Public Schools Are on the Ballot: Why Gina Hinojosa’s Campaign Matters, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 8, 2026

Public Schools Are on the Ballot: Why Gina Hinojosa’s Campaign Matters

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 8, 2026

Today’s news about Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa’s
launch of “Team Texas Public Schools” could not come at a more urgent moment. Across Texas, school communities are being forc
ed to confront an unthinkable reality: neighborhood schools—beloved places where generations of children have learned, played, been fed, been loved, and been known—are being closed, consolidated, and destabilized.

Emilio, Gina, & me

It was an honor to stand with Gina today at the press conference she held at Pease Elementary this morning. CBS Austin below recorded the event so that you can view it, at least in part.

Here in Austin, the pain is immediate. Ten schools are closing. Families are grieving not simply the loss of buildings, but the loss of community, continuity, trust, and belonging. Anyone who has ever walked the halls of a neighborhood public school knows that a school is never just a school. It is where children learn their own worth. It is where teachers become lifelines. It is where parents build relationships. It is where democracy begins, one classroom, one child, one family at a time.

That is why Hinojosa’s words today matter: “It is not just you.” Austin families are not alone. This is happening across Texas. It is happening in communities large and small, urban and rural, Black, Brown, white, immigrant, working-class, and middle-class. It is happening because our public schools have been pushed to the brink by policy choices—choices that have starved districts, demoralized educators, politicized curriculum, over-tested children, and opened the door to privatization.

Let us be clear: school closures are not natural disasters. They are political outcomes.

For years, Texas leaders have told us that there is no money for public schools while finding money for vouchers, border militarization, tax giveaways, political theater, and the steady expansion of private interests into the public sphere. They have manufactured crisis and then offered privatization as the cure. 

They have treated our children’s schools as though they were expendable, especially when those schools serve communities of color, working families, emergent bilingual students, students with disabilities, and children whose parents lack the political power of wealthy donors.

This is why the fight for public education is inseparable from the fight for democracy.

Public schools are one of the last great public institutions where we still gather across difference. They belong to all of us. They are funded by all of us. They serve the common good. When they are weakened, the entire civic fabric weakens. When they are closed, communities lose anchors. When public dollars are diverted to private schools, the children left behind are our children, our neighbors, our students, our future.

Gina Hinojosa’s campaign speaks directly to this crisis because her own public life began in the struggle to save a neighborhood school. As a former Austin ISD trustee, a state legislator, a mother, and a longtime defender of public education, she understands that schools are not line items on a spreadsheet. They are living institutions. They carry history, memory, culture, language, and hope.

Her critique of vouchers as a scam resonates because vouchers do not create real choice for most families. They subsidize private options for some while draining resources from the public schools that educate the overwhelming majority of Texas children. 

They do not guarantee transportation. 

They do not guarantee admission. 

They do not guarantee services for children with disabilities. 

They do not guarantee accountability. 

What they do guarantee is that public money will flow away from public institutions at the very moment those institutions are being told to do more with less.

And the A–F accountability system, as Hinojosa rightly notes, has become part of this machinery. A state agency can design the test, control the rating system, shift the rules, and then declare schools “failing”—often without acknowledging the structural underfunding, poverty, language inequities, and policy instability that shape school outcomes. This is not accountability in any meaningful democratic sense. It is a system that too often punishes the very communities that deserve the most investment.

This is why voting matters.

We cannot mourn school closures and then stay home on Election Day. We cannot say we love teachers and then fail to defend them at the ballot box. We cannot lament what is happening to our children’s schools while allowing the same political leadership to continue dismantling them.

Getting out the vote is not a slogan. It is a responsibility. It means checking our registration, having a voting plan. It means helping our students, families, neighbors, elders, and young people understand what is at stake. It means offering rides, making calls, knocking on doors, sharing information, and refusing cynicism. It means remembering that democracy is not something we possess once and for all; it is something we practice, protect, and renew.

Texas is not a lost cause. Texas is a living struggle. And we are worthy foes against the oligarchs.

Every school closure meeting, every parent testimony, every teacher who stays late, every student who speaks up, every community member who refuses to accept austerity as destiny—these are signs that people still believe in the public good. They still believe that our children deserve better. They still believe that a multiracial, multilingual, working-family Texas has the right to govern itself.

This election must be about more than personalities. It must be about whether Texas will continue down the road of privatization, underfunding, censorship, and manufactured crisis—or whether we will choose a future rooted in public schools, public accountability, and public care.

Our children are watching. Our teachers are exhausted. Our families are hurting. Our communities are organizing.

Now we must vote like our schools depend on it—because they do.

Hinojosa launches program to fight Texas school closures, citing public school crisis

by Jahmal Kennedy | Mon, June 8, 2026 at 5:08 PM CBS Austin



Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa in Austin Monday, June 8, 2026.

As school districts across Texas, including Austin ISD, face budget crises and the threat of campus closures, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa is launching a new effort she says is aimed at helping communities fight back.

Hinojosa said Texas public schools are in dire condition.

“I will tell you that our public schools are on life support right now,” she said.

ALSO "It hurts": Austin ISD families look to keep community alive on final day for 10 campuses

Hinojosa announced a nonpartisan organizing program called Team Texas Public Schools. The program is designed to train parents, teachers and administrators to fight school closures in communities “getting hit the hardest.”

“Ten schools in this city alone in the school district are shutting down, but it is happening all over this state,” Hinojosa said.

Asked about Austin ISD’s budget process and closures, Hinojosa said, “WhatI think is important for the people of Austin to understand as they are in the trenches fighting this fight is that it is not just you.”

She also blamed Gov. Greg Abbott for the situation, saying, “And it is important for supporters of our public schools for parents and teachers to understand that Greg Abbott meant for this to happen.”

Abbott, Hinojosa’s November opponent, has focused his K-12 agenda on school vouchers in recent years. In February, Abbott celebrated what his office called “record-breaking school choice demand” after more than 100,000 families applied for vouchers.

Abbott said of vouchers: “Through this program, families will receive funds to send their children to a school that is the best fit for them.”

However, University of Texas at Austin professor Jennifer Keys Adair studies elementary and early childhood education, and says, "vouchers are definitely diverting funds from public neighborhood elementary schools."

She also added, "it seems like in this voucher conversation, oh, it will allow all families to be able to choose where they go to school. But we know that that's not what's happening," said Adair. She added more affluent families are more likely to get a voucher and said, "So in that case, you're furthering the kind of pressure on teachers and we're furthering the like lack of resources that we're offering to children who need it most."

Hinojosa said she opposes that approach.

“I don't believe in public school vouchers,” she said. Hinojosa even called it a "scam."

Austin ISD parent and former district principal Claudia Kramer Santamaria said she believes Hinojosa is the right advocate for Texas public schools.

“We understand as former principal and teacher that we needed to really have an advocate and I think that's what failed,” Santamaria said.

Hinojosa also criticized Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath for what she called a “rigged” A-F report card system, saying Morath gets to "make the [STAAR] test, rate the test, look at results, and then decide who fails and who passes," and added "And he rigs it to make it show what he wants it to show. And he wants it to show that our Texas public schools aren't strong. And he wants it to show that privatization is a better option."

Hinojosa said that if she becomes governor she would replace Morath.

What We Refuse to Learn About Standardized Testing: Dr. Gerald Bracey and the 89th Legislature, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What We Refuse to Learn About Standardized Testing: Dr. Gerald Bracey and the 89th Legislature

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 4, 2025

Learn more about Dr.
Bracey here.

When I revisited Gerald W. Bracey’s 2009 commentary in Educational Leadership, I was struck by how uncannily prophetic it feels in this political moment—especially in light of the sweeping changes enacted by the 89th Texas Legislature in 2025. Best known for his famous "Bracey Reports," his critique of the nation’s “test mania” reads not as a relic of a bygone era but as a warning flare we failed to heed, one whose consequences unfolded vividly during last session’s battles over testing, accountability, and privatization (see Valenzuela, 2025, for discussion).

While public school advocates secured incremental gains—slightly less disruptive testing policies, quicker turnaround on results, the elimination of a handful of assessments, and improved transparency—the underlying system remains largely intact. Schools are still judged primarily by test scores, accountability frameworks remain narrowly defined, and the deeper structural reforms that advocates have long demanded are once again deferred (Valenzuela, 2025). In this vacuum, the push for charterization and privatization only accelerates. 

Even so, there was a brief moment of meaningful political possibility: Texas lawmakers introduced proposals to overhaul or even eliminate the STAAR exam altogether. Raise Your Hand Texas, in particular, deserves a shout-out for leading the charge. For the first time in decades, a major statewide assessment regime came under serious legislative challenge, and the House even passed a bill to move the state away from STAAR. Yet despite the symbolic significance of this breakthrough, the effort stalled—revealing just how entrenched the test-based accountability system remains.

Bracey began with an observation so commonsensical that many policymakers today still stumble past it: no standardized test can ever know a child better than the teacher who sees that child every day. Yet over a fifty-year span, he noted, the United States managed to devolve from viewing tests as occasionally useful tools, to treating them as compulsory, and finally elevating them into the dominant—almost exclusive—measure of educational quality.

Even though tests like NAEP, PISA, TIMSS, or STAAR were never designed to evaluate teaching, curriculum, or the complex, relational work of schooling, policymakers have repeatedly misappropriated them for exactly those purposes. The result, Bracey argued, has been a national preoccupation with numerical indicators that flatten the human reality of learning, obscure the deeper conditions shaping students’ educational lives, and induce undue stress on teachers and the teaching profession.

That critique feels especially urgent in Texas today. This year, the Legislature passed a statewide voucher program that redirects public funds into private schools, one that rests on the long-standing assumption that public schools are failing (Edison, 2025). This assumption gets reinforced year after year through simplistic interpretations of test scores. 

These debates echo Bracey’s core argument: when policy decisions hinge on flawed measures, those decisions inevitably warp the system they intend to improve. Vouchers, sold as a remedy for supposedly failing schools, rely on the very test-based narratives Bracey spent a lifetime challenging. The claim that low standardized test scores reflect poor teaching ignores the deep structural factors shaping learning in Texas—poverty, segregation, underfunding, and what we are by now discovering as the soaring costs (or "price") of privatization. 

Yet these structural realities rarely appear in the public conversation. Instead, test scores are brandished as evidence that public schools are beyond repair, clearing the political path for vouchers, school district takeovers, and the redirection of taxpayer dollars into private hands.

The fight over STAAR reveals a similar contradiction. Legislators across the spectrum have acknowledged that STAAR tells parents little about what their children actually know and does nothing to inform day-to-day instruction. These critiques echo Bracey almost word-for-word. Still, unless Texas reimagines assessment from the ground up—beginning with teaching rather than measurement—any replacement risks replicating the same distortions. Bracey insisted that the best assessments are those built by teachers and anchored in teacher-made curricula, not imposed from above. 

Bracey also challenged the persistent belief that national or international test scores determine economic success. He reminded readers that Japan continued to dominate global assessments even as its economy faltered, and that countries like Iceland maintained high scores while facing economic collapse. 

The notion that bubbling in answers on a fourth- or eighth-grade exam shapes global competitiveness is, to use Bracey’s word, “easily refuted.” Yet Texas, like much of the nation, continues to tie student outcomes to broader narratives about economic health and workforce readiness, despite overwhelming evidence that economic forces are far larger than any test score.

Bracey’s insistence on returning to the human, relational work of teaching feels especially vital. Public schools are not failing; they are absorbing the accumulated burdens of inequality, political interference, and relentless underfunding—burdens that privatization schemes will only intensify. Vouchers will not solve the challenges facing Texas students. Nor will another standardized test, no matter how politically appealing.

Bracey’s enduring message is that education is not a number. It is not a rank, a percentile, or a scaled score. It is the web of relationships, communities, and possibilities that unfold when schools are supported rather than scapegoated. If Texas is serious about creating a stronger and more equitable education system, then we must move beyond the illusions spun by test scores and invest once again in teachers, teacher-made curriculum, and public schools as public goods.

In this critical moment, Bracey’s voice reminds us that the greatest danger is not that our tests show too little—but that we have come to believe they show too much.

Reference

Bracey, G. W. (2009). Multiple measures. Educational Leadership, 67(3), 32–37.

Edison, J. (2025, May 3). Private school vouchers are now law in Texas. Here’s how they will work. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/03/texas-school-vouchers-greg-abbott-signs/

Valenzuela, A. (2025, September 15). Accountability without justice: The continuing agenda to demonize K–12 public schools to set the stage for further privatization. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2025/09/accountability-without-justice.html 

Austin’s Children Deserve More Than A Test Score, by María del Carmen Unda & Raul Longoria

Congratulations to Dr. María del Carmen Unda and Raul Longoria for this powerful and timely piece in the Texas Observer. You’ve spoken a truth we have long known: test scores measure poverty far more reliably than they measure learning. 

So why punish the very children and communities already carrying the heaviest burdens—other than to continue filing the deep, bottomless pockets of the testing industrial complex?

Thank you for lifting up the voices of Austin’s students, families, and educators, and for reminding us that partnership—not punishment—is the path to real educational justice.

-Angela Valenzuela

Austin’s Children Deserve More Than A Test Score: The city's “F” schools overwhelmingly serve mostly low-income African-American and Hispanic children 

by María del Carmen Unda & Raul Longoria | September 24, 2025 | Texas Observer

Earlier this month, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) announced that 12 Austin-area schools with an “F” rating could be closed. For many families, this isn’t just a policy decision—it’s a direct threat to thousands of children’s educational stability and their communities’ future. 

The affected schools, all part of Austin Independent School District (AISD) received three consecutive failing grades under the state’s accountability system tied to the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) exam. TEA ordered the campuses to submit improvement plans by mid-November, which could involve major staffing changes or closures. The schools include Winn Montessori, Barrington, Dawson, Linder, Oak Springs, Pecan Springs, Sanchez, Widen, Wooldridge, Bedichek, Martin, and Paredes. As education researchers and community advocates, we know that school ratings often reveal more about poverty than about student learning. Decades of research show that standardized tests don’t measure intellect, creativity, or resilience. They measure zip codes. Numerous studies also highlight the direct ties between the testing industry and the prison industrial complex.

The problem is clear: Austin’s “F” schools overwhelmingly serve mostly low-income African-American and Hispanic children. Closing them on the basis of a flawed metric sends one message: Your community does not matter. 

SCHOOL BUSES IN AUSTIN (SHUTTERSTOCK)

More specifically, data from the Texas Academic Performance Report outlines that the twelve Austin ISD campuses at risk of closure or major intervention serve predominantly low-income African-American and Hispanic student populations (see a full chart here): At these campuses, between 78 percent and 97 percent of students are classified as economically disadvantaged, with most schools exceeding 90 percent. This strongly suggests that socioeconomic status, not instructional quality, is the most consistent predictor of school ratings. Research has long demonstrated that poverty shapes educational outcomes through limited access to resources, higher mobility rates, and increased exposure to stressors outside of school. The racial and ethnic composition of these same schools is between 57 percent and 91 percent Hispanic, while African-American enrollment ranges from 1.9 percent to nearly 39 percent. The clustering of F-rated schools in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods highlights the racialized nature of standardized testing outcomes, aligning with scholarship that critiques accountability systems as mechanisms that reproduce racial and class stratification. 

TEA’s accountability system disproportionately penalizes schools that serve economically disadvantaged students of color. All twelve schools identified for improvement or closure received failing (“F”) ratings, yet their student demographics highlight structural inequities rather than deficiencies in teaching or learning. 

Parents and teachers have long known what research confirms: Standardized testing is a poor predictor of success. It rewards test-taking strategies, not curiosity. It privileges students with resources, tutors, and stability at home, while penalizing those navigating poverty, language barriers, or trauma. 

Standardized testing has become a billion-dollar business. In 2013, TEA awarded Pearson a $462 million contract, followed by a $280 million contract with Education Testing Services. Nationally, 45 states spend a combined $669 million annually on testing contracts. These corporations reap massive profits, yet there is no evidence that more standardized testing improves student learning or narrows achievement gaps. What these tests do measure—reliably—is the ability of corporations to siphon resources away from Texas students, teachers, and communities.

Instead of doubling down on testing, TEA should reduce the number of exams and provide real support. Before closing schools, the agency must engage communities in honest conversations about what children need to thrive—whether it’s more bilingual staff, smaller classes, or after-school programs. 

Austin’s children deserve more than a test score. Closing schools will not build stronger communities. Listening to them will. TEA must choose partnership over punishment. 

A growing body of scholarship urges states to move beyond single test scores and adopt multiple measures of accountability. Such systems better capture the breadth of student learning by incorporating graduation rates, college and career readiness, access to qualified teachers, and school climate. Authentic assessments—such as project- and portfolio-based evaluations—offer viable alternatives that measure higher-order thinking and student creativity while remaining compliant with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which explicitly authorizes states to integrate portfolios, extended performance tasks, and adaptive assessments into their accountability systems. Despite this flexibility, Texas continues to rely almost exclusively on high-stakes standardized tests, ignoring well-established recommendations for more equitable, comprehensive approaches to evaluating student learning and school quality. 

At the state policy level, Texas must fundamentally rethink accountability. Policymakers, TEA, and school leaders should establish school-based teams to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data, ensuring that decisions are grounded in the realities of students, families, and educators. 

These efforts must prioritize schools with the greatest needs and the fewest resources, offering sustained support rather than punitive closures. Specifically, TEA should end costly assessment contracts with for-profit corporations and redirect those funds into classrooms, counseling services, culturally relevant curricula, and community engagement initiatives that actually strengthen schools. 

Dr. MARÍA DEL CARMEN UNDA is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas. Her research examines education policymaking and access in K–12 schools, with a focus on the experiences of students of color.

Raul ‘Neto’ Longoria is a candidate for the Texas State Board of Education, District 5. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and he has dedicated his career to Austin ISD as a bilingual special education teacher and parent support specialist.

Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy Henry A. Giroux | Truthout | 2010

 Friends:

Published in 2010, I offer blog reader's Dr. Henry Giroux’s reflection on Paulo Freire that makes clear why the Brazilian educator remains one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed offered not just a literacy method, but a vision of education as a deeply political, moral, and liberatory practice. Especially in fields like education, sociology, and the humanities, I don't think one should graduate without having read this text.

Unlike today’s market-driven models of schooling that reduce learning to test scores, job preparation, and corporate accountability metrics, Freire viewed pedagogy as a project of freedom—an invitation for students to reflect critically, imagine otherwise, and act to transform their world. Giroux laments how contemporary education has largely abandoned this vision, reducing teachers to technicians and classrooms to “dead zones” where critical thought is stifled in favor of test prep and control.

At the heart of Freire’s philosophy is the conviction that education is never neutral. It either domesticates students into existing systems of power or equips them to challenge injustice and reclaim their agency. For Freire, literacy was not merely functional but existential: it was about “reading the world” as much as reading the word, developing self-knowledge, and creating conditions for democratic life. Such an approach is threatening to elites precisely because it cultivates critical citizens rather than compliant workers. Giroux stresses that this remains as urgent today as in Freire’s lifetime, as neoliberal policies and corporate culture continue to erode education’s democratic purpose.

Beyond theory, Giroux also recalls Freire as a person—humble, generous, and full of hope. His politics were inseparable from his humanity: he modeled compassion, joy, and a refusal to surrender to cynicism. For Freire, hope was not naïve optimism but a disciplined practice rooted in history and collective struggle. His legacy challenges educators and citizens alike to see education as a site of possibility, to insist on its role in sustaining democracy, and to nurture the unfinished project of freedom. In Giroux’s words, Freire’s work remains not only relevant but indispensable in the fight against conformity, authoritarianism, and the foreclosure of human potential.

Giroux's article in Truthout originates from Policy Futures in Education, a scholarly journal, where it was published in 2010, as well. I should add that Henry Giroux is also one of the most influential educators in the last and current century, as well. I once heard Giroux lecture while at Stanford and found him every bit as passionate and dynamic in person as he is in his writing.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Giroux, H. A. (2010). Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy. Policy futures in education, 8(6), 715-721. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2304/pfie.2010.8.6.715

Giroux, H. A. (2010, January 1). Rethinking education as the practice of freedom: Paulo Freire and the promise of critical pedagogy, Truthout. https://truthout.org/articles/rethinking-education-as-the-practice-of-freedom-paulo-freire-and-the-promise-of-critical-pedagogy/

Rethinking Education as the Practice of Freedom: Paulo Freire and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy

Henry A. Giroux | Truthout | 2010

Paulo Freire is one of the most important critical educators of the 20th century.[1] Not only is he considered one of the founders of critical pedagogy, but he also played a crucial role in developing a highly successful literacy campaign in Brazil before the onslaught of the junta in 1964. Once the military took over the government, Freire was imprisoned for a short time for his efforts. He eventually was released and went into exile, primarily in Chile and later in Geneva, Switzerland, for a number of years. Once a semblance of democracy returned to Brazil, he went back to his country in 1980 and played a significant role in shaping its educational policies until his untimely death in 1997. His book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," is considered one of the classic texts of critical pedagogy, and has sold over a million copies, influencing generations of teachers and intellectuals both in the United States and abroad. Since the 1980s, there has been no intellectual on the North American educational scene who has matched either his theoretical rigor or his moral courage. Most schools and colleges of education are now dominated by conservative ideologies, hooked on methods, slavishly wedded to instrumentalized accountability measures and run by administrators who lack either a broader vision or critical understanding of education as a force for strengthening the imagination and expanding democratic public life.

As the market-driven logic of neoliberal capitalism continues to devalue all aspects of the public good, one consequence has been that the educational concern with excellence has been removed from matters of equity, while the notion of schooling as a public good has largely been reduced to a private good. Both public and higher education are largely defined through the corporate demand that they provide the skills, knowledge and credentials that will provide the workforce necessary for the United States to compete and maintain its role as the major global economic and military power. Consequently, there is little interest in both public and higher education, and most importantly in many schools of education, for understanding pedagogy as a deeply civic, political and moral practice - that is, pedagogy as a practice for freedom. As schooling is increasingly subordinated to a corporate order, any vestige of critical education is replaced by training and the promise of economic security. Similarly, pedagogy is now subordinated to the narrow regime of teaching to the test coupled with an often harsh system of disciplinary control, both of which mutually reinforce each other. In addition, teachers are increasingly reduced to the status of technicians and deskilled as they are removed from having any control over their classrooms or school governance structures. Teaching to the test and the corporatization of education becomes a way of "taming" students and invoking modes of corporate governance in which public school teachers become deskilled and an increasing number of higher education faculty are reduced to part-time positions, constituting the new subaltern class of academic labor.

But there is more at stake here than a crisis of authority and the repression of critical thought. Too many classrooms at all levels of schooling now resemble a "dead zone," where any vestige of critical thinking, self-reflection and imagination quickly migrate to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media culture. The major issue now driving public schooling is how to teach for the test, while disciplining those students who because of their class and race undermine a school district's ranking in the ethically sterile and bloodless world of high stakes testing and empirical score cards.[2] Higher education mimics this logic by reducing its public vision to the interests of capital and redefining itself largely as a credentializing factory for students and a Petri dish for downsizing academic labor. Under such circumstances, rarely do educators ask questions about how schools can prepare students to be informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live. As Stanley Aronowitz puts it:

"Few of even the so-called educators ask the question: What matters beyond the reading, writing, and numeracy that are presumably taught in the elementary and secondary grades? The old question of what a kid needs to become an informed 'citizen' capable of participating in making the large and small public decisions that affect the larger world as well as everyday life receives honorable mention but not serious consideration. These unasked questions are symptoms of a new regime of educational expectations that privileges job readiness above any other educational values."[3]

"The Long Fight for Meaningful Assessment in Texas: From TAAS to HB 4 and Beyond" by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Long Fight for Meaningful Assessment in Texas: From TAAS 

to House Bill 4 and Beyond

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

House Bill 4 represents a promising and long-overdue step toward meaningful reform of Texas’ public school accountability system, which currently relies too heavily on the STAAR exam. The late Rice University professor, Dr. Linda McNeil, and I published on this very topic 25 years ago (McNeil & Valenzuela, 2000). 

I authored an anthology on this in 2004, published by the State University of New York Press (Valenzuela, 2004). We worked with former Texas State Rep. Dora Olivo, filing a bill on holistic assessment in the 2001 legislature. It actually passed out of the Texas House. This, despite personal phone calls from President George W. Bush to House members in real time. 

Rep. Olivo’s bill stood little chance. After all, "W" was on a mission to pass what would become the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, a sweeping federal mandate that ushered high-stakes testing into every classroom and codified accountability as the cornerstone of public education policy.

Believe me when I say—I’ve given over two decades of my life to this struggle. My older daughter, then just an elementary school student, testified before the Texas Legislature about the harms of high-stakes testing. On the day she courageously refused to take the exam, she wrote a heartfelt letter to President George W. Bush, pleading for change. This fight is not just professional for me—it’s deeply personal. In fact, the very origins of this blog are rooted in that resistance.

By the 2013 legislative session, Dr. Linda McNeil and I had joined forces with Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment (TAMSA), standing alongside a growing coalition of scholars, parents, and advocates committed to transforming our state’s accountability system. Over time, that chorus of resistance only grew louder. I’ve been especially heartened to see Raise Your Hand Texas (RYHT) take a leadership role in this movement, and I’ve had the privilege of attending several of their events and press conferences that continue to shape the public conversation.

Several aspects of Raise Your Hand Texas’s 2025 report, “Assessment and Accountability: HB 4 Back in the Spotlight,” are especially noteworthy and speak to the significance of this moment (Raise Your Hand Texas, 2025).

First, with all the multi-year, RYHT efforts and data on public opinion on the Texas STAAR System of testing and accountability, House Bill 4, a bipartisan bill, died this legislative session, failing to arrive on the Governor's desk. It was a bipartisan bad idea to begin with.

Second, meaningful assessment was a priority of the entire Texas House of Representatives, as evidenced by the lower bill number, and it still didn't make it.

Last, and relatedly, the show of support by so many authors and co-authors is more than I have ever seen on testing legislation in the history of the legislature, and for that, we should be very encouraged.

Educators, parents, and students have long argued that a single high-stakes test cannot capture the full picture of student learning, school quality, or teacher impact. It's also costly and has filled the pockets of Education Testing Services and Pearson, Inc. to the tune of literally hundreds of millions, probably billions by now, over the past decades (e.g., see McGaughey, 2015).

As Dr. McNeil would often say, "Every testing dollar for the testing companies is one less dollar for public education in Texas."

In a political climate where entire diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and centers are being dismantled and faculty governance stripped away, one has to wonder: if the testing regime is so untouchable, then whose interests beyond the testing companies does it serve?

The truth is, the testing infrastructure is far from neutral. It operates as a powerful mechanism of control—determining what counts as legitimate knowledge, who is deemed successful or deficient, and which schools are rewarded or punished. It elevates compliance over curiosity, standardization over critical thinking, and reinforces a relentless hierarchy that ranks students, educators, schools, and, by association, entire communities as winners or failures.

So yes, we must ask—why not dismantle the testing regime too? In a moment when so much is being undone in the name of “reform,” let's turn the mirror on the system and ask who benefits from the tests, and who is harmed when they have an undue influence on our children’s future?

Enough is enough. For over two decades, we have fought against a testing system that punishes children for the conditions they were born into—a system rooted in racism and classism that reduces vibrant, complex human beings to numbers on a piece of paper (Valenzuela, 2004). 

How many more children must carry the weight of a single test? How many more will internalize failure as casualties in a testing system that is, at its core, both racist and classist (Valenzuela, 2004)? We must begin organizing now for the 90th Texas Legislative Session in 2027. The path to justice in education demands persistence, preparation, and the collective will to dismantle what never served our children in the first place. 

All told, a revised version of HB 4, passed unanimously out of the House Public Education Committee this session. It addressed concerns about limiting the weight of STAAR in A-F campus ratings and introduced more formative assessments that provide timely and actionable data. It also included innovative changes, such as updating postsecondary success indicators and launching local accountability pilot programs, allowing districts to design systems that reflect community values and student engagement beyond the classroom.

The bill’s pivot toward a student-centered accountability system—one that, in addition to academic performance, values growth, character, and civic engagement —is not just a policy shift. It’s a moral course correction. I commend Raise Your Hand Texas for its tireless advocacy in helping us reach this turning point. We now have every reason to be hopeful—and even more reason to keep pushing for a future where every child is seen, heard, and valued far beyond a test score.

References

McGaughey, L. (2015, May 19) Texas set to switch testing vendor, reducing role of British education giant: Pearson had held contract for 15 years, Houston Chronicle, https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Texas-set-to-switch-testing-vendor-drops-6271843.php

McNeil, L., & Valenzuela, A. (2000). The harmful impact of the TAAS system of testing in Texas: Beneath the accountability rhetoric. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED443872.pdf

Raise Your Hand Texas. (2025, May 5). Assessment and accountability: HB 4 Back in the Spotlight. https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/assessment-and-accountability-hb-4/

Valenzuela, A. (2004). Leaving Children Behind: How "Texas-style" accountability harms Latino Youth. New York: State University of New York Press.

No, Mr. Petrilli—The Left Doesn’t Undermine Equity. The Right Does.

Friends:

Some claim the left rarely engages the right, so here is my response—prompted by Michael J. Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, who seems to be deliberately baiting such engagement. If that was his aim, it’s a calculated provocation, given how deeply flawed portrayal of the left.

In any case, for starters, the claim that some equity advocates view excellence as the enemy of equity is both misleading and unsubstantiated. The vast majority of progressive scholars and equity-focused educators do not reject excellence. We instead challenge exclusionary definitions of excellence that ignore structural inequities.

Many of us believe that excellence must be redefined through an asset-based lens, one that recognizes and values cultural wealth, resilience, multilingualism, biliteracy, community engagement, and other forms of brilliance too often overlooked in dominant, test-centric models.

Programs like gifted-and-talented initiatives or exam schools frequently reflect opportunity gaps, not innate ability. Access to such programs is strongly correlated with resources like test prep, enrichment opportunities, and parental advocacy, rather than untapped genius. Progressives regularly call for greater equality of opportunity as the antidote to wasted potential.

Second, I have never encountered any serious equity advocate who seeks to "level down" high-achieving students. On the contrary, the call has always been to broaden access to excellence by dismantling the barriers that prevent marginalized students from accessing high-level opportunities.

It is also inaccurate and reductive to claim that the equity debate should center exclusively on prenatal-to-age-five interventions, where ideological consensus might be easier to achieve. While early childhood investments are critical, this framing evades the long arc of inequity that persists across the K–12 and higher education systems, manifest in segregated schools, inequitable school funding models, discriminatory discipline practices, biased standardized, high-stakes tests, academic tracking, and curricula that erase or ignore students' languages, cultures, and lived realities.

Equity advocates are not ignoring early childhood. Rather, they are expanding the conversation to name and challenge systemic racism and classism across the entire educational pipeline that hurts low-income white children, too.

I further reject the suggestion that the political left and right are offering equally valid contributions to the equity project. So many of the right’s current policies—bans on ethnic studies and critical race theory, censorship of discussions about race and gender, book bans, attacks on DEI, and the systematic defunding and privatization of public education—undermine any meaningful pursuit of educational equity.

Yes, personal responsibility and family stability matter. But invoking these concepts without addressing racialized poverty, generational trauma, and systemic disinvestment is historically shallow and dishonest. 

For the record, I am proudly on the left, and I do not reject personal responsibility. I embrace it as part of my patriotic commitment to perfecting this nation. The simplistic suggestion that the left shirks responsibility is a tired rhetorical device—one designed not to clarify debate but to dismiss structural injustice. It begs the question: why are you and others on the right so eager to reduce complex social realities to individual failings, rather than confront the systems that perpetuate inequity?

Let’s reframe the issue clearly: the real problem lies not with those advocating for equity, but with the dominant, assimilationist educational model itself—one built on standardized testing, academic tracking, and decontextualized, frequently uninspiring curricula and promoted by the right. 

This model doesn’t uplift excellence. It manufactures mediocrity. It lowers expectations, rewards the manipulation of metrics, and consistently fails to nurture the full range of human potential, particularly among students from historically marginalized communities.

If the vision you’ve laid out is indeed the right’s blueprint for education, then we should be gravely concerned. A system that prioritizes compliance over critical thinking, test scores over learning, and exclusion over opportunity places not just our children’s futures, but the very health of our democracy, at risk.

-Angela Valenzuela

The true enemy of equity

Michael J. Petrilli 1.19.2023 | The Fordham Institute



Last fall, Stephen Sawchuk published an Education Week article exploring why “educational equity” had become a “trigger word”—even though the notion has been baked into federal policy for decades. “Equity may be the law,” he wrote, “but we don’t agree on what it means.”


I can understand Sawchuk’s confusion because, properly construed, the call for greater equity can and should command widespread support from Americans across the ideological spectrum. A potentially unifying argument might go something like this:

In a great country like ours, we should aspire for every child to grow up to achieve his or her full potential. Anything less is a waste of talent and a blemish on human dignity and flourishing.

Schools have a particular role to play in helping children achieve their full academic potential, and supporting roles in helping children develop socially, emotionally, artistically, and athletically, as well.

Yet we know that our country is failing to live up to this aspiration because millions of boys and girls are failing to live up to their full potential. And we know that most of the reasons have to do with what happens between conception and kindergarten—that the strains of poverty, family instability, parental substance abuse, and other social ills mean that many children enter schools far behind what their cognitive trajectory otherwise could have been.

We know this in part because of the evidence of achievement gaps that can be measured at school entry, if not before. If we reject the notion that genetic differences drive racial achievement gaps as morally and empirically dubious—which we absolutely should—then the explanation for their existence as early as age five must be differing life circumstances, including the gaping chasms in socioeconomic status and its associated opportunities.

A major focus of “equity work,” then, is to close these gaps in the zero-to-five years—both because it’s the right thing to do, and so that all children have the opportunity to achieve their full potential—cognitively, academically, and otherwise.

This project has tended to be the domain of the political left, with its calls for better pre- and post-natal healthcare; the eradication of environmental pollutants like lead paint; direct financial supports for families with young children, like 2021’s expanded and fully refundable child tax credits; and expanded public support for high quality childcare. Yet the political right has contributions to make, as well, with its calls for greater personal responsibility; greater family stability, especially via married, two-parent families; and for welfare programs that encourage—rather than discourage—marriage and work, which have been shown to lead to better outcomes for kids.

Schools also have a critical role to play, especially at the elementary level, where students are still young enough for a great education to make a significant difference in their academic trajectories. Schools may not be able to overcome all of the damage of poverty, family instability, and their associated ills, but they can do a lot, as we know from the markedly different achievement trajectories of children in the highest-performing high-poverty schools—many of them public charter schools—compared to kids in more typical school settings.

Educational equity, then, means providing children, and especially poor children, with excellence—excellent instruction, excellent curricula, excellent teachers, excellent tutoring, excellent enrichment. Some of that costs more money in high-poverty settings, so yes, educational equity demands that we spend more public dollars on the students who need it most.

The greatest enemy of equity, then, is mediocrity. It’s the everyday bureaucratic dysfunction that remains all too common in American education. It’s the decisions that public officials take that block excellent schools, including excellent public charter schools, from growing or replicating. It’s the inertia that keeps traditional public schools from retaining many of their best young teachers. It’s the refusal to intervene when a principal is not up to the task of creating a culture of excellence.

Note what is not an enemy of equity: excellence. Indeed, far from it—excellence is the antidote to inequity.

And yet—back to the puzzle that Sawchuk presented in his article—some “equity advocates” have turned the notion into a “trigger word” by arguing that excellence is indeed the enemy. By their line of thinking, anything that helps a subgroup of children achieve at high levels, or even just celebrates that achievement—such as gifted-and-talented programs, exam schools, or National Merit Scholarships—is at war with equity. These advocates see equity as a zero-sum game. Rather than focus on helping every child achieve his or her potential, potential that inevitably varies from individual to individual, they seek a world in which the outcomes children achieve are closer to equal—even if that equality comes by leveling-down the high achievers.

Needless to say, this conception of equity is highly unpopular, and not just on the political right. As well it should be because it’s also morally bankrupt. It is simply wrong to embrace policies and practices and seek to put a ceiling on any child’s achievement—just as it is wrong to block efforts to get all students to a floor of basic literacy and numeracy.

John Gardner once asked if we can “be equal and excellent too.” The answer is an unequivocal “yes!” And in the domain of racial equity, the way to do that is to ensure that all children, from every racial and ethnic group, get what they need to live up to their full potential. And for high-potential children from underrepresented groups in particular, it means identifying their talent early, cultivating it through gifted-and-talented programs and the like, and keeping them on a trajectory of high achievement all the way through high school and beyond.

It bears repeating: Excellence is not the enemy of equity, it is the antidote to inequity. Equity advocates would do well to keep that in mind.