Post-Mortem of May's Houston Education Rally

On May 19th, 2018, educators throughout Harris County congregated near Discovery Green for the "Texas Public Education Rally." Co-sponsored by AFT, the "rally" was not advertised as a protest, demonstration, or anything looking like a strike, as we know educators do not have the legal right to strike in Texas. The Facebook invitation explained:

We are proud to announce that on May 19th Texas AFT, Mike Collier, and Texans for Public Education will be holding a Rally for Public Education for all teachers, parents, students, and all those who care about public education across the state of Texas. Join us at Discovery Green in Houston as we stand up for a first-class public education system and hold our leaders accountable.

Mike Collier is a candidate for Lt Governor and will run against Lt Governor Daniel Patrick. Collier's "issues" page has a fluffy claim that education is a "highest priority" but includes little detail except that he is opposed to standardized testing and that higher education should be affordable.

Texans for Public Education are a very imprecise advocacy group who are "a group of people who are sick of what the politicians are doing with our school system, so we're taking it back using something they understand very well."

The intended day for the "rally" was the day after the shooting at Sante Fe High School, and the discourse sharply moved to a question of "safety." We will address realities of school safety in a future posts. Here, we want to return to the "rally" in Houston and its insufficiency to impress neither the taxpayers nor the politicians.

We suppose that Texans could build some critical mass similar to educators in West Virginia or Colorado or North Carolina or Arizona where they decisively used effective solidarity and effective communication to persuade the community that neoliberal politicians' decades of education budget and policies have demonstrated ... again ... that neoliberalism is always a poison pill for the community.

But Texans shouldn't hold their breaths.

Seth Uzman explains that Texan educators have multiple disadvantages compared to other states:

1. The part-time Legislature, meeting only every two years, while bureaucrats of SBOE and THECB maintain daily hours. 
2. Second, in any right-to-work state with no collective bargaining rights, striking has potentially significant penalties for militant teachers. Duh.
3. "Aggravating the situation is the state’s cruelly stupid mechanism for funding teachers’ benefits. Texas is one of 15 states that doesn’t allow teachers to pay into Social Security, leaving them instead with a poorly organized pension fund through the state’s Teacher Retirement System." 

We want to discuss these other issues including the lean towards a privatized pension fund. We also need to review the state and court hostility toward laborers. We need to discuss the collaboration of community colleges and the THECB.

Actions like the rally for public education may have value in bringing together and energizing a group of people, but only if there's a significant next step that presses the need for face-to-face meetings with legislators. Because we know that as long as rallies take place outside of work hours, outside of legislative sessions, outside of the the earshot of the SBOE and the THECB, that those with power aren't listening. It will take more sustained action to be heard. The State of Texas is a well-organized oligarchy and each educator must become more direct, effective, and energized against it.