Community Impact spoke with Witt in July about how politics have begun to play a larger role in local school boards over the past few years.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you think Texas school boards were designed to have nonpartisan trustees?
I think, in theory, it would be so great if our school boards were nonpartisan. They were set up that way because public education should not be political. ... It should be very straightforward what an accurate, honest education is, and we should be creating environments where kids can be safe and embraced no matter who they are. ... We should all be working toward the same goal regardless of adults’ political views or agendas.
But obviously, that has not happened. ... It's really powerful to play on the fear and anxieties that a lot of parents and community members have around how our future generations are growing up.
And I also think—for the general population of voters—that school board elections and State Board of Education elections, while they're extremely important, a lot of people don't pay as much attention to them as they should. The State Board of Education, while different than [local] school boards, really trickles down and affects school board policies. Those SBOE seats serve the largest electorate other than a statewide official, but we don't see a lot of voter turnout in those races.
So, I think that school boards have been a really easy place for conservative [political action committees] to fund right-wing board members and trustees and put them on those boards. And communities don't often realize that it's happening until we have really big public things happening like vaccine and climate change information being taken out of textbooks.
When would you say this started here in Texas?
I think the strategy to infiltrate public education as a means to gain political control and to siphon money away from public schools has been happening for decades. I think that the 2016 election certainly emboldened a new generation of ultra-right-wing conservatives to bring ideas to the table that were not mainstream before [former President Donald] Trump was elected.
... We know that [former U.S. Secretary of Education] Betsy DeVos had a lot of connections with different voucher PACs and programs that wanted to fund vouchers across the nation. So that administration itself definitely popularized going after public education; ... telling people falsehoods about what their kids are learning in public schools and really demonizing teachers and demonizing public education and fear-mongering among parents.
I think [the COVID-19 pandemic] exasperated all of that in a way that is just immeasurable. I don't think it can be underestimated how much fear and misinformation can grow during a time where people are really anxious and fearful and scared and in their homes being fed propaganda and misinformation.
... But the groundwork has been laid for decades. I think that it became more popularized in 2016 and then [in] 2020, it just kind of spread like wildfire.
Why are local school boards such a significant platform?
At a basic level, it's so significant because our children—as trite as it sounds—really are our future, and it's scary to see their education and their upbringing being politicized in such a way and not having the freedom to learn accurate, honest information.
Public school curriculum for a long time has been whitewashed, but we're seeing that become even worse because of different bills happening at the Legislature that then empower school boards to take out information.
In Cy-Fair [ISD], for instance, the reason that they could take out information about vaccines and climate change is because of HB 1605, and that allows them to adopt supplemental materials to meet the standards [so] they can adopt materials that align with their political views.
... I think that it is part of the strategy to continuously siphon money away from programs that they don't agree with. I don't think that's to help children; I think it's to continue crippling public education, and there's a lot of money behind that because there are really rich people who want vouchers to be adopted in Texas so they can make money off of privatized education.
... So, there are a lot of reasons that people should be concerned. I think that education in general is something that's really easy for people to only care about if they have kids. So we really need people who also don't have kids to be concerned about how our future generations are being educated and how our tax dollars are being manipulated to pay for education that doesn't have to meet any standards and doesn't have to serve every single kid and family.
When we see these political issues coming into public schools, how does that affect students?
I think that a lot of what we're seeing is a response to the fact that, as a society, we are becoming more progressive in our thoughts and our policies. But also, our society is becoming more and more diverse every year, and Texas is becoming more diverse every year. And our electorate is becoming younger—one-third of our electorate is under 30.
So, I think a lot of what right-wing lawmakers are doing right now is out of fear because they know that younger generations don't agree with them, and they're scared that the kids who are in school right now will continue to become more progressive if they're given the same education that we were and they're given accurate, honest information about our history and climate change.
That said, I think that the harm to kids is huge. One huge way is that climate change is the biggest crisis that we're facing and that they're going to face. Kids who are under 18 right now, the impact of climate change that they're going to see is nothing like what we can imagine. And so, it's really doing them a disservice and doing harm to not teach them the truth about climate change so that they can meet those challenges.
I also think that censoring stories about people that look like them is really harmful. Kids from every single background, of every race, whether they're LGBTQ or their families are, deserve to see themselves represented in stories in their libraries and in the history of their textbooks.
... I think there's a lot of harm that can be done there. I also think kids are really smart and resilient, and that it doesn't necessarily mean that all of our future generations aren't going to learn the truth, but they're going to have to try harder, and they should be getting that in their public schools.
Are politics distracting from bigger issues that are being overlooked in public schools?
A lot of kids that are under 18 right now missed some really vital years being in person and being socialized in schools, which was necessary to stop the spread of COVID, but they really deserve for their school board trustees to be spending time thinking about how Texas can do better in education, rather than thinking about how they can politicize their education and take away library books from kids and not teach them about climate change.
... It's really hard to attract teachers right now because they have really been put under fire and blamed for a lot of things, and they're underpaid—their raises were held hostage with the voucher bill last year. So, kids don't even have the teacher-to-student ratio that they should have in almost any school district in Texas, so I do think we're doing kids a really big disservice by not focusing on anything positive we can do for them and just continuing to manipulate their education.
