Education Reform or Manufactured Crisis?
The Systematic Destruction of Texas Public Education
Across Texas, a profound shift in education is underway, driven by a powerful network of legislators, state agencies, and private entities. Framed as "Education Reform," this movement is deliberately undermining traditional public education, resulting in catastrophic academic failure, rising behavioral and mental health crises, and tragically increased suicide rates among students since 2008.
Key Players Behind the Crisis
To understand this crisis, Texans must examine closely the entities driving education reform:
Texas Legislature: Crafts the laws that govern public education.
Governor Greg Abbott: Signs into law reforms that drastically reshape the education landscape.
State Board of Education (SBOE): Elected officials responsible for setting curriculum standards, selecting instructional materials, and managing education funds, including the Permanent School Fund.
Texas Education Agency (TEA): Implements laws passed by the legislature, creates regulations, and oversees education practices statewide.
Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA): Provides professional development training for school administrators, significantly influencing district-level education policy.
Texas Association of School Boards (TASB): Conducts training for school boards, further entrenching education reform policies.
Education Service Centers (ESC): Offers mandated professional development for teachers and consolidates district services, enabling the widespread implementation of state policies.
These entities operate collectively, creating a tightly controlled pipeline that rapidly pushes education reform from the statehouse into classrooms across Texas, with little accountability or transparency.
Manufactured Failure: Academic and Mental Health Impacts
Since the intensification of reforms, Texas has witnessed a disturbing decline in student academic performance, accompanied by a significant rise in behavioral issues and mental health crises. The aggressive implementation of standardized testing, online adaptive assessments, and social-emotional learning programs—mandated by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)—has shifted focus from traditional academic skills to subjective psychological profiling and behavioral modification.
This relentless focus on data-driven outcomes and behavioral assessments has taken a profound toll. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), adolescent suicide rates have alarmingly increased since 2008, coinciding closely with the intensification of educational reforms. The pressure from constant standardized testing, invasive data collection, and the undermining of teacher authority through digital "personalized learning" has contributed to a generation of students experiencing unprecedented stress, anxiety, depression, and hopelessness.
The Great Texas School Ratings Swindle: How Abbott’s A–F Scam Hurts Our Schools
It’s official: Texas public schools just got slapped with a wave of “failing” grades – and it’s no accident. The Texas Education Agency (TEA), under Gov. Greg Abbott’s hand-picked commissioner Mike Morath, rigged the state’s A–F accountability system to manufacture a crisis
Public-Private Partnerships: Profiting Off Children's Misery
Central to the education reform movement is the aggressive promotion of Public/Private Partnerships funded through Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) or Pay for Success (PFS) schemes. These complex financial instruments incentivize private companies to profit directly from educational outcomes. Under this model, students become commodities, their data harvested continuously to satisfy investor returns.
The result is not just the commodification of children but a systemic erosion of educational quality. Teachers, once trusted professionals guiding students through robust academic content, are now facilitators forced to implement vendor-driven software and curricula designed primarily for data collection and compliance.
Texas: Ground Zero for Education Reform
Texas is uniquely positioned at the epicenter of this crisis, driven by bipartisan political interests. Both Democrats and Republicans, including prominent national figures such as Hillary and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Jeb Bush, Betsy DeVos, along with organizations in Texas like the Texas Public Policy Foundation who has key Brooke Rollins advising President Trump. All have championed school choice and charter school expansions, deceptively framed as equity-driven solutions.
These plans result in:
Charter schools systematically replacing traditional public schools.
Federal Title I choice funds redirected to private, religious, and charter schools.
Uniform national curriculum standards dictating what every child must learn.
Universal standardized testing, with all curricula and software aligned to these tests.
Comprehensive government-mandated data collection, tracking students from preschool through workforce placement.
Texas politicians, notably Governor Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Senator Brandon Creighton, and Representative Brad Buckley, have aggressively advanced these policies. Their push for the largest government-regulated school choice Education Savings Account (ESA) program represents not parental empowerment but a wholesale transfer of educational control from local communities to centralized state authorities and private interests.
Strategic Transformation and TASA’s Vision
Across Texas, school districts are strategically transforming education through new learning environments, standards, assessments, and accountability frameworks, driven primarily by the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) and their "New Vision for Texas Public Education." Enabled by Texas Senate Bill 1557, passed in 2013, taxpayer-funded initiatives allow superintendents and administrators to aggressively pursue transformative policies.
TASA explicitly acknowledges their goal: "A group of Texas school superintendents concluded that the present system does not have the capacities to develop the knowledge, attitudes, skills, creativity, and rigorous thinking that students need to meet challenges brought about by powerful new digital, social, and economic forces." This clearly signals a shift away from academic excellence towards reshaping student attitudes, values, beliefs, behaviors, and worldviews—a shift from equal opportunity to forced equity in outcomes.
Gates Foundation Influence
Significantly, the TEA received a $7 million grant from the Gates Foundation to evaluate projects within "Educate Texas," funded by the Communities Foundation of Texas, to assess effectiveness and promote technology-driven learning models. TASA also secured a $6.3 million Gates grant to provide superintendents and principals with training on technology integration and comprehensive systemic change.
Collateral Damage: Our Students
As Texas lawmakers rush forward with these sweeping reforms, children in Texas classrooms have become collateral damage. The evidence is clear: public schools outperform charter schools on TEA’s accountability metrics, yet the push for charters and vouchers continues unabated. These reforms do not expand parental rights—they erode them. The promise of "choice" masks the harsh reality: loss of local control, intrusive data collection, and increased mental and emotional suffering among students.
Protecting Texas Students
Texans must urgently demand transparency and accountability from the institutions driving these reforms. A comprehensive audit of TEA, SBOE, ESCs, TASA, and TASB is essential to expose the extent of this crisis and restore local educational control.
Parents, educators, and communities must unite to challenge and reverse harmful policies that have systematically dismantled academic standards, undermined teacher authority, and jeopardized student well-being. Texas’s children deserve better. Protecting them from the predatory forces of privatization and profit-driven education reform is not just essential—it is a moral imperative.
This systematic destruction is taking place not only in Texas public education, but also in the designs of our President and others in Washington, D.C.