On June 1, shortly after the school year ended, the Republi-fascist–controlled Texas Education Agency (TEA) removed the elected leadership of Houston Independent School District (HISD). It put the district under direct state control. The new leadership, Christian fascist Mike Miles, quickly began putting in place a “New Education System” (NES) in HISD.

On June 2, all employees of 29 HISD schools, from principals to maintenance workers, had to reapply for their jobs. All the schools are in industrial areas north and south of the Houston Ship Channel populated mainly by Black and Latino people. Miles held two “public meetings” in June to discuss the state takeover. The first was disrupted by people chanting and shouting against the takeover. Miles stayed in a back room and appeared only when the board voted on his contract. At the second “public” hearing, only 35 people were allowed into a room which could hold hundreds. Others who tried to enter were pushed back by armed police, and at least one man, a teacher, was arrested.

Training Children for a Future as Prisoners

During the spring and early summer, protests and rallies against the takeover were held at schools throughout the district. They usually featured Democratic political leaders like Mayor Sylvester Turner and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. But by July 11, 28 HISD schools were officially in NES, and another 57 were “NES-Aligned (NES-A).” By July 14, 500 HISD administrative positions had been eliminated. All teachers had to resign if they didn’t want to work under NES or NES-A, or face the prospect of losing their teaching certificate. Hundreds of staff workers were fired.

By August 1, Miles had announced that school libraries were being shut down in NES schools, and librarians would lose their jobs. What had been libraries were converted into detention centers—in the fascist language of the NES, these rooms for punishing students for “misbehavior” are now called “Team Centers.” On August 5, several hundred people came to an angry protest against the fascist state takeover.

But when what remains of the teaching staff returns on August 14, and students return to re-opened schools on August 24, they will find a landscape remade. Teachers who had been beloved fixtures in their communities will be gone. New principals, appointed by the state, will be in charge.  Detention centers will have replaced libraries.

Exactly what NES means in terms of actual curriculum is not clear. One teacher told the Texas Observer, “We have no idea what we’re walking into when those doors open.” But every minute of the day will be carefully calibrated, monitored and recorded, and everything will be focused on standardized tests. An elementary school teacher said that teachers had received schedules for the students, and there was no downtime. “To not give kids any downtime, for them to be productive every single second, or [not] have any breathing room, it’s like we’re training them to be prisoners.” 

Turning Education into a Commodity

A sustained attack to undermine and cut funding for public education has been underway in Texas (and other states) for at least 30 years. It has been bankrolled by billionaire fascists such as Farris Wilks, a West Texas “oil man” who thinks Biblical values should guide a Texas run exclusively by fundamentalist Christians. Wilks and others have spent tens of millions of dollars “funding far-right Texas candidates” and developing fascist “grass roots” groups across the state, especially in the sprawling suburbs of major cities such as Houston, Austin, and Dallas. They rail against what they say is the promotion of an “LGBTQ agenda” in public schools. They have “abolish(ed) critical race theory” from being taught in public schools, as Christian fascist Governor Greg Abbott put it.

In place of existing public schools, Republi-fascists have promoted “vouchers” (meaning the state provides money for a child to attend another school) and “charter schools” (schools run by an entity, often Christian, contracted by the state, but not part of any school district).

Taken together, these measures have funneled more and more children into Christian fundamentalist programs and schools, where teaching about the horrors of slavery in the U.S. is forbidden, discussion or even recognition of LGBTQ people is out of the question, creationism is taught, and the science of evolution repudiated. They also take more and more students and money out of public schools, whose funding depends largely on attendance. Then fascist politicians like Abbott turn around and point to schools struggling because Republi-fascist policies have gutted them of money and resources and say this supposedly shows “the failure of government schools.”

Wheatley High

HISD is the largest school district in Texas, and one of the largest in the country. Its  students are about 62 percent Latino, 22 percent Black, and 10 percent white. Sixty percent are considered “economically disadvantaged.” The district has been a significant obstacle to fascist attacks on public education in Texas. For years, Abbott and others threatened to close down certain HISD schools, allegedly for low performing test scores. In fact, HISD’s “overall academic standing is strong relative to its big-city Texas peers.” HISD as a whole received a “B” in the most recent state school ratings. 

One of the schools repeatedly singled out for “poor performance” by Abbott and others is Wheatley High, a beloved and historic institution in the Fifth Ward, one of Houston’s oldest ghettos. In 2022, after a few years of dedicated effort by teachers, staff, alumni, and students, Wheatley passed its TEA grading. Wheatley High, and much of Fifth Ward celebrated. The Houston Astros honored Wheatley teachers at one of their games. Many thought the threat from the state was over.

But it wasn’t.

The state argued that since Wheatley and some other schools had previously failed under the continually mutating standards of the TEA, it could legally take over the entire HISD. The fascists responsible claimed their harsh moves would benefit the schoolchildren and their parents. Abbott declared that “there has been a longtime failure by HISD, and the victims of that failure are the students.”

Abbott lied about the facts. And he definitely doesn’t give a damn about the well-being of HISD students.

Invoking “parental rights” is a time-honored fascist tactic to mobilize people and indoctrinate children in American chauvinism, white supremacy, male supremacy, and traditional heterosexual gender roles. This has been a central theme of Christian fascist leaders and the frenzied Nazi-like mobs storming school board meetings across the state, demanding school libraries be purged of books they don’t approve, and LGBTQ teachers fired. But Abbott and the fascist cohort showed nothing but contempt for the expressed desires and demands of parents in Fifth Ward and other inner-city neighborhoods as they ran roughshod over them in their rush to take over HISD.

No “Staying Put”

Education for the masses of people, especially the masses of oppressed people, has always concentrated the racism and injustice that stamp U.S. society as a whole, despite the best efforts of many teachers to bring a joy for learning to children, and to introduce them to some of the wonders and beauties of the world and universe around us all. The very concept of public education, especially for Black and Brown youth, has long been bitterly opposed by racists since the end of the Civil War in 1865.

But now, all of society and its institutions are being torn apart, including educational institutions. Fascists are no longer just attacking public education and people who support it, though they are doing plenty of that. They are transforming education into a harsh fascist regime of enforced lock-step regimentation, drills of rote memorization instead of critical thinking, and unquestioning acceptance of the way things are. Fights over the content and direction of public education, even for its very existence, are one of society’s foremost battlegrounds.

Bob Avakian wrote:

As this situation develops, and the ruling class is more and more unable to rule in the old way, society and daily life for masses of people, from different parts of society, can become increasingly unsettled and chaotic, with frequent “disruptions” of the “normal” way things have been.

And as “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way.