Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott believes in pre-K for a select few in Texas. Democratic state Senator and gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis pointed out that Abbott is fighting for a $20 million dollar cut in Texas’ pre-K program, while promising to “improve” the program on the campaign trail.
Since then, teachers have weighed in with conclusions similar to Wendy Davis – namely, that Abbott wants to restrict pre-K to a select few, while Davis wants to expand pre-K to all the children in Texas.
TSTA president Rita Haeker’s comments in a speech Tuesday, reflect the sentiments of teachers who are backing Wendy Davis’s pre-K proposal.
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Long before Greg Abbott tried to defend the status quo with his mythical “gold standard” that would provide pre-K funding for only a select few, Wendy Davis offered a “Great Start” plan that recognizes every child is worth his or her weight in gold.
Indeed, Abbott’s policy is based on a compilation of right wing assumptions about gender, race and class with intellect based in part on the mythical musings of Charles Murray, the co-author of “The Bell Curve.” As Christy Hoppe reports in her piece on Abbot, Murray and pre-K, Murray works for the right wing belief tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
Check out page 2 of Abbott’s pre-K policy proposal:
Family background has the most decisive effect on student achievement, contributing to a large performance gap between children from economically disadvantaged families and those from middle-class homes.
That’s code for saying that the poor are poor because they are intellectual inferior. Same goes for Blacks, Latinos and of course, woman. Abbott backs that up with a citation of Charles Murray’s “Real Education” though he displayed his intellectual supremacy by misspelling it,”Read Education”
Laura Basset, who also reported on the link between Charles Murray and Greg Abbott’s pre-K program, offered this assessment of Murray as a source for an education plan.
Murray is a very problematic source of inspiration for an education plan. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes him as “one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.
Indeed, the SPLC quotes some of Murray’s “work” in their profile of him.
A huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It’s going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.
There is no way for Greg Abbott to spin his way out of citing a known white supremacist to bolster the Republican candidate’s beliefs about the influences on a child’s achievement in the education system.
When Wendy Davis says that Abbot’s goal is to restrict pre-K to a select few, she isn’t kidding and neither is Abbott. Needless to say, Abbot envisions a Texas in which pre-K prepares young white boys for 21 century jobs, while women and the increasingly brown and black communities in Texas know their place.
It’s more than obvious that Greg Abbott is working very hard to win over the white supremacist vote in Texas. Palling around with white supremacist and gun nut, Ted Nugent, didn’t pan out as well as Abbott hoped. One can conclude that since some Texas communities were willing to pay Nugent to stay away.
Now he is trying to sell Texans on his pre-K policy by citing a man who wrote a book to make racists to feel better. Not that he is fooling anyone – except the white supremacists.
Image: WN
Former contributor.
