In a thick of a presidential campaign, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. Education commentators are justifiably curious about the possible schools agenda of a President Trump, Sanders, or Clinton, sometimes to the exclusion of candidates in the down-ballot races. But even though the past few months have largely been given over to the looming fall contest, that’s certainly not the only meaningful election being held. This week, for example, millions of Texas families wisely rejected the candidacy of Mary Lou Bruner, the hard-right zealot who nearly won the Republican primary for a seat on the Texas State Board of Education.
First things first: Though she was ultimately defeated by rival Keven Ellis in Tuesday’s runoff vote, Bruner came within a few national headlines of holding office. She was the big winner in the original primary election several months ago, horsewhipping Ellis by seventeen points and coming within two points of the clinching 50 percent mark. The good people of her district have shown themselves to be very comfortable with the thundering oddballs who tend to prevail at the local level, and that played to Bruner’s strengths: She proved a Trumpian conjurer of free publicity, earning national fame by asserting that President Obama once worked as a prostitute and that global warming is a sinister and fantastical hoax.
Unlike Donald Trump, however, Bruner was susceptible to the laws of political gravity: Her know-nothing act (and the terrible news coverage that came along with it) wore thin with local conservative groups, who turned their backs on her after she subjected a group of East Texas superintendents to a mouthful of nonsense on teacher shortages and special education. The worm eventually turned, and now Bruner is left to kill time until the 2020 GOP presidential primary. (I kid! Well, maybe…)
I can sense your curiosity: But isn’t this just another kooky race at the lower warrens of American politics? The firebrand candidate lost her race, to the relief of millions. And even if she’d won, the election determines just one seat on a fifteen-member board, after all. Crackpots come and go.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. In terms of magnitude and reach, the Texas SBOE is exceeded only by its counterpart in California and, at the federal level, the Department of Education. The state’s 5.2 million schoolchildren make up roughly 10 percent of the nation’s total K–12 enrollment. The board issues sweeping academic decisions that directly impact those students, mostly involving textbooks. As the primary arbiters of curricular material in the country’s second-largest market, those fifteen members elected from Beaumont and Florence and Amarillo are empowered to stamp their personal beliefs on classrooms across the state.
Consequently, the board has been notorious for decades as a culture war battleground. When some of its members attempted to distort the state’s science standards in 2009—essentially aiming to cast doubt on evolution and make room for the teaching of intelligent design—it earned the rebuke of over fifty national councils of scientific learning. Its meddling in history and social studies curricula have been no less pernicious; approved textbooks have been shown to soft-peddle the horrors of slavery, while others grandly overstated the importance of biblical patriarchs like Moses to the work of the Founding Fathers. When Fordham reviewed Texas’s U.S. history and social studies standards in 2011, we pulled no punches, complaining that “complex historical issues are obscured with blatant politicizing throughout the document. Biblical influences on America’s founding are exaggerated, if not invented….From the earliest grades, students are pressed to uncritically celebrate the ‘free enterprise system and its benefits.’”
By the time we issued that report, the board’s high-water mark for national criticism had already been reached. Its chairman, a trained dentist and dedicated young-earth creationist, had his appointment stripped by the state legislature and lost a primary against a more moderate Republican. (These events are depicted, along with many of the board’s abuses, in a terrific PBS documentary from a few years back.) But the man who beat him declined to run for reelection, opening up the vacancy that Bruner sought to fill. After what had been a relatively low-key period, the state’s governing educational authority was nearly plunged back into quarreling over interpretations of the Old Testament.
It’s easy enough to see that Mary Lou Bruner had no business determining what Texas kids learn in school. The contents of her Facebook page, where she speculates that only the Great Flood could have created the Grand Canyon, provide a pretty good representation of the views she would have brought to the board. She’s also been a fixture at its meetings, decrying the subversive efforts of Muslims to warp textbook content and exposing sex education as a ploy by homosexual activists to convert straight children. To most observers, she seems a strikingly paranoid and ideological character.
But Bruner’s thankfully failed candidacy isn’t the real issue here. The main force behind this problem isn’t individual political conflict, but rather (as my colleague Aaron Churchill recently and convincingly argued) the very notion of partisan elections to a state board of education. Such a body should obviously be composed of experts on education and instruction, not ambitious politicos. The idea of elected school board members, much like that of elected judges, seems a bizarre inheritance from Jacksonian democracy ill-suited to the twenty-first-century nation state. There’s a reason we don’t vote for supreme court justices or members of the presidential cabinet.
Source: National Association of State Boards of Education, State Education Governance, January 2015
Just eleven states hold elections to determine membership of their boards of education. And of those eleven, only six (Alabama, Colorado, Kansas, Michigan, Texas, and Washington) do so on a partisan basis. That’s as it should be, since political tribalism has no place in education governance. Don’t believe me? Look at the open brawling between Indiana’s Republican governor and its elected schools chief, who briefly ran in the Democratic gubernatorial primary last year.
The people of Bruner’s district woke up and elevated a much more responsible candidate, who will most likely do his job and not embarrass them. But the board, which make some of the most consequential decisions of any educational jurisdiction in the country, is still a prize to be squabbled over by untold Bruner-like figures to come. Even now, they’re debating approval of a textbook that portrays Mexican Americans as subscribing to “a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this country.” While it’s heartening that the voters rejected a vicious and unqualified ideologue in this instance, it should never have come this close.
