Texas has stormed into the Houston education district, taken control of 85 schools, the majority of which are mainly Latino or Black, homogenized curriculums and instruction, converted some libraries into study and disciplinary centers, and fired or transferred teachers and librarians.
According to the state, the rapid and vigorous intervention was necessary to save the district’s 62% Latino and 22% Black students from years of educational failure that have left many of them illiterate or behind their peers in math.
Although some of the Latino and Black public schools in the district had been receiving high performance ratings, the removal of parts of them brings to mind the not-so-distant practices of separate and unequal education, if it was even available for Latino and Black children in the state.
Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, stated that “one element cannot solve the issues that led to educational inequities.”
“You require thorough surveillance, resources, and attention. It takes resources to turn around a school, much less an entire district, he continued, and that’s the true issue. These largely Black and Brown neighborhoods are resource poor.
Texas, like other states across the nation, has historically forbade Black children from attending school. According to civil rights lawyer Al Kauffman of San Antonio in a law journal article, a constitutional amendment mandated separate schools for “the white and colored children” that also applied to Mexican American youngsters.
The state crammed Mexican American students into subpar “Mexican schools” with minimal resources, few grade levels taught, and the presumption that kids would end up working on farms and in households.
The schools were established with the intention of teaching English, but they quickly turned into state detention centers for kids with Spanish last names, regardless of whether they spoke the language or not. Following the closure of Mexican schools, Mexican Americans and White.
There is “no reason” for the district’s disparities.
Despite the fact that some Houston schools were taken over and then changed, Saenz claimed that the conversion of some of the schools’ libraries, the dismissal of their librarians, and some other changes have resulted in a situation that is “certainly unfair” and “probably illegal.”
“There’s no reason for the Houston school district to have such a significant deviation between schools,” Saenz said. According to him, these injustices frequently occur across school districts rather than within them.
“A school district with a single budget, governing body, and superintendent should make sure that every school at a given level, including every high school, every middle school, and every elementary school, has the same services,
Black and Latino students attend schools that are not affected by the recent severe changes because Houston is a city that is predominately made up of minorities. However, a large percentage of Texas’s pupils attend high-poverty, largely non-white school districts.
Mexican Americans in Texas have fought for equal education for nearly 200 years through legal actions, demonstrations, walkouts, boycotts, and the establishment of their own schools. In Del Rio in 1930, one of the earliest cases brought by Mexican Americans in Texas regarding unequal educational opportunities.
We fought against these problems in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1990s, and 2000s. If inequality persists, how can you claim that education is the great equalizer? And it wasn’t a coincidence.
But in Texas, the state House once supported school vouchers as a means for white parents to remove their kids from integrated schools.
Campos didn’t believe she had any influence on her child’s school in Houston.
She began to cry as she spoke, “I feel like I want to scream at the top of my lungs and maybe someone will hear us.” “I feel helpless and powerless,”