"America’s entrepreneurial boom begins long before venture capital," by Anthony Hernandez, Ph.D.

Friends,

Dr. Anthony Hernandez’ just-published piece in Fortune, “America’s Entrepreneurial Boom Begins Long Before Venture Capital,” makes a powerful and necessary point: entrepreneurship does not begin in boardrooms or venture-capital meetings. It begins in classrooms, community colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, and other Minority-Serving Institutions that cultivate the talent, confidence, and opportunity on which our economy depends.

His argument matters because it reframes education policy as economic policy. At a time when Latino entrepreneurs are helping drive business formation, job creation, and revenue growth across the United States, disinvesting in the institutions that prepare these future innovators is not only unjust—it is economically shortsighted.

Dr. Hernandez reminds us that America’s competitiveness depends on whether we are willing to invest in the students, workers, and communities already shaping the nation’s future. This is an important essay for educators, policymakers, business leaders, and anyone concerned about inclusive opportunity and shared prosperity.

I encourage you to read and share it: https://lnkd.in/gcsSzf2k

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.


America’s entrepreneurial boom begins long before venture capital

by Anthony Hernandez, Ph.D. July 5, 2026

Dr. Anthony Hernandez is a faculty member in the Department of Educational 

Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.©courtesy of Anthony Hernandez


The United States has spent years worrying about slowing business creation. But one group of entrepreneurs has quietly prevented that decline. According to a new report out of Stanford, between 2017 and 2023, Latino-owned businesses added 180,000 new firms while white-owned businesses lost roughly 140,000. Put differently, without Latino entrepreneurs, America would have ended the period with fewer businesses than it started with.

Latino entrepreneurs weren’t simply contributing to America’s business growth. They were preventing its decline.

Yet this remarkable economic story has received surprisingly little attention. At a moment when business leaders are searching for new engines of economic growth, one of the country’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial forces has been hiding in plain sight.

Latino-owned businesses added nearly one million jobs during those six years, compared with roughly 658,000 among white-owned firms. Revenue climbed from $495 billion to more than $832 billion, a 68 percent increase compared with 45 percent growth among white-owned firms. Latino-owned businesses generated more net new firms and jobs than businesses owned by any other major racial or ethnic group.

But this isn’t simply a story about one community. The broader Latino economy now approaches $4 trillion in annual economic output, making it one of the world’s largest economies if it stood alone. It is growing more than twice as fast as the overall U.S. economy.

These entrepreneurs did not simply appear. Every founder begins somewhere. Behind every successful entrepreneur is a talent-development system that helped prepare them. We often celebrate entrepreneurs after they build successful companies but spend far less time thinking about the institutions that helped prepare them.

Colleges and universities, particularly Minority-Serving Institutions, are part of America’s economic infrastructure. They produce workers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. If policymakers and business leaders want more business creation, they cannot afford to weaken one of the country’s most productive talent pipelines.

As a former Title V administrator at a Hispanic-Serving Institution, I have spent years studying how colleges create pathways into economic mobility. Research consistently shows that these institutions produce strong workforce, degree completion, and economic mobility outcomes despite serving students with fewer resources.

The story is visible at Compton College, a Minority-Serving Institution in California. Over the past decade, the college has invested in the supports that help students complete college and enter the workforce like dual-enrollment programs, workforce advising, childcare, healthcare access, basic-needs supports, and transfer pathways. These are often described as “student services.” Business leaders should recognize them as investments in future workers and entrepreneurs.

Corporate America spends billions searching for talent. Yet one of the country’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial pipelines already exists. Partnerships with these institutions offer companies access to future founders, engineers, healthcare workers, technology professionals, and business leaders. Supporting these institutions is not charity. It is a long-term talent strategy.

IPEDS data show that Compton College outperforms many peer institutions in completion and transfer despite serving large numbers of Pell-eligible students. Those outcomes strengthen local labor markets and expand the nation’s talent pipeline.

But federal support for Minority-Serving Institutions has become increasingly uncertain.

This debate comes at a pivotal moment. Even as new research documents the rapid growth of Black and Latino entrepreneurship, policymakers are reducing or redirecting investments in higher education, including programs that support many Minority-Serving Institutions. America cannot expect to produce more entrepreneurs while investing less in the institutions that educate them.

Policymakers should strengthen these institutions through investments tied to workforce development, entrepreneurship education, and student success. Business leaders should do the same. Rather than viewing partnerships with Minority-Serving Institutions as philanthropy, companies should view them as long-term talent investments through internships, workforce partnerships, entrepreneurship centers, and research collaborations.

Returns on educational investment also extend well beyond the individual student. They benefit their families, neighborhoods, employers, and regional economies. A healthy workforce pipeline is not a social luxury. It is fundamental to doing business.

The future of American entrepreneurship will not be determined solely by venture-capital or startup investment. We can invest in the institutions preparing tomorrow’s entrepreneurs or continue treating them as expendable.

America cannot celebrate record entrepreneurial growth while underinvesting in the institutions producing tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. America’s next generation of entrepreneurs is already in our classrooms. The question is whether we will invest in them before our competitors do. Strengthening those institutions is not simply education policy. It is economic policy.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Birthright Citizenship and the Constitutional Rejection of Caste: A Searing Defense by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

I recently heard on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s powerful concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case in Trump v. Barbara may be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of American History by the Organization of American Historians. If so, that would be more than fitting.

Justice Jackson’s opinion is not only legally rigorous; it is historically grounded. In defending what birthright citizenship means under the Fourteenth Amendment, she draws from a deep well of historical scholarship, including Isabel Wilkerson’s extraordinary book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. 

Justice Jackson’s analysis reminds us that birthright citizenship was never a technicality. It was, and remains, a constitutional repudiation of hereditary caste, racial exclusion, and the denial of full personhood.

If you have not read Wilkerson’s Caste, I highly recommend it. The audiobook is excellent, too.

And yes, Justice Jackson’s opinion is also a searing response to Justice Clarence Thomas. Where Thomas narrows the meaning of citizenship, Jackson restores its Reconstruction-era moral and democratic purpose: to ensure that no child born on U.S. soil is rendered stateless, casteless, or less than fully human under law.

This is a deeply-researched constitutional interpretation anchored in universalist principles and moral clarity.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

#HistoryMatters

https://tinyurl.com/yu4sj777

Listen to Lawrence O'Donnell, The Last Word here.

No Secret Settlement or Appeasement with Trump's DOJ: Yale Must Defend Academic Freedom, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

No Secret Settlement or Appeasement with Trump's DOJ: Yale Must Defend Academic Freedom

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 6, 2026

Bravo to the Yale College Council for speaking with moral clarity at a moment when it is so urgently needed. President Maurie McInnis and Yale University should not capitulate to the Trump administration through a closed-door settlement with the Department of Justice (Nyberg & Lynn-Skov, 2026). To do so would not merely be a legal or administrative decision. It would be an act of appeasement with national consequences.

Yale need only look to Harvard to understand what is at stake. Harvard’s situation shows that resistance and capitulation can coexist uneasily within the same institution: even as Harvard sued the Trump administration and won important legal victories, it also renamed its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging as federal officials demanded the dismantling of DEI programs (Giordano & Patel, 2025). 

That concession did not end the pressure. Soon after, Harvard College and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences replaced several diversity offices, a move The Harvard Crimson described as a “major concession” to a central demand of the Trump administration (Scharf & Patel, 2025). Reports also followed that Harvard and the Trump administration were nearing a settlement framework involving a $500 million payment to restore access to federal funding and end investigations (Binkley, 2025; also see Berbenes, 2025). 

Students, faculty, alumni, and public officials warned that such a settlement would not protect Harvard’s independence; it would teach the Trump administration that intimidation works. Yale must not repeat that mistake. A university cannot bargain away lawful holistic admissions, diversity commitments, faculty governance, student rights, or institutional autonomy and still claim to be defending academic freedom. If Harvard’s experience teaches us anything, it is that appeasement does not satisfy authoritarian power. It feeds it.

Harvard students, faculty, and alumni have repeatedly warned that so-called “settlements” with the Trump administration are not neutral acts of institutional pragmatism. They are forms of political surrender that invite more demands, not fewer. As Harvard student writers argued in The Harvard Crimson, a bad deal with the Trump administration would not protect students, faculty, or the university. It would hand the administration a political victory and encourage the same strategy against other institutions (Gerdén, Kaplan & Molden, 2025).

Their critique is devastating because it comes from those most vulnerable to institutional compromise: international students, students of color, Jewish students, pro-Palestine students, researchers dependent on federal funding, and students whose speech, safety, and belonging have been placed in the crosshairs of federal power. 

Harvard students have rightly understood that capitulation does not end the assault. It widens it. It teaches the federal government that threats work. It tells other universities that the path of least resistance is to trade away institutional autonomy, student rights, faculty governance, and academic freedom for temporary relief.

This is precisely what Yale must refuse. The Trump administration’s pressure campaign against elite universities has not been limited to one issue or one campus. At Harvard, federal demands reportedly reached into hiring, admissions, student discipline, protest restrictions, international student scrutiny, and oversight of academic programs. 

The Harvard Crimson’s reporting described demands that would have disempowered faculty leaders, punished student groups, imposed ideological screening, and subjected academic units to external review (Mao & Paulus, 2025). These are not ordinary compliance matters. They are efforts to make universities govern themselves according to the political preferences of the state.

Harvard students and faculty have also named the deeper danger: appeasement does not work. As Harvard professors Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky (2025) argued, the reward for capitulation is more extortion. Universities that concede do not buy peace; they make themselves and others more vulnerable (Enos & Levitsky, 2025). 

That lesson should be etched into Yale’s decision-making. Any settlement that restricts lawful holistic admissions, compromises institutional independence, chills political speech, weakens faculty governance, or allows federal officials to dictate university policy would not protect Yale. It would implicate Yale in the broader dismantling of higher education as a democratic institution.

Nor can Yale claim neutrality by calling such a deal “prudent” or “strategic.” There are moments when caution becomes complicity. There are moments when institutional self-protection becomes betrayal. A university cannot teach students to pursue truth, defend democracy, and act with courage while its own leadership quietly bargains away the conditions that make those commitments possible.

Yale’s students understand this. So do many faculty and alumni. They know that the issue is not whether universities are above criticism or beyond reform. They are not. Universities must confront antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, anti-Latinx exclusion, anti-Asian racism, attacks on Indigenous sovereignty, anti-immigrant hostility, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of discrimination with seriousness and integrity. But that work must be done through democratic, educational, legally sound, and community-accountable processes—not through coercive settlements designed to place university life under partisan control.

President McInnis should listen to the students. The Yale College Council’s statement reflects precisely what democratic education is supposed to cultivate: young people who can recognize authoritarian overreach, name the stakes, and call institutions back to their highest principles (Yale College Council, 2026). Yale should be proud of them. More importantly, Yale should heed their moral and ethical clarity as you can hear for yourself in this video and follow their lead.

Yale has the resources, stature, alumni base, faculty strength, legal capacity, and moral obligation to resist. If Yale bends, less-resourced institutions will be placed in an even more precarious position. If Yale concedes behind closed doors, the consequences will reverberate across public and private higher education alike.

But if Yale refuses to capitulate, it can help establish a different precedent: that universities are not instruments of the state, that students are not bargaining chips, that admissions cannot be dictated by political intimidation, and that academic freedom—meaning the right to teach and learn—is not for sale.

This is also a test of President McInnis herself. Before leading Yale, Maurie McInnis served as executive vice president and provost at The University of Texas at Austin, beginning July 1, 2016, and remaining in that role until May 2020, when she left to become president of Stony Brook University (Canizales, 2020). President McInnis should not meet this moment with managerial caution or elite institutional self-protection. 

Courtesy of UT Austin

She should meet it with courage. No secret settlement. No abandonment of lawful holistic admissions. No surrender of institutional independence. No chilling of student speech. No weakening of faculty governance. No appeasement of authoritarian power.

Yale must not do what Harvard students have warned against. It must not mistake capitulation for peace. It must not confuse compliance with leadership. It must not teach the next generation that even the most powerful universities fold when democracy needs them to stand.

References

Berbenes, M. (2025, May 2). Tracking Trump’s war on elite universities: Which schools have lost funding and what they're doing about it, Yahoo News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/tracking-trumps-war-on-elite-universities-which-schools-have-lost-funding-and-what-theyre-doing-about-it-200621655.html

Binkley, C. (2025, August 13). Harvard and the Trump administration are nearing a settlement including a $500 million payment, Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/harvard-trump-agreement-antisemitism-ivy-a84b88a8136a852aa305e508d012afb6

Canizales, A. (2020, March 26). Executive Vice President and Provost Maurie McInnis leaving UT-Austin, The Daily Texan. https://thedailytexan.com/2020/03/26/executive-vice-president-and-provost-maurie-mcinnis-leaving-ut-austin/

Enos, R. D., & Levitsky, S. (2025, June 26). This isn’t negotiation. It’s authoritarian extortion, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/6/26/enos-levitsky-harvard-trump-negotiation-extortion/

Gerdén, L. Kaplan, T. L. & Molden, K. N. (2025, July 2). President Garber, a bad deal with Trump will not protect us, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/7/2/harvard-negotiation-trump-garber/

Giordano, J. J., & Patel, D. T. (2025, April 29). Harvard renames diversity office as Trump demands dismantling of DEI, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/29/harvard-oedib-renamed/

Mao, W. C. & Paulus, V. H. (2025, April 15). Trump’s demands to Harvard, analyzed, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/15/trump-demands-analysis/

Nyberg, L., & Lynn-Skov, A. (2026, June 28). Yale seeks Trump deal as admissions inquiry reaches College, NYT reports. Yale Daily News. https://yaledailynews.com/articles/yale-seeks-trump-deal-as-admissions-inquiry-reaches-college-nyt-reports 

Scharf, A., & Patel, D. T. (2025, July 10). Harvard College, Faculty of Arts and Sciences replace diversity offices. The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/7/10/college-fas-end-diversity-offices/

Yale College Council. (2026, July 4). Public statement on behalf of the Yale undergraduate student body regarding Yale’s ongoing settlement negotiations with the Trump administration [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwX1FqqaqjY

Organizing as If Social Relations Matter: Cindy Milstein, SEAT, and Youth Leadership in Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. July 3, 2026

Organizing as If Social Relations Matter: Cindy Milstein, SEAT, and Youth Leadership in Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 3, 2026

Cindy Milstein’s essay, “Organizing Social Spaces as If Social Relations Matter,” deserves to become a classic. It is a must-read because it gives language to something I have been privileged to witness firsthand: young people organizing not only for change, but through relationships of care, trust, joy, and shared responsibility—especially within Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, or SEAT, as well as in LULAC and other community-based youth spaces where I work.

Milstein’s central insight is deceptively simple and deeply profound:

Movements cannot be built only around strategy, demands, protest, or opposition. They must also cultivate new social relations—new ways of being with one another—if they are to prefigure the more democratic and caring world they seek.

I, in fact, first learned of Milstein's essay from youth in SEAT.

She describes resistance, rebellion, and revolution as incomplete without a fourth “R”: reorganization. By this she means not simply reorganizing institutions, but reorganizing how people relate to one another. 

Without that relational transformation, movements risk reproducing the very hierarchies, exclusions, and harms they oppose. This is one of the essay’s most important contributions: it reminds us that social justice work is not only about what we are against, but also about how we practice what we are for. It is as much or more about beingness as about doingness—who we are and how we show up in our social movements.

This is precisely what I see in SEAT’s leadership. These young people are not simply organizing around issues that matter to them; they are building a culture of care, trust, shared responsibility, and collective courage. Their work is strategic, yes. It is political, yes. But it is also deeply relational. They listen to one another. They make room for vulnerability. They show up for each other. They understand that leadership is not domination, performance, or individual charisma, but a shared practice of building capacity, confidence, and belonging. It's about fun and enjoying the process.

Milstein’s essay helps us see why this matters so much. She cautions that movements often fail not only because of external repression, but because we fail each other. We carry into our organizing spaces the wounds and habits of the very society we are trying to transform—individualism, hierarchy, competition, shame, exclusion, and the temptation to retreat when conflict arises. 

Milstein asks us instead to, in effect, “fail well,” by making "better mistakes" and to treat these and the discomfort that comes along with them not as reasons to abandon one another, but as opportunities to grow in honesty, humility, compassion, and repair. These are tall orders, no doubt, but they are achievable when we commit to practicing them together.

That lesson is especially important for youth organizing. Young people are often expected to perform courage in public while receiving too little care behind the scenes. They are asked to testify, march, mobilize, speak truth to power, and defend democracy, all while coming of age in a world marked by political hostility, ecological crisis, racial injustice, economic precarity, and attacks on education itself. SEAT’s work matters not only because of the policies it contests, but because of the human and democratic relationships it nurtures along the way.

In this regard, SEAT embodies Milstein’s thesis. Its leadership practices suggest that organizing is not merely about occupying public space, but about transforming social space. It is about creating conditions where young people feel seen, heard, trusted, and capable of acting together. It is about learning how to disagree without dehumanizing, how to lead without dominating, how to struggle without losing tenderness, and how to build power without sacrificing care.

For those of us in education, this is a profound lesson. Democracy is not learned only through textbooks, civics lessons, or formal institutions. It is learned in the lived experience of collective work. It is learned when young people discover that their voices matter, that others have their backs, and that public life can be organized around dignity, mutuality, and shared purpose rather than fear or one-upmanship. SEAT’s leadership offers a glimpse of this kind of democratic formation in action.

Milstein gives us language for recognizing what is easy to overlook: the greeting, the check-in, the shared meal, the patient conversation, the willingness to stay present through discomfort, the refusal to reduce one another to mistakes, and the commitment to keep building together. These are not soft additions to the “real” work of organizing. They are the work. They are the ethical infrastructure that makes sustained movement possible.

In a Texas political climate where young people are too often treated as problems to be managed rather than democratic actors to be respected, SEAT offers a different vision. Its members remind us that youth leadership is not future leadership. It is leadership now. And when that leadership is grounded in care, courage, and collective responsibility, it does more than resist the present. It rehearses a freer and more humane future.

That is why Milstein’s essay matters to me. It helps me name what I see in SEAT and other youth organizing: young people organizing as if social relations matter—because they do. We have much to learn from them.

Reference

Milstein, C. (2014, June 14). Organizing social spaces as if social relations matter. Outside the Circle. Originally published in shorter form in ROAR Magazine. https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/organizing-social-spaces-as-if-social-relations-matter/

Organizing Social Spaces as If Social Relations Matter




by Cindy Milstein | June 14, 2014 | Outside the Circle

This essay was originally published, as a shorter version, in ROAR Magazine, “an online journal of the radical imagination providing grassroots perspectives from the front-lines of the global struggle for real democracy,” at http://roarmag.org/2014/06/milstein-social-spaces-relations/.

The Four Rs

Throughout the history of resistance, rebellion, and revolution—the three Rs that should be taught alongside the traditional ones of reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic—there has always been a fourth R, consciously or not: reorganization. Such reorganization has sought to establish not simply new social structures but also, critically, new social relations.

That has not always ended well. In fact, it has frequently ended badly, with different forms of social organization, to be sure, but ones that ultimately—or too quickly—entailed new forms of domination and terror. If we humans have learned anything from these moments, it’s that the reconstitution of people up to the challenge of enacting goodness in the good society that they are trying to create takes time and practice. Moreover, the time and practices needed far exceed the duration and acts of toppling a king, despot, or dictator, overthrowing colonial, military, or statist rule, or overcoming internecine struggles among radicals.

Various “horizontal” or “from below” experiments, as they’ve been called, have struggled openly during the past two decades in particular with this problematic. They’ve humbly aspired to focus on the social relations side of the puzzle versus—and also within—those exhilarating, necessary instances of popular uprisings.

Some appear to have done it better than others, such as the Zapatistas (recently celebrating twenty years since their first public entrance on the world stage) and Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (which became a national movement thirty years ago), at least according to the stories told by some of those born into these autonomous communities, and thus who’ve never known another world and have been socialized by other ways of attempting to live together.

Most of the shorter-lived recent occupations of squares, plazas, and parks, too, quickly set about this task, reveling—at least initially—in the transformed ways people began relating to each other within the myriad of self-organized structures intended to meet everyone’s needs as well as desires.

The same could easily be said of the power of contemporary social movements such as the massive, relatively long-lasting student strike in Quebec in 2012. In that case, months of blockades and nightly illegal street demonstrations, coupled with a plethora of assemblies and collective culture-making, wove a magical fabric of hitherto-unimaginable social interactions across generations and at least two languages.

Here in the United States, the Occupy uprising, in its heady beginnings, created spaces where social-media-isolated people could suddenly “find each other” and (re)discover human(e) connections (see, relatedly, my essay “Occupy Anarchism,” https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/occupy-anarchism-musings-on-prehistories-present-imperfects-future-imperfects/). But also here in the United States, where looking through the lens of “I” first and then “we” down the road is so deeply ingrained in us, it too quickly became clear that the ties that bound us Occupiers were spider-web fragile. We torn each other apart in so many varied ways, along so many lines of hurt already scribed into our bodies by white supremacy, heteronormativity, patriarchy, ableism, settler colonialism, classism, overdetermined identity politics, and a long lineage of other violences.

The conundrum of remaking ourselves as we attempt to remake society appears to stymie us here so much faster than in places with greater vestiges of communal lifeways.

It also erects an extra-high hurdle for US social struggles and movements: Can we rise above the learned behaviors inculcated by the mythical origin story and its related American dream of the lone individual making it against all odds, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, as entrepreneurial pioneer? Can we surmount the way we tend to instrumentalize each other, “valuing” other people as mere things in relation to our cost-benefit analysis and accountability ledger sheet of strategic organizing and movement needs—relations that have been naturalized in us, made subtle and almost invisible, by capitalism? Can we avoid brushing off the ways that we lack empathy for each other, as ourselves “products” of this damaging society too, with uncompassionate phrases such as “We need to focus on the real enemy”?

It’s too easy to blame the police or state repression alone for why our projects, much less movements, fail. They fail us, and we fail them.

We’ll always fail in ways, of course. But if we don’t allow others—and ourselves—to make mistakes; if we see mishaps as aberrations or, worse, a condemnation of the whole of someone’s being; if we believe that failure and success are separate, stable moments; and if we think that being human, being imperfect, is in itself wrong, then we’ve already lost. We’re already lost.

There are many forces that can be blamed for making most of us, and indeed most of humanity, feel lost at this time in history, from the new layers of alienation heaped on us by high-tech innovations to the palpable sense of “no future” that military-industrial ecological devastation instills. This list, like all the painful -isms, unfurls too far. We don’t just feel lost, though. More to the point, we are tangibly experiencing much loss, and at faster and faster rates, ranging from communities to climates, from homes to loved ones.

This is all the more reason that it’s imperative to rediscover each other, yet in the fullness and complexity of our imperfections, and recognize that such imperfection will be inherent in the revolutionary transformation of present-day society—made up not merely of hierarchical institutions and systemic exploitation but also damaged social relations. It is, then, our perspective on failure that matters.

To conjure up the insight of a teacher-artist friend, Arthur, during a history-oriented study group recently, the point of revolutions is not to achieve some permanently perfect world, or a utopia in the most caricatured of definitions. It is to find ourselves having different, less horrendous conflicts—say, why the delegation of tasks related to community health care isn’t working in an autonomous, directly democratic region as opposed to when and where to go to war as a nation-state. It is to be better equipped to walk toward and through those conflicts in increasingly egalitarian, compassionate ways.

In short, it’s about making better mistakes, and utilizing our better failures as moments of transformation in pursuit of an ever-freer society, filled with ever more dignity and freedom, among other lovely practices.

Another teacher-artist friend, Carla, observed that her goal is, in fact, to have projects fail. That is, she remains open to the likelihood of failure and hence how we might do that well. Her clear-eyed notion grasps the generative attributes of missing the intended mark. Carla’s failures-in-action are amazing to behold, drawing out the best in people, for themselves and toward others. She creates spaces of collaborative empowerment with others, without knowing what will emerge, and strives to curate various contexts in which people can discover the potential of those spaces and themselves together.

A Word of Thanks to Gina Hinojosa—and a Hope for Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 A Word of Thanks to Gina Hinojosa—and a Hope for Texas 

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 2, 2026

Gina Hinojosa, Martha Cotera & me

I have hesitated to write about this because I do not like to toot my own horn.

Those who know me know that I am much more comfortable lifting up the work of students, educators, communities, colleagues, and movements than calling attention to my own recognition.

But this one is special.

I write with a full heart and deep appreciation to thank State Representative Gina Hinojosa of House District 49, Democratic nominee for Texas governor, for authoring a resolution, passed by the Texas State Legislature, recognizing my inclusion in the 2025 Rick Hess Straight Up EDU Scholar Public Influence Rankings. This annual list recognizes 200 university-based scholars across the United States whose work has had significant influence on educational practice and policy.

I am grateful for the honor itself, but I am especially moved by the fact that this recognition came through the Texas Legislature and from Representative Hinojosa, whose public service has consistently reflected a deep commitment to children, families, public education, civil rights, and democratic governance.

The resolution notes my work as a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, my role as director of the University of Texas Center for Education Policy and the National Latino Education Research and Policy Project, my founding of this blog, Educational Equity, Politics, and Policy in Texas, and my scholarship on urban education, minority youth, bilingual education, and educational justice. It also recognizes my book, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, and the honors I have received across the years, including the Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education and the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Association for Bilingual Education.

To see this work named in a formal legislative resolution is humbling. Public scholarship is often a labor of persistence, conviction, and faith. It means writing, researching, testifying, organizing, teaching, and speaking in ways that do not always fit neatly within conventional academic metrics. It means believing that knowledge should circulate beyond the university; that communities have a right to research, history, policy analysis, and critical interpretation; and that educational equity is not an abstract ideal, but a public obligation.

For more than two decades, this blog has sought to serve precisely that purpose. It has been a public archive, a policy resource, a space of reflection, and a site of democratic engagement for those committed to educational justice, bilingual education, Ethnic Studies, academic freedom, and the freedom to learn. In that sense, this recognition is not mine alone. It belongs to the many students, educators, parents, scholars, community leaders, advocates, and organizers whose struggles and insights have shaped my work and given it meaning.

I also want to say a special word about Representative Hinojosa herself. Gina Hinojosa has long been a principled and courageous advocate for public education and for a Texas that honors the dignity of all its people. As a civil rights and labor attorney, former Austin ISD school board president, and state legislator, she has brought intelligence, moral clarity, and a steady commitment to the public good into every arena of her service.

I truly hope—and expect—that Gina Hinojosa will be Texas’ next governor. Texas needs leadership rooted in care, fairness, public education, democratic accountability, and respect for the diverse communities that are the future of this state. Her authorship of this resolution is, for me, not only a personal kindness, but also a reflection of the kind of leadership she offers: one that sees education as central to democracy and recognizes the scholars, teachers, students, and communities working every day to defend it.

So, thank you, Representative Hinojosa, for this generous recognition and for your continued service to Texas. I receive this resolution with humility, gratitude, and renewed commitment to the work ahead.

At a time when public education, academic freedom, bilingual education, ethnic studies, and truthful curriculum are all under attack, such recognition matters. It reminds us that the work of educational equity is not marginal. It is central to the future of Texas. It is central to democracy. And it is work that we must continue together.

And that means showing up—not only in classrooms, community meetings, hearings, and public conversations, but also at the ballot box. As November approaches, I hope we will all make sure that we, our families, friends, neighbors, students, former students, and loved ones of voting age are registered, informed, and ready to vote. Democracy is not self-executing. It depends on our participation, our vigilance, and our willingness to act on behalf of the Texas we know is possible.

The Texas SBOE’s Bible mandate is Not Religious Literacy. It is State-Sponsored,Taxpayer Funded, Religious Favoritism, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Texas SBOE’s Bible mandate is Not Religious Literacy. It is State-Sponsored, Taxpayer Funded, Religious Favoritism

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 28, 2026

Last Friday’s decision by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) to require Bible stories and Christian instruction in Texas K–12 public schools should alarm every Texan who cares about public education, religious freedom, democracy, and the constitutional separation of church and state (Yu, 2026)

This is not religious literacy. It is not a neutral study of religion. It is not a good-faith effort to help children understand the Bible’s influence on literature, history, or culture. A serious academic curriculum would introduce students to multiple religious traditions, secular traditions, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the diverse intellectual inheritance of a state where children come from every corner of the world. Instead, the SBOE has approved a state-mandated reading list and social studies framework that privileges Christianity, narrows the story of humanity, and forces teachers and students into a curriculum shaped less by scholarship than by ideology.

Let us be clear: the issue is not whether the Bible may be studied in public schools. It can be—and, in the appropriate context, should be—studied as literature, as history, and as a text with enormous cultural influence. But it should be studied alongside other sacred, philosophical, ethical, and cultural traditions. 

As a product of Texas public schools, I would have welcomed the opportunity to learn about the world’s religions in school—not in a reductive way, but in an expansive one. Indeed, if this curriculum is anything other than expansive, pluralistic, and intellectually honest, it is dead on arrival.

The real issue is whether the state should use public schools—and exorbitant taxpayer dollars—to elevate one religious tradition above others and present that tradition as the moral foundation of civic life. That is not education. That is state-sponsored religious favoritism. It is constitutionally suspect, pedagogically flawed, and morally dangerous in a state as religiously, culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse as Texas.

Ironically, this approach may also fail on its own terms. A shallow, politicized, and coercive treatment of the Bible may not deepen students’ understanding of scripture. It may turn them away from it. When sacred texts are reduced to political instruments, they lose the very depth, mystery, and moral seriousness that make them meaningful to believers and worthy of study by nonbelievers. A curriculum built on such a flawed foundation does not honor the Bible. It weaponizes it.

This is where Katherine Stewart’s work is so helpful (Stewart, 2012, 2020, 2025). Stewart reminds us that Christian nationalism is not simply a matter of private faith or religious devotion. It is a political project. It operates through donor networks, legal organizations, advocacy groups, media platforms, think tanks, and elected officials who seek to capture public institutions and bend them toward an authoritarian vision of society. 

In this sense, the SBOE’s decision is not an isolated curriculum dispute. It is part of a broader movement to remake public education in the image of Christian nationalist power.

That movement is also visible in Project 2025 and in the larger effort to weaken public institutions, centralize executive authority, privatize public goods, and subordinate democratic deliberation to ideological control (Dans & Groves, 2023). In Texas, this matters enormously because governors appoint key officials, including the Commissioner of Education, who oversees the Texas Education Agency. These appointments help shape the direction of public schooling for millions of children. Curriculum, therefore, is not merely a classroom matter. It is a governance matter. It is a democracy matter.

A democratic public school system should not be argumentative in the narrow sense of imposing one worldview on everyone else. It should be deliberative. It should teach students how to think across difference, how to ask hard questions, how to understand history in its complexity, and how to live ethically in a pluralistic society. 

The SBOE’s decision moves us in the opposite direction. It turns curriculum into a vehicle for religious and political domination.

Texas children deserve better than this. They deserve schools that respect their families, their faiths, their questions, and their futures. They deserve a curriculum capacious enough to include the Bible without turning public school into Sunday school; rigorous enough to study Christianity without privileging Christian nationalism; and democratic enough to honor the full humanity of every child in the classroom.

Recent testimony before the SBOE made this danger plain. Parents, educators, religious freedom advocates, historians, and community members warned that the proposed standards and required reading list distort education by subordinating academic integrity to a sectarian political agenda. Texas Freedom Network President Felicia Martin captured the problem forcefully:

 “The Bible isn’t a history book, public school isn’t Sunday school, and ignorance is not a Texas value.” 

That line deserves to be remembered because it names the issue exactly. Public schools belong to all children—not only Christian children, not only conservative Christian children, not only children whose families accept the state’s preferred theological worldview.

This decision also comes in the shadow of a broader restructuring of public education in Texas. We have seen attacks on books, on Ethnic and Gender Studies, on LGBTQIA+ students, on honest teaching about racism, on teachers’ professional autonomy, and on local democratic governance. 

We have seen vouchers pushed as “choice” while public schools remain underfunded. We have seen the Ten Commandments elevated in classrooms, chaplains invited into schools, and now Bible stories mandated as required reading. These are not isolated developments. They are pieces of a larger project.

That project is legible through the Seven Mountains Mandate (Boedy, 2025), a Christian dominionist framework that calls on believers to exercise influence—or dominion—over seven spheres of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.

 Education is one of the mountains.

Government is another.

Business is another. 

Texas is now witnessing the convergence of all three: billionaire money, state power, and public school curriculum being aligned to serve a Christian nationalist vision.

Katherine Stewart’s work helps us understand what is happening. In The Power Worshippers 2020) and Money, Lies, and God (2025), Stewart shows that Christian nationalism is not primarily about private faith, prayer, or religious devotion. 

It is about power. 

It is about networks. It is about donor money, legal infrastructure, media ecosystems, political candidates, think tanks, and policy shops working together to transform democratic institutions from within. The movement does not merely want a seat at the table. It wants to own the table, write the rules, choose the curriculum, discipline dissent, and call the result “freedom.”

This is why today’s SBOE decision must be understood alongside the political influence of West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. As I wrote previously in “Texas: Two Billionaires Want to Destroy Public Education and Replace It With Christian Schools,” the attack on public education is not incidental to their politics. It is central to it. 

As you can view and see for yourselves, CNN’s reporting made plain that former associates and critics view Dunn and Wilks as especially focused on education, with the long-term goal of replacing much of public education with private Christian schooling. Former Republican state senator Bob Deuell put it bluntly: they “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools.”

That is the context for today’s vote. This is not simply about whether a first grader hears “David and Goliath” or a high school student reads Job. It is about who controls the moral and intellectual formation of more than five million Texas public school students. It is about whether the state will honor the religious diversity of Texas families or treat non-Christian children as guests in someone else’s public school system. It is about whether teachers will be trusted as professionals or reduced to instruments of ideological compliance.

As I recently blogged (Valenzuela, 2026), supporters will say this is about “Judeo-Christian values.” That phrase, however, often functions as a political shield. It collapses Jewish traditions into a Christian nationalist story, erases the profound diversity within Christianity itself, and excludes Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Indigenous spiritual traditions, atheists, agnostics, and many others, including Jews themselves—who are also part of Texas. It also misrepresents Christianity. 

That is not what Texas has chosen.

Many of us grew up in Christian traditions rooted in social justice, humility, hospitality, care for the poor, and love of neighbor. The Christianity being smuggled into public policy today is not that faith. It is a politicized, exclusionary Christianity aligned with hierarchy, conquest, privatization, and punishment.

This is why the phrase “religious freedom” is being turned upside down. True religious freedom protects families from state-imposed religion. It protects Christian families, Jewish families, Muslim families, Hindu families, Buddhist families, Indigenous families, nonreligious families, and interfaith families alike. It means the government does not get to decide whose sacred stories become mandatory and whose traditions disappear. It means public schools do not become Sunday schools by legislative design.

The irony is painful. Texas leaders claim to be defending parents while overruling millions of parents whose religious and moral commitments do not align with the state’s preferred theology. Many, if not most, among them believe in the separation of church and state.

Let’s unmask this nefarious, anti-democratic agenda for what it is: a coordinated effort to capture public education, weaponize faith, and shrink the democratic imagination of Texas children.

They claim to support local control while imposing sweeping curriculum mandates from Austin. 

They claim to respect teachers while stripping them of professional judgment. 

They claim to strengthen history while narrowing it. 

They claim to teach freedom while modeling domination.

The damage will not fall evenly. Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian American, Muslim, Jewish, immigrant, LGBTQIA+, and nonreligious students will feel most sharply what it means to be written to the margins of the curriculum. So will Christian students whose faith teaches them that coercion is not discipleship and that the Gospel should never be reduced to a state lesson plan. 

Public schools should be places where children learn to think critically, encounter complexity, and develop civic respect across difference. 

They should not be laboratories for Christian nationalist social engineering.

Texas is a pluralistic state. It is young, multilingual, multiracial, multi-faith, and globally connected. Our curriculum should prepare children for that reality. Instead, the SBOE has chosen retreat: less world history, less diversity, less intellectual honesty, and more state-sponsored religious favoritism. This is not educational excellence. It is ideological containment.

We should refuse the false choice between faith and public education. Many people of faith support strong public schools precisely because public education is one of the few institutions where children from different backgrounds can learn together. A democracy—at least in theory—public school does not require children to abandon their faith. It protects their right to have one. It also protects their right not to have one. That is the genius of public education at its best.

The SBOE's decision moves Texas in the opposite direction. It brings us closer to the world envisioned by the Seven Mountains Mandate, where education is not a public good but a terrain to be conquered. It advances the agenda Katherine Stewart has warned about: a donor-funded, anti-democratic movement that uses the language of faith to seize institutions and the language of freedom to justify domination.

Texans should see this for what it is. The SBOE has not merely approved a reading list. It has opened the door wider to the religious capture of public education. It has placed the state’s power behind a narrow theological and political worldview. And it has done so in a state whose children deserve so much better.

This orchestrated, well-heeled “culture war” reveals what has been true all along: the struggle is not only over curriculum. It is over democracy itself. Public schools are among the last remaining civic spaces where we can still imagine and build a common good. That is precisely why they are under attack. They hold the promise of an animated, well-informed, and educated citizenry—one capable of questioning power, resisting domination, and participating fully in democratic life. 

And that is why we must defend them—with clarity, courage, and an unwavering commitment to religious freedom, educational justice, teachers’ freedom to teach, and students’ freedom to learn.

Reference

Boedy, M. (2025). The seven mountains mandate: Exposing the dangerous plan to Christianize America and destroy democracy. Westminster John Knox Press.

Dans, P., & Groves, S. (Eds.). (2023). Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise. The Heritage Foundation [pdf]. 

Stewart, K. (2012). The good news club: The Christian Right’s stealth assault on America’s children. PublicAffairs. 

Stewart, K. (2020). The power worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. Bloomsbury.

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury.

Tackett, C. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B3PTuADIHQ

Valenzuela, A. (2026, June 26). When ‘Judeo-Christian’ Means Christian: The Texas State Board of Education and the Politics of Curriculum [Blog], Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/06/when-judeo-christian-means-christian.html

Yu, I. (2026, June 26). Texas becomes first state to require students read the Bible with required literary list, Austin American-Statesman. https://www.statesman.com/politics/texas/article/social-studies-overhaul-bible-christianity-22320559.php 

When ‘Judeo-Christian’ Means Christian: The Texas State Board of Education and the Politics of Curriculum, by Angela Valenzuel, Ph.D.

When ‘Judeo-Christian’ Means Christian: The Texas State Board of Education and the Politics of Curriculum

by

Angela Valenzuela, PH.D.

June 26, 2026

Please read Ellie Ashby and Chloe Landen’s important Texas Tribune/Religion News Service article, “As supporters praise Texas’ proposed “Judeo-Christian” curriculum, rabbis say it dismisses Judaism” posted below. The piece reports on this week’s State Board of Education hearings over proposed changes that would require Texas public school students to read Bible stories and passages as part of a statewide reading list. Supporters repeatedly invoked the phrase “Judeo-Christian values” to defend the proposal, claiming that such readings simply acknowledge the nation’s religious and moral origins.

Yet the testimony from rabbis and Jewish leaders revealed something much more troubling: the term “Judeo-Christian” is doing ideological work. It is not functioning as an inclusive recognition of Judaism. It is functioning as cover.

As Ashby and Landen report, Jewish leaders criticized the proposed biblical selections as overwhelmingly Christian in framing, translation, and interpretation. Rabbi Joshua Fixler of Houston’s Congregation Emanu El captured the problem with painful clarity when he described the use of “Judeo-Christian” as “a fig leaf at inclusion.” In other words, Judaism is being rhetorically invoked in order to make a Christian-centered curriculum appear broader, more ecumenical, and more constitutionally palatable than it actually is.

This is precisely the fiction behind the concept of “Judeo-Christian.” The phrase sounds generous. It sounds like partnership. It sounds like interfaith harmony. But historically and politically, it has often served to absorb Judaism into a Christian civilizational story while excluding Muslims, secular people, Indigenous spiritual traditions, and the many other religious and nonreligious communities that make up our society. It is a phrase that points at pluralism while narrowing the public imagination.

Robert O. Smith, associate professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, usefully reminds us that the term “Judeo-Christian” was popularized during the Cold War as part of a U.S. civilizational narrative that joined Protestants, Catholics, and Jews against supposedly “godless” enemies abroad, while excluding Muslims and others from the nation’s moral imagination (Ashby & Landen, 2026).

In this sense, “Judeo-Christian” is less a neutral description of shared religious heritage than a political construction. If anything, a Protestant or more specifically—Christian nationalist—reading of the Bible often subtracts from Jesus’ Jewishness by lifting him out of the Jewish world that formed him. 

Were this not so, Christians would more fully acknowledge the Jewish festivals, practices, scriptures, and interpretive traditions embedded throughout the New Testament, rather than glossing over them—or treating them as mere background to an otherwise Christian story. The irony is that those who invoke “Judeo-Christian values” often do so in ways that diminish Judaism itself, using Jewishness symbolically while centering a distinctly Christian interpretation of scripture, history, and nationhood.

This is why the Texas debate matters far beyond the reading list itself. What is at stake is not simply whether students should learn about religion. Of course students should learn about religion, history, literature, culture, and the many traditions that have shaped human life. Religious literacy has a legitimate place in public education. But there is a profound difference between teaching about religion and using public schools to advance a particular religious worldview.

The proposed Texas reading list crosses that line. As the article notes, many of the selected passages draw from Christian translations and interpretations, with Jewish texts treated thinly, awkwardly, or in ways that Jewish leaders themselves find troubling. Particularly alarming is the proposed pairing of Lamentations 3 with Holocaust literature, a pairing that rabbis warned could invite students to consider whether the Holocaust was divine punishment for Jews. Whether born of ignorance or intent, such a curricular choice is pedagogically irresponsible and morally dangerous.

This is how Christian nationalism enters the classroom: not always through an explicit declaration that Christianity should rule, but through curricular choices that quietly normalize one religious tradition as the foundation of American identity. It happens when “heritage” becomes a substitute for historical accuracy. It happens when “values” becomes a code word for exclusion. It happens when public schools are asked to carry theological assumptions that belong in families, congregations, seminaries, and houses of worship—not in state-mandated curriculum.

Texas is home to more than 5.5 million public school students. They are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Indigenous, secular, questioning, and more. They come from families with deep faith commitments and from families with none. A public school curriculum worthy of them must not narrow their world. It must broaden it.

Moreover, those adhering to traditional Protestant faiths—that are themselves diverse—should be just as concerned. A state-mandated curriculum that instrumentalizes the Bible for nationalist purposes does not honor Christianity; it distorts it. It reduces scripture to a civic ornament and treats faith as a tool of political formation rather than as a living moral and spiritual tradition. For Christians who take seriously the prophetic tradition and the separation of church and state that protects all faith communities, this should be deeply troubling.

That is why this debate is also about democracy. Public schools belong to the public. They should not be used to launder sectarian politics through the language of tradition. Nor should Jewish communities be conscripted into legitimizing a Christian-centered project that many Jewish leaders explicitly reject.

The phrase “Judeo-Christian” may sound inclusive, but in this context, it conceals more than it reveals. It masks power. It rewrites Jewish experience. It excludes whole communities from the story of Texas and the nation. And it asks public schools to do the work of religious formation under the banner of civic education.

The Texas State Board of Education had already given preliminary approval to the contested mandatory reading list that includes Bible passages, with final adoption scheduled for today, June 26, 2026 (Vertuno & Stengle, 2026). The proposal, if finally approved, would take effect in 2030 and would make Texas a national outlier in requiring a state-mandated reading list that includes biblical passages in public school instruction.

Texas students deserve better. They deserve honest history, constitutional fidelity, and a curriculum that respects the full diversity of our state. They deserve to learn about religion without being taught religion. They deserve schools that cultivate understanding rather than impose belonging on sectarian terms. They should also actually be taught the origins of so-called "Judeo-Christianity."

And above all, they deserve leaders who understand that pluralism is not a slogan. It is a democratic obligation.

References

Ashby, E. & Landen, C. (2026, June 25). As supporters praise Texas’ proposed “Judeo-Christian” curriculum, rabbis say it dismisses Judaism. Texas Tribune/Religion News Service. 

Vertuno, J. & Stengle, J. (2026, June 26). Texas school board to vote on required Bible readings in public education, Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/texas-curriculum-bible-board-vote-06530403ff91c10462382422003e109f

As supporters praise Texas’ proposed “Judeo-Christian” curriculum, rabbis say it dismisses Judaism
A required reading list before the State Board of Education would present a predominantly Christian perspective to public school students, Jewish leaders say.

By Ellie Ashby, The Texas Tribune, and Chloe Landen, Religion News ServiceJune 25, 2026, 5:00 a.m. Central

Rabbi Joshua Fixler speaks at the State Board of Education meeting in Austin on Monday, 

June 22, 2026. Fixler argued that the required reading list is full of Christians texts that are 

inappropriate for public school classrooms. Aiden Gonzalez/The Texas Tribune