In his first public event after winning the Democratic primary for governor, Beto O’Rourke took the stage in a North Dallas church for a town hall on what he says is the most pressing issue in Texas: education.
O’Rourke pledged support for teacher pay increases and more money for public schools while pushing back on the renewal of voucher efforts in the state as he gave a sweeping overview of his policy ambitions.
“If we want to see better jobs in this state, and want Texans to actually work them, we’ve got to improve our pre-K through community college systems of education in the state of Texas,” O’Rourke said, adding that the state has fallen behind others during Gov. Greg Abbott’s tenure. “We’ve got to be the best in the country. And when we do that, not only will we be creating better jobs … but we’ll have a workforce that will actually be able to compete for them.”
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/JO7OUQLJR5GCZCDU7CCTVUDBQ4.jpg "Beto O’Rourke Pledges To Increase School Funding, Fight Vouchers During Dallas Campaign Stop - The Dallas Morning News 2")
The Dallas event was the first of a handful of policy-specific town halls that O’Rourke will have throughout the state, addressing issues such as jobs and health care.
Abbott, too, used the Dallas area as a launching point for his educational platform, announcing his “Parental Bill of Rights” in January at Lewisville’s Founders Classical Academy.
After being introduced by Dallas’ State Board of Education member Aicha Davis, O’Rourke tied Monday’s anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” — where John Lewis and other protesters were beaten by Selma, Ala., police during a march on voting rights on Mar. 7, 1965 — to the ensuing efforts from another Texas political leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
A little more than a week after Lewis and others were attacked, Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to push for the Voting Rights Act. In his speech, Johnson recalled his time as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, at a segregated school.
“Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child,” Johnson said during his address.
O’Rourke said that Johnson “understood that our public school classrooms are perhaps the most perfect representation of our democracy that exists.”
“Yes, we learn reading, writing and arithmetic in those classrooms, right?” he said. “But we also learn how to work together, and how to not see each other as the enemy at the end of the day. We learn civics; we learn to do and build and create things together. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what democracy is?”
Prior to taking questions from the crowd, O’Rourke quickly ran through four education-focused policy points.
He repeatedly stressed the need to attract, recruit and retain high-quality educators. O’Rourke said that he’d like to get teacher pay in Texas “at least” to the national average.
The national average for public school teachers for 2019-20 was $64,133, according to data from the National Education Association. Texas ranked 27th, with an average salary of $57,090, over $7,000 less than the national average.
He added that he wants to provide retired teachers a cost-of-living increase, something that state lawmakers haven’t approved since 2013.
As for school funding, O’Rourke said state leaders must reject voucher-like efforts and instead fully fund public schools and special education. In general, vouchers allow families to use money that would have otherwise flowed to public schools on private school education.
In perhaps his most specific policy solution, O’Rourke said he wants Texas schools funded by enrollment and not by attendance — the current mechanism. With statewide attendance rates at around 96% even before the pandemic, attendance-based funding leaves public schools to fill the gap for approximately 260,000 students who are enrolled but aren’t in regular attendance.
O’Rourke also targeted the state’s assessment, the STAAR test. He said if he were in office right now, he would cancel the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness for the current school year. In the future, he pledged to change the assessment system so that it would be used more as a diagnostic test to help students and schools and less as a cudgel for “punitive measures.”
During the townhall, Rosemary Curts — a Dallas ISD educator and teacher union Alliance/AFT steward — asked O’Rourke about Dallas’ teacher pay and evaluation system, which heavily relies on student assessments like STAAR. Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath, a former Dallas ISD trustee, has pushed the model statewide, as part of a teacher pay pilot. O’Rourke responded that Curts had his “commitment” that he wouldn’t support tying pay to student assessments.
O’Rourke didn’t give much oxygen to the current furor over “critical race theory” nor how race and sex is being taught in Texas schools. Such topics have been key issues for some conservative politicians.
After the event, O’Rourke told The Dallas Morning News that in his travels across the state in recent years, he “almost uniformly” hears parents talk about more substantive issues, like educational quality and teacher pay, and not the academic theory that’s debated in higher education and not K-12 schools.
“Of all the challenges that we have in public ed … let’s focus on the problems that we really have,” O’Rourke said. “We don’t have a problem with CRT. We don’t have a problem with transgender kids in middle school athletics. We really have problems with reading, graduation and college preparedness. Let’s focus on that.”
Abbott, in his campaign stop in Lewisville, outlined what he saw was needed to “restore parents as the primary decision-makers of their child’s education and healthcare issues.”
Included in that call was requiring school districts to provide all course materials and curriculum available to parents, and targeting the removal of teacher licenses for educators who give students “obscene” content.
A gaggle of state and local politicians were in attendance at Northhaven Church, including Mike Collier, the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor, State Sen. Nathan Johnson (D-Dallas), and a handful of Democratic state representatives: DeSoto’s Carl Sherman, Dallas’ Rafael Anchia and Julie Johnson, and Carrollton’s Michelle Beckley.
But the politician who received the loudest ovation was Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, so much so that O’Rourke said that he would mention Jenkins if needed to get the crowd’s energy back up.
O’Rourke did just that 15 minutes into his talk, when a pair of hecklers — including Highland Park reality star and self-professed professional troll Alex Stein — shouted at the candidate from the church’s balcony.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Clay Jenkins!” O’Rourke quipped as Stein was escorted out of the venue.
Jenkins later posted a cellphone video of Stein and the other heckler filming him as he walked home from the event.
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
