in Texas’ southernmost counties. The governor entrenched immigration enforcement as a state function, through both executive action and signed legislation, even as people illegally crossed less and less into Texas from Mexico.

Texas’ role in enforcing its and the country’s immigration laws continued to grow after Trump was elected a second time in 2025. Soon after his inauguration, his administration restarted the “task force” model of what’s known as the 287(g) program, named after the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that created it. That model—discontinued under the Obama presidency amid racial profiling scandals—effectively turns local police into federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. In its new incarnation, thanks to the gusher of anti-immigrant funding unleashed by last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” and aided by a 2025 state law, came with new financial incentives for participation as well. 

Since Trump took office, some 350 Texas law enforcement agencies have entered into task force partnerships with ICE. These are primarily at the county and municipal levels, but the list also includes the Texas Attorney General’s Office—soon to be led by Democrat Nathan Johnson—the Texas National Guard, and both the criminal investigations and highway patrol divisions of DPS, which had some 5,000 commissioned officers as of last year. (Even prior to these agreements, DPS was often acting as a force multiplier for ICE.)

Gina Hinojosa on the campaign trail in 2026 (Eden Shamy)

In the wake of last week’s election, Democrat Gina Hinojosa, a Rio Grande Valley native, is preparing to become the first Hispanic governor of Texas in its history as a U.S. state. After voters spurned ICE’s overreach, it’s likely she will shift immigration-related policy significantly, but she will face some limitations and decisions about how much of Abbott’s expansive executive approach to emulate.

The disaster declarations that underlie Operation Lone Star must be regularly renewed, so she may let them lapse. 

Beyond this, advocacy groups like La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) in the Rio Grande Valley, a place that sees ICE arresting people daily in communities across the region, are calling on the governor and the rest of the state’s newly elected Democrats to get the agency out of their communities. 

“Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has the power to scale back Operation Lone Star. And she also has the opportunity, along with the other Democratic leadership, to end the enforcement of the 287(g) contracts,” Dani Marrero Hi, LUPE’s deputy director, told the Texas Observer in a phone call. “We already saw the mayor of Houston come out with the executive order to limit the police collaboration with ICE.” (Austin is taking similar action.)

According to the task force memorandums of agreement between ICE and DPS, the latter can terminate the partnership at any time. That authority, within DPS, lies with its director, Freeman Martin. 

While Hinojosa is expected to make numerous appointments as governor, the Public Safety Commission members—who oversee DPS and select its leadership—are all Abbott appointees with at least a year left on their terms. But that doesn’t mean that the board would necessarily defy Hinojosa, should she ask for the agreements to be terminated. 

“Once the governor says, ‘I don’t want you to do this anymore,’ I would raise my eyebrow if the DPS board said, ‘well, we don’t feel like it, we’re just going to go ahead and carry this out,’” Randy Erben, who was once Abbott’s legislative director and is currently a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Observer. “Agencies are not going to continue conduct that the governor, once she takes office, is unhappy with on a regular basis.”

Hinojosa’s campaign did not make the governor-elect available for an interview. DPS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

LUPE plans to meet with local and state government officials leading into the next legislative session, which starts in January. The group’s policy priorities go beyond ICE, which is only the latest symptom in years of the Rio Grande Valley’s increasing militarization, enabled and prolonged by Abbott and the Trump administration. 

Last summer, the Legislature also passed Senate Bill 8, which requires nearly all Texas sheriffs to apply for 287(g) agreements. These sheriffs do not have to apply for the task force model and may opt instead for less-aggressive partnerships that function within the county jails. The law provides some funding through a grant program.

But the turnover in state leadership could take the teeth out of SB 8 as well. The law’s enforcement mechanism is that, starting this December, “The attorney general may bring an action against a sheriff who fails to comply.” 

The Central Texas-based advocacy group Mano Amiga recently called on the Hays County sheriff, who has signed no agreement, not to do so. “Since the only 287g enforcement mechanism is the Texas attorney general: the new administration in January is not likely to take  enforcement action if the sheriff refuses to sign or delays,” the group wrote. 

Other large Texas counties that have signed no agreement include Harris, Dallas, and Travis. 

Johnson, the incoming Texas attorney general, did not respond to a request for comment. 

SB 8’s grant program is also established and administered, per the law, by the comptroller—a position set to be filled come January by Democrat Sarah Eckhardt. Eckhardt’s campaign team did not respond either to the Observer’s comment request.

Marrero Hi, the LUPE organizer, said that the Rio Grande Valley has suffered from years of being treated as a place worthy only of surveilling and patrolling: “That’s pain that an election does not fix,” she said. “But it does change the landscape and how we organize moving forward.”

The post Will Governor Hinojosa Break Up DPS and ICE? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Over the course of 12 years at the helm of Texas state government, Greg Abbott became arguably the most powerful governor—de jure and de facto—in the history of Texas. His rule grew progressively unbalanced and unchecked by the GOP-run Legislature which increasingly followed his lead, through fear or favor, or the GOP-run judiciary, which was increasingly stocked with Abbott apparatchiks. 

Much of his power accumulated through longevity and hegemony, which also allowed for an aggressive and unprecedented use of the Texas governor’s executive powers—governing via disaster proclamations that granted him unilateral executive authority over a large swath of state policy over a long period of time. This became most pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic and continued through his border disaster proclamations, the basis on which he built his Operation Lone Star state immigration dragnet.

In total, his actions amounted to a transformation of the historically weak Texas governorship, which through intentional constitutional design is less empowered than in many other states. Those constraints are achieved through, among other mechanisms, staggered appointment terms, an independent lieutenant governor (long considered, though the sentiment is now outmoded, the actual most powerful statewide official), and a decentralized executive branch with a number of other elected statewide positions. Abbott used a variety of methods, including his simple staying power, to break out of his constitutional cage—and his Democratic successor now inherits an office whose overreach she’s harshly criticized but whose power, to the extent it remains tappable, may be politically irresistible.

“Not only is this the most extensive [use of executive authority], it’s also the most unchecked. He’s used these powers in a very aggressive way,” Randall Erben, a governmental law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who closely follows state executive powers and who once served as Abbott’s legislative director, told me for an in-depth profile I did on Abbott’s executive power grabs in 2021. 

His powers continued to expand since that time. In seeking an unprecedented fourth term—which would have given him a tenure old enough to drive—Abbott was on the verge of attaining an even higher level of gubernatorial power. His control and micromanagement of the state agencies was total, and his willingness to preempt, circumvent, or otherwise dictate to the Texas Legislature was well established. 

That dominion, however, was rudely ripped away by the Texas electorate last Tuesday who instead gave the governorship to a liberal Austin state Representative named Gina Hinojosa, whose insurgent campaign was laser-focused on the casual corruption and political overreach of Abbott’s government. 

“The Republicans have been in too long, and they started to turn into a party of big government,” Erben told me after the election. “They were getting into your doctor’s office, getting into your house, and were telling businesses what they could and couldn’t do.”

Abbott (center) in 2021 (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Not long ago, Abbott and his advisors were trawling for generational legacy items—to put on the mantle next to private school vouchers—to tackle in his fourth term, including a harebrained scheme to abolish school property taxes. His data center pause, carried out via executive action, was meant to delay the permitting process until after the elections. Hinojosa, who campaigned on a full moratorium, could order agencies to extend the pause until the Legislature enacts permanent regulation. 

Abbott’s defeat and imminent departure will leave a gaping hole in Texas politics—but the power of his governorship will continue to be felt for years, including through his numerous board appointees whose terms will continue for years into the next administration, and his playbook of governing by executive order, a tactic which Hinojosa has signaled she may emulate. 

Hinojosa will begin the task of navigating her own realm of power as a governor who will have, in many ways, a more diminished authority. While her electoral mandate is strong and ability to wield the bully pulpit is still fresh, it’ll take years to stock her appointments throughout all the state agencies, and she’ll have to navigate tumultuous waters to get her priorities through a divided Legislature. 

With her historic victory—becoming the state’s first Hispanic governor and first woman and Democratic top executive in three decades—many observers are now wondering just what a Hinojosa administration will look like, what she can (or will) do right away and over the long term. And, importantly, will she be able to retain some of the same muscular power that Abbott built in the office, or will much of it atrophy by circumstance, reverting to the governorship’s rather weak status quo? 

With a new Democratic governor, a newly Democratic state House, and a state Senate as the only remaining bastion of GOP control, the next several months will bring about a wholesale recalibration of the balance of powers in Texas government. 

One aspect of Abbott’s swollen power cannot be immediately replicated:  longevity. His dozen-year reign maximized his appointment powers for hundreds of state boards, agencies, and universities, which are defused through staggered terms. Over time, he was responsible for almost every single agency commissioner, university regent, and all the other assorted gubernatorial appointees across state government. 

Second, he benefited from political hegemony—a GOP-run Legislature and GOP monopoly on statewide offices—that accompanied him from the outset of his tenure. Those legislators who still defied him, for instance the rural GOP state reps who blocked private school vouchers in 2023, were finally taken out to the woodshed in what turned out to be the twilight of his tenure. 

Lastly, Abbott pushed the reach of his executive authority to unprecedented levels through his aggressive use of expansive, seemingly perpetual emergency orders which, through the state’s Disaster Act, grant the governor unilateral power. 

With that came a rather brazen new brand of pay-to-play disaster politics in which vendors who won no-bid contracts under his emergency orders—during the pandemic and through Operation Lone Star—became major donors. 

Hinojosa was one of the most outspoken critics of this abuse of executive power, zeroing in specifically on what she saw as wasteful no-bid contracts to favored vendors at the Texas Education Agency—but also through Operation Lone Star.

“This is a corrupted use of the governor’s emergency powers,” Hinojosa told the Texas Observer for an investigation into Abbott’s cultivation of political contributions from major Operation Lone Star contractors. Through his perpetual disaster declarations, “Texas has become a pay-to-play [state] if you want these big government contracts because we don’t have fair bidding requirements. Now we see these political donors getting rich off taxpayer money with no accountability. Abbott acts as if he’s king, and he’s rewarding his patrons.”

As a candidate for governor, Hinojosa promised to bring in a newly transparent and accountable brand of state government leadership that would no longer rely on fiat and would not use the levers of power to award and cultivate campaign donors and political allies. 

Hinojosa will be able to swiftly appoint replacements at some agencies—such as the Texas Education Agency, where she promised to fire Commissioner Mike Morath, whose term conveniently expires in January, immediately. In other cases—such as the Public Safety Commission, which oversees the state police agency, where the earliest term expiration is in 2028; or the pardons and parole board, where only three of seven are up next year—her direct appointment influence will be relatively muted for some years. (That could change if Abbott appointees opt to resign.) These appointments also require confirmation from the state Senate, which will be in GOP hands for at least two more years, though the governor can make interim appointments that hold between sessions.

With a Governor Hinojosa, there is the possibility of some political struggles between agencies that remain controlled by Abbott appointees and the governor’s office that could play out on a number of issues. Or, there could be relative stability. 

“Agencies are not going to continue conduct that the governor, once she takes office, she is unhappy with. I just don’t buy that. You’d be causing a real crisis,” Erben said. 

On the flip-side, Hinojosa will have to be somewhat restrained:  “It’s not like you’re saying, I’m just going to fix this right now and I’m going to put all my people in charge. It doesn’t work that way. There’s going to be a lot of persuasion. And I’ve known Gina Hinojosa a long time. She’s a smart, savvy politician,” Erben added. “She’s also going to have to pick her fights.”   

As of today, there are eight active disaster proclamations issued by Abbott that grant his executive orders the power of law—one pertaining to border security (Operation Lone Star), two for floods, one for fire, one for severe storms, one for drought, one related to diesel fuel prices, and one for the Screwworm outbreak. The state has been under some sort of ongoing disaster order since at least 2020. Despite border crossings having almost entirely halted, that proclamation remains in effect and has been renewed 69 times. 

Those orders must be renewed every 30 days. Upon becoming governor, Hinojosa can either let those expire or terminate them as she sees fit. She can—and has said she will—issue her own disaster orders, a sign that she’s willing to some extent to follow Abbott’s executive playbook to enact her own agenda. 

During her campaign, Hinojosa said in a statement to the Texas Tribune that she pledged to issue a disaster proclamation related to high costs on day one of her gubernatorial administration—and to issue two executive orders: one to suspend the state’s gas and diesel fuel tax and the second to freeze electricity rates for all ratepayers.

Over the course of the past several years, some Republicans have tried meagerly to rein in the governor’s executive authority—and most specifically the governor’s disaster powers, with proposals to require legislative approval for ongoing emergencies. But they didn’t really push that hard, and they didn’t find any success. Why anger the most powerful leader of your own party, who was wielding that power to largely carry out favorable priorities? 

Chief antagonizer in the Texas House, GOP state Representative Brian Harrison, who has filed bills to limit the governor’s power in past sessions, is now leading an almost-surely doomed push to get Abbott to call a special session and get the current GOP Legislature to curb executive powers before Hinojosa takes office.

But Abbott has set a precedent—and with a divided Legislature could come an empowered new governor. 

“The precedent that’s being set is that any time in the future, when a governor believes that we have a problem and policymakers in Washington are not addressing the problem and policymakers at the local level are not, or are frustrating the governor’s preferences,” Dale Carpenter, a constitutional law professor at Southern Methodist University, told me back in 2021, “he can declare a disaster and set up a different set of policies and direct spending to accomplish those policy objectives.”

The post Gina Hinojosa Won’t Be Able to Govern like Greg Abbott. Should She Try? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Editor’s Note: In light of the forthcoming entrance of another Democrat into the governor’s mansion—and because exactly two decades have lapsed since Ann Richards’ passing—we’re resharing our October 6, 2006, cover story.

It is Molly Ivins’ touching and candid obituary for her friend, the last Dem to hold the state’s top office—until Gina Hinojosa, that is. Here, the tribute has been condensed and lightly copyedited.

Ann Richards’ public life was mostly about gender. She was outrageous and courageous on behalf of women everywhere.

She was also a legendary campfire cook, a beautiful ballroom dancer (she did do everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in high heels), she loved movies, was a bossy momma, just as good as at-the-moment quips as at telling great stories, a reluctant hunter (“first, you have to get up at four in the morning and dress from head to foot like a woody vine”), a great laugher, fine canoeist, former drunk, and first woman governor of Texas to get there on her own credentials.

In retrospect, it sounds almost easy. I believe if Ann had been born 10 years earlier or started 10 years later, she could have been president. But it’s easy to forget how firmly sexism ruled this culture.      

When Ann first ran for statewide office in 1982, you could feel it: the start of a movement. Those women with big hair and big purses in Amarillo and Abilene flocked to hear her. 

She said that running the treasurer’s office was just like balancing a checkbook “except more zeroes.” That quaint simile is in fact true. “Women are trained to detail, and we are expected to juggle a lot of balls at once,” she would say. In fact, motherhood is splendid training for politics. All good mothers know what to do when there’s two kids and one cookie, and all good mothers know what to do when there are two kids in the back seat hitting each other, each one of them claiming the other one started it. All political problems are merely variations of those two situations.

Gina Hinojosa, now governor-elect, on the House floor in May 2025 (Jordan Vonderhaar for the Texas Observer)

Her 1988 speech at the Democratic National Convention “made her a star overnight,” as they say. Ann had told me years earlier, “You always think Washington and New York are going to be so much harder. I mean, our friends here all think we’re wonderful, but they’re our friends, what do they know? Actually, if you can do it in Texas, you can do it anywhere.”

Ann’s opponent in the 1990 election was not [Republican] Claytie Williams but [primary opponent] Jim Mattox, who was meaner and smarter. He finally dredged up some allegation about cocaine use, and Ann, according to her campaign manager Glenn Smith, was paralyzed by it. Among other things, she was just embarrassed to have her parents hear about it. So she wound up not commenting, which turned out to set the model for pols being asked about “youthful indiscretions.”

The fall campaign teeter-tottered along, a real nail-biter with Claytie Williams helping out several times. Ann was running for “a new Texas,” as vapid a slogan as has ever been dreamed up, and Claytie, with his good ol’ boy racism and sexism—he never meant to offend a soul—kept defining “old Texas” in the most helpful way.

Ann won on the women’s vote: She carried it by almost 60 percent, including suburban Republican women.

She inherited a huge mess as governor. The state’s economy was in the toilet—oil at $8 a barrel and vast destruction left by the idiot follies of the S&L scandals. I don’t know that many of us who voted for her had expected Ann to spend most of her time helping General Motors, Apple Computer, and other dispossessed citizens, but she was quite proud of steering those deals where the state gives a company tax breaks, free infrastructure, etc. The state’s economy did grow slightly faster than the national average in those years, but we had not thought she would be cutting tax deals with big corporations. 

The Observer was not ecstatic over her performance and, as I recall, rarely had much good to say about her. In the meantime, she also had to clean up the school funding mess and the prison mess (what good liberal builds 60,000 new prison cells?). She did put 14,000 beds into a prison alcohol rehab program. More than once she sat down with a circle of alcoholic convicts and said, “My name is Ann and I am an alcoholic.” (Bush later cut the program to 3,000 beds.)

Ann disappointed many liberals, but then, she was elected governor of Texas, not Sweden.

She ran again after four exhausting years, and it was fairly apparent she didn’t really want to do it. She had been working flat-out for the entire term. Although few people knew it, Ann had a form of grand mal epilepsy that could result in seizures: It was dangerous for her to get extremely tired. Ann pushed herself so hard and what she really needed was someone to force her to stop at the end of the day. But she felt under such pressure to run again—all those people who believed in her, all those women who were inspired by her.

One thing Ann delivered on was opening government to all the people. Her record of naming blacks and Hispanics to state boards and commissions, of working them into the bureaucracy so they rise at their own pace, has not been equaled since—not that Bush or Perry tried much.

The ’94 race was the full tide of Republican reaction. Newt Gingrich & Co. had taken Congress two years earlier, and it was God, Gays, and Guns. Naturally, rumors somehow spread about Ann and lesbians: She had appointed two openly gay people out of 800 or so appointments, but gay is gay. Ann had also said that if the Legislature passed a right-to-carry law, she would veto it. They did, and she did. The NRA put on a big push to convince her that we Texas women would feel ever so much safer if we could just carry guns in our purses. Ann said, when she issued her veto, “You know I am not a sexist, but there is not a woman in this state who could find a gun in her handbag.”

Had Ann been able to see just a little further into the future, she would have run like a racehorse. She really felt contempt for Bush and thought his ignorance and arrogance a dangerous combination. Depending on how liberal you are (and this magazine is lily-pure), you could also get mad about Ann’s lobbying career once she left office. When she was with the law firm of Verner, Lipfert, she actually lobbied for the tobacco companies. When I talked to her, it seemed to me more of a case of Ann getting paid for her political judgment, and she was right on every call she made. She told me the Senate had made a mistake by holding out for better than the attorneys’ general agreement with the tobacco companies, and she was right.

I’m glad she got to make money and take the grandkids on cruises and the girls down the Grand Canyon and all that good stuff. The most touching moment at a smaller service for Ann came from Bud Shrake, known as Ann’s “walker” when she was governor. Shrake is not likely to spill sticky sentiment across an occasion. He said simply, “She was the center of my life for 17 years. I loved her. A-men. A-women. A-Ann.”

I think what she said most often in her life was, “Idn’t it wonderful?”

The post Molly Ivins on Ann Richards’ Legacy appeared first on The Texas Observer.

My son is 3 now. So in just one or two vanishingly short years, he’ll enter Austin’s public school system. That doesn’t make me special—there are 70,000 kids in the Austin Independent School District (ISD)—but it does make me, well, nervous. 

Because public schools in the capital city and around Texas today are being roiled by an interventionist state government, one backed by out-of-state special interests. What’s happening now goes far beyond Texas’ historic financial neglect or legislative incapacity to properly finance the education system. What we have before us is a many-tentacled crisis, one that looks and acts like a colossal heist in broad daylight but whose full scope is hard to grasp amid the myriad particulars.

In other words, I needed to talk to someone. About private school vouchers, now in its first school year of implementation, which Republicans want to expand next session. About the growing number of Texas Education Agency (TEA) takeovers—whereby a single school’s failure on standardized tests can mean elected trustees are swept aside, soul-sucking pedagogical reforms are implemented, and campuses are parceled out to charter school operators (despite clear conflicts of interest)—one of which looms over Austin ISD as I write this. 

So I spoke in late September (prior to the elections) to Carrie Griffith, director of the two-year-old nonprofit Our Schools Our Democracy, a group that has lately brought an energetic and nerdy zeal to watchdogging not just the matters mentioned above but the longer-standing problem of unchecked charter expansion. On balance, I felt a bit better afterward.

GB: The name of your group makes it clear that you’re linking together public schools and democracy. But what exactly is the threat to democracy that comes from expanding charter schools, private school vouchers, and state takeovers?

When we were brainstorming names, we really wanted to make the connection to what we are seeing privatization do in terms of truly being a vote steal. By that I mean that the three publicly funded systems of schools—independent school districts, charter schools, and now private school vouchers—only one of those is publicly governed. And so as we are expanding systems with public taxpayer dollars but removing the elected governance and the right of the community to have a say, it’s a direct steal of their democratic input into a system that they’re funding.

Something that we try to make clear is that charter schools are not public schools. They’re defined as being public in the Texas Education Code because the lobby worked hard to get that definition in there, but we define public as being both publicly funded but also publicly governed. 

How exactly does a charter school affect overall public school districts—why is it a threat other than just that it’s not subject to as many regulations?

Charter schools are only just now beginning to be understood by the broad public as a threat. Whereas the voucher law is sort of the big bad wolf—it’s easy to understand that this is the diversion of public funds to private entities and that it’s a threat to our public schools—it’s much, much more difficult to understand why charter schools are also a threat, and so I like to call them the wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

They primarily, like private schools, can selectively admit and artificially cap enrollment. They have to be a little bit sneakier in the way that they sort of shape their enrollment because they can’t explicitly deny admission in the way that private schools can, but they absolutely can de facto. And so we see this in ways like having uniform requirements, not providing transportation, coaching students out, not providing special education services. But I think the biggest thing that readers really need to understand is that charter schools happen almost entirely outside the democratic process. The only element in the entire process of approving a charter school is when the original charter can be vetoed by the elected State Board of Education. 

Here in Austin, the pending takeover is a constant topic of conversation, and people seem a little confused about: Does TEA really have a choice in the matter at this point, given that we have the school ratings and that the statute seems to say the state “shall” take action?

So it is a “shall” statute, which is wrong. That needs to be changed. … My understanding is, in the Austin situation, there is kind of one final lever possible and that is if the parents of the schools that are triggering the takeover, if they themselves request that their schools be closed, then that could buy some time, which is a Sophie’s Choice and it’s really awful because those families don’t deserve to have their schools close.

Readers really need to understand that failure is being defined by the state, and it is being defined very, very narrowly, almost entirely based on standardized test scores. 

Is it possible or have you seen with your own eyes a school with an F that you know, in reality, is a nurturing, well-administered institution? 

Oh, 100 percent. I have three daughters in Austin ISD; my high school senior started kindergarten in our neighborhood public school that was rated F. She was a white minority, and I was an elementary school parent there for 13 years because of the age difference of my kids. Its accountability rating has increased because the demographics have changed; you’re getting more and more students who come from educated families. But the teachers are not different. The curriculum isn’t different. There were many years where the principals were the same. All three of my daughters had the same kindergarten teacher. The arts program is incredible. It’s an incredible, incredible school. 

Thinking ahead to January, to the next legislation session, if you assume Republicans probably still have the Senate and House [November 10 Editor’s Note: lol], what are two or three things that are within the realm of possibility to achieve for public schools?

High-level, our legislative priorities will always, regardless of who is governing, be transparency, fiscal responsibility, and fairness. … Thinking about vouchers, even though the comptroller’s office has already requested that the program be expanded to $4.4 billion, including waitlists … our ask and the ask of many people on all sides of the conversation is that it be capped until there is better data.

In terms of takeovers, I think that this situation where one campus can trigger the takeover is low-hanging fruit that a lot of reasonable people are scratching their heads at and thinking this really doesn’t make sense. So that will be a pretty basic ask. 

Charters … one thing that has consistently been on our agenda, we want that a charter school be required to provide notice that a campus or district is alternative accountability [i.e., uses different tracking standards] and what that means, because alternative accountability exists for very unique campuses like [those focused on severe special needs] and adult learning. But charters abuse it, and they identify as a part of the alternative accountability system way more and without there being a substantiated need.

Do you have any specific advice you give to Texas parents who are concerned or panicked about the state of their public education system? What do you recommend people do?

It’s sort of a long-term solution to a short-term problem, but vote. I mean, pay attention because it’s really important that people understand you can’t just assume that a Democrat on the ballot is going to be the candidate that’s best for education. There are so many well-funded Democrats that are infiltrating state boards and school boards to push these privatizing tricks on our districts. So really pay attention and stay connected to groups like mine and what the teacher unions are saying. 

And I always like to share with frustrated families … there really is nothing happening at the local level anymore that is the fault of the local governance. Local control doesn’t even exist anymore. So every complaint that a family has about a school really can be tracked back to the state, and that makes us feel as parents like we have less of a say, and it feels like a harder problem to solve. But just really celebrate and support your neighborhood public schools and be willing to do the thing that the teacher or the principal is asking for until we can get out of this mess and we can restore local control and adequate school funding and quality curriculum and teacher autonomy and a system that measures quality as we define it and not as the state is defining it. So, patience, compassion, and activism—those are the three answers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Texans Are Losing Their Democracy, School by School appeared first on The Texas Observer.