Grumet: Texas needs teachers. Why does Gov. Abbott keep attacking them?

“Teachers play a key role in the success of Texas students & our state.”— Gov. Greg Abbott, in a Feb. 24 tweet

“We will not use Texas taxpayer dollars to teach our children to hate our country.”— Also Gov. Greg Abbott, in an April 15 tweet

Texas has a teacher shortage that’s so acute the governor last year created a task force to recommend solutions, and lawmakers are planning to dish out raises. A poll last year found three-quarters of Texas teachers were seriously considering leaving the profession.

Three-quarters.

Salaries and workloads can always be improved. But when the problem is low morale, part of the solution is respect. It’s free to give. No budgetary implications. And it would mean something to overworked, highly dedicated educators — who are, in fact, valued by the vast majority of Texans.

Why doesn’t Gov. Greg Abbott share their view?

Instead, at the very time we need to recruit and retain teachers, Abbott has turned their profession into a piñata, an empty approximation of the real thing he can whack for sport.

Abbott has been pushing hard for “school choice,” allowing parents to use public school dollars to send their children to private school. Reasonable people can disagree about the pros and cons of such a thing, and the chambers of our Legislature remain divided over it.

But our take-no-prisoners governor has chosen to make his case by demonizing public school teachers — accusing them of teaching “a radical, woke agenda,” engaging in “indoctrination” and “using their positions to try to cultivate and groom” young kids into being transgender.

And, as he tweeted this past weekend, teaching “our children to hate our country.”

Which is a terrible thing to say. Plus, didn’t Texas already “solve” this manufactured problem two years ago with laws limiting classroom discussions about race and racism and establishing “patriotic education” through the Texas 1836 Project?

After my column went to print, Abbott's office responded to my questions about how and where Texas children were being taught to "hate" America. Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris pointed to teacher training materials at the Fort Worth school district that included concepts such as "white privilege" and "antiracism," as well as the controversy over a "cultural competence plan" in Southlake that faced fierce opposition and was never enacted.

I should note, the Southlake proposal was an attempt to craft diversity training requirements for Carroll school district students and teachers after viral videos circulated in 2018 and 2019 of students shouting the N-word. Critics complained the plan would result in "reverse racism" against white students.

Mahaleris said parents across the state have told the governor "countless stories of woke agendas and hateful rhetoric being forced on Texas students in the classroom."

"These divisive teachings have absolutely no place in Texas schools, which in part is why Gov. Abbott made education freedom an emergency item this session to ensure parents have access to school curriculum, school libraries, and what their child is being taught in the classroom," Mahaleris said.

For all that talk of "divisive teachings," though, I haven’t heard of anything like that out of the Austin schools my kids have attended, or the Central Texas schools where my husband has taught over the past decade, or from any of the families I know in schools around the state.

If this was just a campaign, with Abbott hurling incendiary accusations at an opponent, maybe this would be politics as usual. But this is the governor repeatedly dragging public school teachers at a time when Texas needs to attract and keep more of these good people in the classroom.

A crushing workload, low pay and lack of administrative support were cited by many teachers considering leaving the profession, according to the 2022 Texas Teacher Poll produced by the Charles Butt Foundation. But the poll also found a steep drop in the past few years in whether educators feel valued, which affects their desire to stay.

Only 34% of Texas teachers said they feel valued by their community, a 20-point drop from the dawn of the pandemic in March 2020.

“Being accused of indoctrinating students into left-leaning thinking is getting out of hand,” one high school teacher in West Texas told pollsters. ”We are being vilified by our own communities.”

Not surprisingly, history and social studies teachers reported the sharpest decline in feeling valued by the community, a 33-point drop since March 2020.

And while only 20% of Texas teachers felt valued by the state’s elected officials in 2020, that number has now plummeted to 5%.

Mahaleris touted the increased funding for education and teacher incentives under Abbott's watch. But the teacher exodus is a real concern for the 5.4 million students in Texas public schools, a problem much more deserving of our governor’s attention than the conjured complaints of “woke” lesson plans. And it would be so easy for Abbott to help.

First, stop the ugly rhetoric.

Second, offer some words of support for the educators who work long hours teaching Texas kids. Maybe even give them space to do their jobs instead of passing more mandates on what can or can’t be taught.

Is that so hard?

Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or via Twitter at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/news/columns.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Grumet: Texas needs teachers. Why is Greg Abbott attacking them?