Quiet Resistance

Just when your average rational person couldn’t respect and admire public school teachers any more, there’s a new alleged “gotcha” video that only reveals them as critical thinkers and fact lovers, just the kind of people we non-crazies want teaching our children.

In the video that shall go unnamed to keep it from generating any more views, some C-team right-wing personality — let’s call him “Gotcha Gary” — shows hidden-camera footage of North Texas public school educators admitting to, in Gotcha Gary’s words, “possibly breaking the law.”

The law is Texas’ ridiculous ban on Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), Critical Race Theory or CRT (whatever that is; just another right-wing bogeyman), and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in public schools.

In Gotcha Gary’s new video, a Coppell school district administrator is revealed explaining the way in which he and his team teach a certain equity-minded science standard without triggering Gov. Greg Abbott’s goon squad. Our new favorite person, Coppell ISD’s Evan Whitfield, says, “We kind of dance, tap dance, around calling it anything, because if I were to say, ‘Coppell is teaching [Next Generation Science Standards],’ if I were to publish that on our website, that’s when we would get a call” from the TEA (Texas Education Agency). “Yeah, but are we still teaching NGSS-ish? Absolutely.”

NGSS says that “students from all backgrounds should have a fair opportunity to participate in scientific learning experiences that are authentic, relevant, and engaging.”

How that’s terrible, only ask a terrible person like Gotcha Gary or Greg Abbott.

And it’s not just teachers Gary’s accosting. Roaming outside schools with his microphone on camera, he also corners parents. He peppers them not with questions or context but with leading statements. In front of a Coppell elementary school in the new video, Gotcha Gary jumps on a mom walking her kid out of the building and, without any context, merely says to Mom rapid fire-like, “A Coppell school district administrator was captured on hidden camera bragging about deceiving parents,” before jamming his mic in her face.

The woman stops, looks at him, then simply says, “That’s awful, yeah.”

Groundbreaking stuff, Gary.

His whole point is to drum up support for vouchers or “Education Savings Accounts (ESAs),” as Abbott misleadingly calls them, no doubt because “private-school welfare” would not go over well. On Gotcha Gary’s YouTube page (17.4K subscribers), his group says, “Passing legislation for universal school choice” or ESAs “is the best way to empower parents to choose schools where they can be confident their children aren’t being taught controversial ideologies like Critical Race Theory.”

SEL, CRT, and DEI, Gary says in the new video, “bring racism. They bring antisemitism. They divide us.”

Amid the incessant whining from far-right snowflakes that fact-based history makes white students feel bad because their ancestors killed impoverished Blacks and Hispanics and that equity-focused hiring discriminates against Whitey, many teachers — lots even in North Texas, apparently — soldier on in the name of equality, equity, and fact-based instruction.

At Keller ISD, teachers are plowing forward with SEL principles but under a different name. At Edgewood ISD, an ELAR content coordinator tells Gotcha Gary that she and her team are ignoring the CRT ban because they “do not follow much of what Abbott is trying to get us to do,” and in Plano, Gotcha Gary nabs an administrator being rational by saying diversity trainings are still being conducted there.

ESAs, or vouchers, will be Topic No. 1 in January, when the Texas Legislature reconvenes. Last week at the Capitol, the Texas House Committee on Public Education held a two-day discussion on ESAs/vouchers with speakers from both sides of the debate. One member of the Texas Democratic Rural Caucus told KUT News in Austin that “public education in Texas is on a path toward complete disarray, and this is by design. The Abbott crowd is deliberately going beyond just dismantling our public schools [and is] actually hell-bent on sabotaging the actual existence of public education itself.”

In Texas now, 14- to 15-year-olds can work up to 48 hours per week, almost like adults. The endgame for conservatives — mostly white, mostly wealthy, often Christian — is to segregate poor (often Black or brown) students from whites to allow the whites to further their education while Black/brown students spend their precious youth and the rest of their miserable lives clocking in at blue-collar jobs. The ESA/voucher train will also barrel right over poor, rural whites, which is why rural Texas Republicans have joined minority Dems in quashing ESAs/vouchers in the state year after year. There’s now a difference maker. Big-money donors have foisted ESA/voucher-loving Republicans into rural seats formerly occupied by pragmatic, anti-ESA/voucher Republicans, meaning this time around in the lege, ESAs/vouchers will cruise to approval.

Data from other states has proven that ESAs/vouchers are only wealthy welfare. Parents who can afford private schools have been whining forever about paying tuition at St. John’s Wort or Our Lady of Hail Mary Passes while also funding public school students through taxation, never realizing that an educated populace is a healthy populace. Or maybe that’s the plan. When you’re poor and uneducated, you’ll believe anything, even that wealth trickles down. The gap between the haves and have-nots has never been wider, and approving ESAs/vouchers now will only turn that gap into an untraversable chasm.

Public school teachers are our only hope to staunch the changing tide. For them, going on strike would be a challenge — too much to lose in a souring labor market. Quiet resistance may be the only option. As Gotcha Gary has proven, Coppell, Plano, Keller school districts and others are leading that charge. You can help by supporting them via social media and by helping pay for classroom supplies.

And by writing letters and/or fiery columns in local magazines.

This column reflects the opinions of the editorial board and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.