Texas is Failing its Public School Students

By: Ava Daugherty

Since August 29, 2023, when Katy Independent School District in Houston, Texas, began enforcing a policy that requires educators to notify parents and guardians if their child identifies as transgender, nineteen students have since been forcibly outed. Elsewhere, the Texas Education Agency has, starting this school year, taken over Houston Independent School District — the state’s largest, with most schools having majority Black or Latino student bodies — due to a long streak of sub-par standardized test scores from a largely underfunded school system. In 2021, the Texas legislature passed twenty-two new laws that fall under the umbrella of permitless carry measures, removing limits on accessing deadly weapons, one of which made it possible for the eighteen-year-old shooter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, to purchase two AR-style rifles days after turning eighteen, the weapons with which he then murdered twenty-one people. These, among other legislation, point to the fact that the state of Texas is failing its public school students.

In 1969, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that, by barring students from sporting black armbands in protest against US involvement in the Vietnam War, the district violated the students' First Amendment rights. Even so, Texas, in recent years, has developed a fraught track record in terms of upholding the court’s decision: in 2021, the Texas House of Representatives passed one of the nation’s first measures against Critical Race Theory in classrooms (a field of study primarily developed by legal scholars at institutions of higher education) — House Bill 3979 — which prohibits the study of The 1619 Project, the discussion “controversial” current events, and exploring the concept of institutional racism. By enforcing this draconian limitation on civics education in its classrooms, Texas public schools, as agents of the government, are violating the First Amendment rights of their students and denying them the basic right to receive a comprehensive and nuanced education.

Further, since the state’s takeover of Houston Independent School District, Texas has continued to strip students of this fundamental intellectual freedom. By converting school libraries — which have, for some time, been under intense pressure to comply with sweeping book bans and the “Parent’s Rights” movement — into discipline centers, students in the state’s poorest performing schools lose valuable educational materials that remain available in wealthier, whiter districts. Additionally, in permitting Katy Independent School District to reveal the gender identities of transgender students to their parents without their consent, Texas, by proxy, is violating the constitutional right to privacy upheld in the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges — which guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry based on the privacy protections offered by the Fourteenth Amendment. Regarding physical safety, privacy, quality education, and intellectual freedom, the state of Texas is violating the fundamental rights of its public school students.

Sources

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/neighborhood/katy/article/katy-isd-transgender-policy-board-18331497.php

https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/pdf/HB03979F.pdf#navpanes=0

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/05/25/uvalde-shooter-bought-gun-legally/

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/texas-houston-overhaul-latino-black-parents-racism-history-inequity-rcna111416

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/us/texas-houston-schools-libraries-takeover.html?searchResultPosition=8

https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/free-speech-high-school#:~:text=Morse%20v.&text=In%20Morse%2C%20the%20Supreme%20Court,sponsored%2C%20off%2Dcampus%20event.

https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/supreme-court-case-library/obergefell-v-hodges