Much Better Than Last May!

Quick reactions to School Board Election Night in Texas

Last night’s school board elections results in Texas were much, much better than the results from a year ago, when Patriot Mobile-backed Christian Nationalist candidates swept across North Texas and extremists took seats on board all around the state. Censorship, Christian Nationalism, and anti-LGBTQ extremism proved far less successful campaign messages this year.

So that’s the headline. Now some details.

Call me a grump if you want, but I’m going to start with the night’s disappointments, because some of the races that turned red really do sting. In particular, it hurts that pro-censorship factions strengthened their hold on the boards in Keller, Katy, Grapevine-Colleyville, and Spring Branch ISD. All of those districts have suffered under extremist leadership over the past year—teachers being chased out of Keller and GCISD, a trip to see James & the Giant Peach being canceled in SBISD—and things will only get worse from here. The students in those districts don’t deserve that, and I’m heartsick for them and for the teachers, parents, and advocates who have been fighting on their behalf.

But in better news, pro-censorship candidates were wiped out in other high-profile races across the state, especially in North Texas. Highlights included: McKinney ISD, where book banners have been organizing to try to take over the board since last summer, and all three incumbents easily held their seats; Canyon ISD, the home district of book-banning group Texans Wake Up, where one of the district’s leading book challengers lost her bid for the board; and Northwest ISD, where a brand-new group, Unite for NISD, banded together brilliantly to resist the sort of takeover that has plagued neighboring districts. And then there’s my personal favorite result of the night, from Frisco ISD—that’s State Rep. Jared Patterson’s home district—where both candidates supported by book-banning PAC Families 4 Frisco lost handily.

Here are some of the people voters kept off of Texas school boards last night:

• Lydia Ortega (Plano ISD), who proposed “incentivizing” students to find sexual language in school libraries by rewarding them with $500 for turning books in to the authorities.

• Rachel Elliott (McKinney ISD), who personally challenged 282 books for removal from the district.

• Carolyn Rachaner (Denton ISD), who challenged The Handmaid’s Tale in her district, writing, “I believe the person who approved this book for our libraries should be fired,” “I believe I will have to involve law enforcement,” and “Trash it and order a mental health exam for the author.”

All of that is great news.

What lessons can we take from last night?

1. Red districts hate censorship, too! I see you Fredericksburg ISD and Kerrville ISD. The Hill Country has a small but active and influential Moms for Liberty chapter (Gillespie County) that threw its support behind Brandon Aery in Kerrville and Dennis McCanless in Fredericksburg. Both candidates lost—and other rural and heavily Republican districts repudiated extreme candidates (see Canyon ISD and Red Oak ISD, among others). It’s more evidence of something I argued at the start of this cycle: this fight isn’t a question of partisanship; it’s about principles. Some people–Democrat and Republican–stand up for the value of education. Some oppose it. 

2. Big money remains hard to beat. So what happened in the districts that went sour? Well, generally, those are districts where Patriot Mobile (in North Texas) and Texans for Educational Freedom (in the Houston suburbs) pointed their money cannons and started blasting. Their interventions were ugly and often dishonest, but they provided needed boosts for extremist candidates in low-turnout elections. That said …

3. Patriot Mobile isn’t invincible. Last May, candidates backed by Patriot Mobile won every race they ran. This year, the Christian Nationalist phone company/PAC aimed its personal cash howitzer at Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, dumping an obscene $130,000 into the races there. But none of the candidates they backed won a majority of the votes. Richard Newton lost outright to Diana Sager, and while A.J. Pontillo and Mary Humphrey were able to win seats on the board, they only avoided a runoff because of a recent change in district rules. In addition, districts Patriot Mobile dominated last May—like Mansfield ISD—went the other way this time.

4. Relatedly, we can’t split votes and expect to win. The big problem in GCISD wasn’t Patriot Mobile money; it was the fact that there were multiple anti-extremist candidates running in two of the three races, and enough voters went for option B to send two extremists onto the board without majority votes.

   And look what happened in the Place 7 race in Humble ISD. In that district, a half-dozen extremists candidates ran for spots on the board. The only one who won was Mark Grabowski, arguably the weakest candidate of the bunch. Why? Because in his race, two strong anti-extremist candidates, Natalie Carter and Nancy Morrison, went up against each other.

5. The playbook for holding off an extremist takeover remains clear. This is what I wrote after the election last year:

   The biggest success stories, Eanes & Richardson ISDs, have in common really good, big, established, on-the-ground organizing groups. Eanes 4 Equity and Richardson ISD Families for Equity are officially non-political, so they didn’t endorse any candidates. But they are both committed to the cause of equity, and they both provided space for like-minded voters to meet and share information. They hosted events and forums, and Eanes 4 Equity president Darshana Kalikstein even took the courageous leap of appearing on Aaron Silva’s (fairly hostile) podcast to defuse the fear around CRT and DEI. She did a great job, and that alone might have changed some minds in a district where one race was decided by 265 votes.

   What lesson can we take from that? If I were in a district with a school board race in November, this week I would look for a group like Eanes 4 Equity and Richardson ISD Families for Equity or Lake Highlands Area Moms Against Racism.* And I would invite all of my friends to join. And if I couldn’t find such a group, I would start one.

   It holds up well after last night. In Northwest ISD, Unite for NISD did all of that. In Richardson, Richardson ISD Families for Equity worked its magic once again. And teachers organized in Frisco ISD in truly amazing ways—hopefully I’ll have more on that in a future post. Organizing like that is no guarantee. Groups in Katy, Keller, and GCISD also seemed to do everything right but still came up short. But it’s the best way forward we’ve got.