The Texan Podcast - 88th Session Kickoff: Public Education and School Choice Panel

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

Get a FREE “Fake News Stops Here” mug when you buy an annual subscription to The Texan: https://go.thetexan.news/mug-fake-news-stops-here-2022/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=weekly_roundup This panel was about public education and school choice. Our reporter, Holly Hansen, moderated the discussion between State Sen. Brandon Creighton and Reps. Harold Dutton, Brian Harrison, and Carrie Isaac. Enjoy this content? Be sure to subscribe for similar podcasts and The Texan’s Weekly Roundup — a podcast released every Friday that brings you the latest news in Texas politics.

Howdy folks, Senior Editor Mackenzie DeLulo here. Welcome to a special edition of the Texans Podcast, where we play back a panel discussion with lawmakers that we hosted at our 88th session kickoff event on January 24th. This panel was about public education and school choice. Our reporter, Holly Hansen, moderated the discussion between State Senator Brandon Creighton and State Reps Harold Dutton, Brian Harrison, and Kerry Isaac. We hope you enjoy listening to this conversation, and be sure to subscribe at thetexan.news to always be the first to have an insider's look at Texas politics and policymaking. Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for being here on a cold and rainy morning early to talk about public education and school choice.

First, I'll introduce our distinguished panel. We have right here Representative Harold Dutton of Houston, a Democrat, and he last session chaired the House Committee on Public Education. And then we have Kerry Isaac, who is a representative from Wimberley. And although a freshman, is no stranger to Texas politics and the state legislature. I think you bring a lot of knowledge to the process, for sure. And then, of course, we have Senator Brandon Creighton from Conroe, Republican. Just named chair of the Senate Committee on Education and has been chair of the Subcommittee on Higher Education. And then we also have Brian Harrison, representative from Midlothian. Did I say that correctly? Midlothian. Elected in 2021 and we were discussing serve for eight days in

the last session, right? So this is your first full rodeo. Very good. Well, let's launch into our topic. We, of course, every session talk about education funding. Last year, the National Assessment for Educational Progress released scores indicating that students in the state of Texas and across the nation, to be fair, did suffer learning losses possibly related to the pandemic school closures. So there's a lot of concern about student achievement. But we do know that even prior to the pandemic conditions, we do have some schools and districts in the state of Texas that have struggled to bring students up to levels of achievement that we would hope for to give them a positive future. And there are criticisms that say that we don't fund public education enough,

that we don't spend enough per pupil. There are calls, of course, this session to increase per pupil funding. There are calls to adjust the way we fund public schools. But there are others who say the question or the problem is not funding, but there are other measures that we need to take to address those student achievement issues. And I'll let each of you talk about this, but we'll start with Representative Dutton. We had a conversation last week about schools in your district, so we'll take it away. Well, thank you. Let me start by thanking you all for inviting me to this. I don't have all the answers, but Senator Creighton told me he did. So I thought I'd leave most of it up to him. somewhere around 38 cents out of every dollar in our budget for public education.

We have about five and a half million students in the state. And one of the problems, and I'll use HSD where you and I are from, Holly, as an example. The question of funding always comes up when we're talking about certain schools. Certain schools that have been low performing or failing for consecutive school years. And then we hear this argument that there's a funding crisis in Texas. But then when you go to certain schools, funding doesn't seem to be a problem at all because they seem to be achieving at higher levels. The students' outcomes are extremely higher than normal. And then many of the children who reside in these low-performing school areas who get on a bus every morning and go across town to get an education are

succeeding. So I don't think that it necessarily, the argument that we're not funding education enough, like every state agency, they could always use more money. They could always use more money, but I don't think necessarily that's the problem in our public schools. Thank you for having me. I think all children are different, and I believe if parents were empowered to be able to make a decision to find the best school that would serve that child the best,

I think children would do better. I don't believe that all children learn the same. And I believe that the more opportunities that parents would have to choose, I believe in education freedom, and I think that that would go a long way in improving outcomes in children and how they learn if they can find their spot, their school that's best for them. Thanks for having me. It's working.

Okay, well, first, I don't have all the answers, but I know that Representative Dutton and I and Carrie and Brian can figure it out together with your input for sure. We're always climbing towards a better education opportunity for our kids in Texas, right? I mean, we're always doing our best to lift up public schools and also to look at ways that allow parents, as Carrie said, to drive their education dollars in the ways they see fit. And I think out of the 7,000 great ideas this session

called Bills will have so many of those different ideas and models and concepts to consider. That's why we're here, right? It's incumbent upon us to not just make a bunch of promises on the campaign trail, but to do the heavy lifting and the hard work when we arrive in Austin for sessions. So I had the opportunity years ago to work the 72nd regular session in the Senate when we had three special call sessions on school finance. And from that time in the early 90s with this guy, you know, standing out here with the gavel, Bob Bullock, I got the opportunity to work around him during those sessions and all of the drama and the soap opera related to the school finance litigation hearings and on and on. From that time until now, we have, in my opinion, always been searching for better ways to fund public education. We've hit serious challenges along the way as we're Texans, right?

I mean, we're all accustomed to the gut punch, whether it's Hurricane Harvey or the global pandemic or the subprime crash in 08 and 09, which caused us to look for $18 billion to cut from our state budget because we don't have a printing press like the feds do to throw another trillion dollars at a problem on any given Monday. So when we have to do things like that to make sure our budget's balanced and the Constitution is adhered to, it takes a while to climb out of that, years and years and years. So up to last session, we increased our state share of public education from 38% to 44. We paid teachers more across

the board as part of our budget culture and then we created the teacher incentive allotment that allows 7,000 teachers in this state to make between 17,000 and 50 grand over their base. 7,000 teachers that weren't making that just a year and a half ago, and then fully funded public education and new enrollment and set up a tenth of a billion dollar grant fund for hardening of school buildings to make them safer. So we're being innovative, and that's our job. We don't always agree on the best solution,

but we'll get there because we're on a clock and we have to eventually narrow down onto you know some decisions that will work for the future i think this session with this unprecedented surplus and i'll finish with this that we have the opportunity to have historic funding levels for public schools to lift them up. We have amazing opportunities to pay teachers more than ever and to address some concerns by survey that they've indicated are the reason why they're leaving the profession. And then separate from that, we can take some amazing steps to make sure that parents are empowered to drive their education dollars

in the direction that's best for their kids. And I'm excited about all the above. Thanks for having me. Howdy and good morning. Thank you, Holly. Thank you to the Texans for having me. Thanks to my colleagues up here. And thank you for coming to listen to us talk about, on a bipartisan basis, what I would argue is probably the single most important domestic issue in America and in Texas right now, and that's the issue of education.

I say that as a father of four young kids myself. I've got an 8-year-old boy, a 6-year-old boy, a 4-year-old boy, and a 2-year-old girl. And they are the ones that are in school, that are school age, are in public schools back in District 10, which is in Ellis County, Texas. So I care deeply about this because I don't think there's a single other issue that's going to have as transformative of an impact on the next generation than the question of how, where, and when, and using what methods and funding we teach our children. You hit a couple things there, Holly, and I'll try to go in the order I heard them. One, you talked about some assessments on outcomes.

While we are blessed here in the state of Texas to have a lot of schools that do work well for many Texas students, we need to be honest about the situation that there is a little bit of trouble in Paradise. And I think the assessment you referenced, if I remember correctly, on fourth graders, when it comes to mathematics, we've got about 35% of fourth graders who are proficient in math in Texas. It's only slightly better in reading. Fourth grade, approximately 40%, or I should say only approximately 40 percent of Texas fourth graders are proficient in reading. We have a problem because once you fall behind, statistics nationwide

show us it is very, very hard to catch up. So we've got a huge problem, and I think unless we acknowledge there is a problem, we're not going to be able to be as honest and efficient in finding the solutions. And there's a lot of solutions. We'll spend time talking about that. I'm a huge champion of empowering parents with school choice, as Representative Isaac mentioned a minute ago. I do believe it's a civil rights issue of our era, and we need to get that done this session. You talked about funding, and there will be a lot of discussion, I'm sure,

this session on the issue of funding. But one thing I want to make sure we do anytime we're talking about the issue of funding is paying at least as much attention to the other side of that coin and that's the issue of spending. Because I've got real concerns that certain school districts across Texas are not sufficiently prioritizing the one thing that should matter and that's recruiting, training, and supporting teachers because that's where the rubber hits the road is what happens in that classroom.

And I can tell you statewide, the numbers are pretty close to this. I know back in my neck of the woods, we spend about $15,000 per student per year. I think if you ask most of my voters, most of the constituents of my colleagues who are up here, what percentage of your school property taxes go to teachers, they probably think, oh my goodness, that's 90%. That's most of what we're paying for. Look at all these teachers we're hiring. That's not true. Only about one-third of the per-pupil cost of education in Texas goes to teachers. The rest of it goes to, and it's almost a one-to-one ratio now,

of staff and administrative folks who are not teaching anybody, who are spending almost the same amount of money as we're paying the people who are teaching our kids. That's a problem. And the full other third of that is buildings and debt. Now, I learned how to do calculus in a gym, and I'm very concerned about the Taj Mahals that are being built here across the state. So I just want to make sure in any funding discussion when it comes to public education, we are taking at least the same amount of time and talk about how are the ISDs spending this money. And then I'll close with one comment, because I do hear this a lot, especially when people talk about education assessments in the

two years since COVID. I hear a lot that we've had a learning loss since COVID. COVID-caused generational learning loss. I'll close this first sentence by just saying, ladies and gentlemen, a virus with a statistically speaking 100% survival rate amongst young school-aged children did not cause generational learning loss or school closures. Liberal teacher unions and weak politicians caused school closures that led to generational learning loss. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, just a couple of follow-up questions. First of all, for Representative Dutton, we talked about some of the schools in your district. They were subject to a Texas Education Agency takeover.

The whole Houston ISD district was subject to that, but it was litigated and tied up in the courts until just last week we found out the state Supreme Court said the agency could move forward with taking over that district do you think that there's more the state legislature could do to assist those students in schools like cashmere and wheatley high school where students i think it's 25 percent of students are reading or performing on grade level. Well thank you for the question. I've heard lots of comments from people about, and

particularly even some legislators about the issue in Harris County and regarding HSD and the takeover. There's some people who stood up and said well it was a plot by Greg Abbott to take over the schools and put all the people in it that he wanted to run it. And I looked at him and I said, you know, that actually came from Harold Dunn. That's where that came from. That didn't come from Greg Abbott.

I didn't ever talk to Greg Abbott about it. He never talked to me about it. But what started it was this. I, Wheatley, I'm a Wheatley High School graduate. And what I did, excuse me, we were celebrating the 75th anniversary of Wheatley. And I had something I wanted to do that was called a Purple and White Gala.

And it honored all the Miss Weasleys and so what I did is I got from the first Miss Weasley Miss Bessie Hogan I got every Miss Weasley all the way up till the year 2000 I think it was 2001 and I also got their pictures in their bios. And what I saw was alarming to me because the early Miss Wheatley's, Miss Hogan for example, she was the first Miss Prairie View, not only the first Miss Wheatley. There was so much success in these earlier Miss Wheatley's, but when I got to the 80s, I saw a huge drop-off in terms of their accomplishments, in terms of things they were doing. We had Ms. Wheatley's who had a part in chairing a committee at NASA, for example, to put the first person on the moon.

But when I got to the 80s, I thought, what is going on? So I got more into the schools in my district. And what I realized was that there was a dearth of learning taking place. Wheatley was the symptom of the problem. When I looked at the middle schools and I looked at the elementary schools, I found that they were failing also. And so what I did is I went to my school board and I said, look, we got a problem because I went to one school, Cashmere, you mentioned, and Cashmere had been failing for like seven, eight consecutive school years. And what I realized is that

they had been failing because they had not done well on the math portion of the standardized test. And then I asked the superintendent, did he know why? He said no, he didn't. And I said, well, I do. Kashmir had never had a certified math teacher. The students never had a certified math teacher. And so I went to my school board and I said, look, we need to do something about this. Well, the school board member from the west side of town told me I needed to talk to my school board member on the east side of town. I said, no, no, no, no. You get elected on the west side of town,

but you're a school board member for all of HSD. And so I'm talking to you about it. I went to Jimmy Don Aycock, who was the chair of the House Public Education Committee, and I said, we've got a problem, because there are nine individual members on the board at HSD, all elected from specific districts, and they don't all seem to have any skin in the game when it comes to improving HSD. He said, well, how would we improve that, Errol?

I said, well, I don't know. Let me think about it. So I thought about it this way, that if we had one campus in a school district that's been failing, and I said three, I changed it because of Jimmy Don, but we changed it to five consecutive school years, that the state could come in and take over it. Now, I never thought that would happen. I never thought, I thought they would fix the school. But what happened was, HSD did nothing, Cashmere failed more, and Wheatley, also a high school in northeast Houston, failed even more.

And so then it came to where the rubber meets the road, as my colleague says, and all of a sudden the state was in a position to take over the school district. Now, I still think that we've got to fix these schools, and that is the question I think all of us face up here. How do we make school outcomes for students? How do we improve that? What do we do to improve student outcomes? And I'm certainly willing to listen to whatever solutions that people have. But I think that's where we are. A follow-up for Senator Creighton.

I know you were talking about it. Yes, great answer. You were talking about a teacher bill of rights earlier this year. What does that look like and how can that contribute to student achievement also? Yeah, I was pleased to see that Florida followed our lead on that yesterday, right? So we rolled out our teacher bill of rights in September and as it should be, as Texas goes, so should the rest of the nation, right? So I saw the governor announce that. We saw some press on it.

But what we're talking about in Texas and through our office for a teacher seeing by survey across the state in our school districts that, you know, those new teachers that are coming into the teaching profession, that over 60% of them just don't know if they'll be there in another 60 months. They don't know if they'll hit the five-year mark. And that's alarming. So the Teacher Bill of Rights starts first with safety. Second, follows up with compensation. Third, make sure that they have the ability to speak out without reprisal. And fourth, directs the legislature or encourages the legislature to speak to Congress through a resolution that we pass all together through both chambers to repeal the windfall provision that has prevented teachers from benefiting from their deceased spouse's Social Security benefits for years and years.

Congressman Kevin Brady, Ways and Means chair at that time under the Trump administration, passed it in the House to repeal it. All these things together, along with some other incentives, just will make it the first of its kind in the nation to prop up our Texas teachers and to make sure they know that we have their back, we validate their efforts, and that we want them to know that staying in the profession will be worth it. Representative Isaac, you mentioned parental empowerment, and I think that that is, you know, there's a lot of motivation this session to do something about school choice and possibly offer some sort of school choice programs. The lieutenant governor and governor or the lieutenant governor said they

were all in on this issue. So in getting used to your new colleagues and talking to people, which programs do you think have the most, the best chance for being passed in both chambers? And how do you compromise with those who say that these kind of school choice programs will take away from public schools, traditional public schools, or from the rural areas of Texas? Yes. So, you know, I'm an athlete. I know firsthand that competition makes everything better.

I don't, all of the issues we're talking about here, I honestly believe that education freedom would fix everything. Education freedom would help teachers. They would have more options. It would help the failing schools. These children that are trapped in a failing school because of their zip code. You know, right now, our higher income families, we have education freedom. It's our low income families that don't and that they get trapped. And we need to,

when it comes to funding in Texas, we need to focus on funding children and students, not systems. And I would like the idea of education savings accounts. And if you think it's going to take away from your school, then you must not have a whole lot of confidence in your school. Because if you are in a good school and you love your school, then you won't be leaving your school. So I don't understand that. I mean, you must... Maybe they do need to have funds taken away from them if they're failing. But we need more choice.

It would fix everything all around the board. But, yes, education savings accounts is something that I can get behind. And I believe it has a chance to to pass and representative Harrison you mentioned Florida and I think Creighton also mentioned Florida now I'm getting you all confused but you mentioned Florida and they have a very robust school choice program there's a lot of different choices which of those programs do you think will be most viable for Texas yeah so Florida does, Arizona does. I got to tell you, as someone who believes Texas should be leading in freedom issues, I do not like

the fact that we are following, at this point, over 30 other states in the issue of education freedom. It's about time we get in the game. Look, I like the education savings account approach. I think in the issue of education, two things matter. Educating every child so that when they turn age 18, they have a diploma in their hand and they walk across that stage. They are equipped with skills sufficient so they can provide for them and their family in the marketplace. And then number two, on empowering the parents.

And on the issue of rule, because I hear this a lot, and I got elected, this was the biggest issue in my campaign. I represent a mostly rural area south of Dallas. I'm probably the first person to support education freedom that's ever held this seat. And I ran against somebody who vehemently opposed education freedom. But this was the biggest issue in my campaign. It's the liberty issue. It's the freedom issue. It's the issue that will define the future. And despite being outspent three to one, I won by over 10 points in a rural district on the issue of education freedom. And I hope people take a look at that and realize that especially since

COVID, the times have changed. There's a new paradigm in America. In the teachers, the liberal teachers unions, they've always had the resources and the lobbyists. But you know who has not had the resources and the lobbyists and the special interests? Parents. And now they do. Parents' eyes have been opened. They're involved. And so on the issue of rule, A, I hope my election is one day to point to show the tide has has turned Also the nine most ruled states in America all of them Have some choice some form of education freedom and school choice school states that are more ruled in Texas When it was on the ballot proposition for Republican voters in the state of Texas, it passed overwhelmingly with 81% statewide.

And in the top 10 most rural counties in the state of Texas, not one of them did Republican voters support the issue of education freedom by less than 80%. Rural Texas wants this too. We need to empower every parent and every school children and that should not be determined by what zip code you live in. And further, I hear this argument all the time that if we pass school choice, it's going to somehow destroy the rural districts. First of all, if you're doing great, you should be prepared. If you're an ISD and you're doing a great job, you should be prepared for school choice because your

money and your students are about to surge. Okay, if you're doing a good job, they're going to come to you. Second of all, two things can't be true. The people that say school choice would hurt rural Republicans. They want to say two things. They want to say school choice will drain the money from our public schools. And then at the same time, they're going to say, there's no private school alternatives out here in rural Texas. Pick one, please. It can't both be true true so I'm focusing on empowering every parent and on the issue of the takeover only in government by the way when you fail do you get more money more staff and more resources and more authority the the solution to failed government is not more government thank you just one

follow-up for those who are not, can you quickly and succinctly explain the mechanics of the educational savings accounts? Not everyone knows what they are. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it is a complicated issue. The really short version is that the state would divert a chunk of money that we would have to figure out exactly how it gets there and where it comes from, etc. But usually it would involve the state upping our part of what would go to you would traditionally be paying through the M&O part of your local property tax. The state takes that money through some type of a sales tax, through surplus, however we get there, and then it goes into an educational savings account

that parents are basically given the controls to. Think of it as an account that a parent has access to, and the parents can direct that. And one last sentence on this is there is no sort of perfect solution, but I always want to start with first principles. Number one, just because we say a government or as a society, we want government to fund something, it does not mean the government should provide that go-to-that service.

And secondly, when we figure out the funding allocations and all that, I kind of want to keep in mind what might be the best way to do this. So I say this a little bit tongue-in-cheek, and I know it's way overly simplistic, but we should, as a state, just kind of figure out how much money do we need to educate every student in the state of Texas? How many students do we have? Take the first number, divide it by the second number, give it to the parents in the form of an education savings account, and say, do what's best for your kid? Representative Dutton, even though we don't have other school choice options in the state of Texas right now, within the current system, we do have charter schools, and there are charter schools in your district. However, last year, the State Board of Education vetoed a number of charter schools,

including one that was slated for Houston ISD. And there have been calls to give the State Board of Education more authority over charter schools. Just to clarify, they vetoed ones that had been approved by the Texas Education Agency. There are also school districts asking to have more power over whether or not a charter opens within their attendance zones. What do you think about this issue? Does the state board need more authority over charter schools? Or is the system working as it's intended at this point with those accountability measures for charter schools? Well, let me say first, this argument about between charter schools and traditional schools is, I think, misplaced to a large extent.

There are about 6 or 7 percent of our children in Texas in charter schools at the moment. And so that's a relatively small number in terms of the total student. But I do think that the state board sometimes has become politicized to the point where they make choices that are not necessarily in the best interest of the student. And what happens is they make decisions based on the politics of it, and that always ends up at the wrong conclusion for most of our students. But let me say this. I think one of the things that we've got to recognize is that I don't think there are any magic bullets to solving the problem of public education. There's none.

I mean, we have about 1,200 school districts in the state, and we've got certain problems. We've got an education code that has about 800 pages, I think, in it. And when you read it, you're left with, why do we have this, for the most part, for some of it? But at the same time, having been on public education as long as I have,

one of the things that I recognize is that we've tried to improve public education by raising the ceiling. For example, we had a discussion as to whether or not students who graduate were going to be required to take Algebra I. Well, the argument became, well, there's some students who are not proficient in general math. So what we do is we will put

education, graduation, further out of reach of those kids. One of the things that this pandemic did is it shoved more kids into the bottom rung of our public education system. And now what we do is we've got to recognize that there were children already at the bottom and now we've had more children at the bottom and so we've got to recognize that there were children already at the bottom, and now we have more children at the bottom, and so we've got to do something to target, to lift the floor of public education as opposed to raising the ceiling. And I think that that's the challenge for all of us up here. There may be different solutions in certain people's eyes, but I would invite them to also look at this thing so that we are absolutely sure that we're going to improve the education outcomes for all students. All right, we'll shift just a little bit here. Shift just a little bit, and I want to talk about

Senator Creighton. You also have a Parents' Bill of Rights, but let's talk just a little bit, and I want to talk about, Senator Creighton, you also have a parents' bill of rights, but let's talk just a little bit about some of the concerns that parents across the state have expressed about some of the materials that have been made available to students, either in school libraries, in teachers' classrooms, and also through the electronic databases that are made available to students through their public school districts. Some of the parents have pointed out that some of these materials are sexually explicit. They maybe convey some very controversial theories about gender ideology. What role does the state have or the state legislature have in maybe tamping down on these materials and if there is a policy solution how would you enforce that with our public school districts so with the issue of library books the in reference to the teacher to the parental Bill of Rights those are both coupled together and that would be a component of the parental Bill of Rights for sure. So whether we're,

you know, look, for library books and our children in schools, I mean, it's non-negotiable for any of those books to be inappropriate, right? I mean, that's just a non-starter, and we have to speak to that. There's going to be accusations of book banning and censorship and whatever might be thrown out there by some of the unions and the organizations and the leftists that just don't want that addressed. But it's just common sense. It's what parents expect and what these kids deserve. We may have a rating system that parents and grandparents can easily follow. We certainly should speak to the publishers when they say, oh, you know, we just have no idea how those seven books got wrapped up in these 8,000, in this bundle of

8,000 books that it was delivered in. I mean, all of this accountability is going to be, you know, instated, infused into our policy this session to make sure that those mistakes aren't made in the future so we can handle it on the publishing side we can also address it on a rating system so parents are informed they certainly do that at Target with video games you know at every birthday or every Christmas in knowing even from a bilingual standpoint, what these ratings mean. But we have to get the inappropriate content out of our schools, and it's just, you know, no excuses for that particular issue.

And just to note, I believe Representative Dutton, you filed legislation that would segregate objectionable materials, right, and put them in a restricted area. Is that correct? I heard from a lot of parents during the interim, and one of the things that jumped out at me is that there are some parents who didn't like certain books, and there are some parents who did. One parent came to me and said, well, based on what? She was hearing about objectionable material.

You couldn't put the Bible in the library because it had certain things in it that would be objectionable. And so what I did is I came up with that idea. I said, well, look, why don't we do it this way? Why don't we let school boards decide these issues? And to the extent that they would need to, we can have a restricted area in the library for those books that people would like to have restricted, such that you would need parental, the student would need parental permission to actually go and get a book out of that particular section of the library. It seemed to me to be the, and when I proposed that to some of the parents, they thought, well, that's a good idea. We think we'd like to, we'd like to, I know some parents wanted to put more books in there than others. But at the same time, I think it was a broad solution to a problem that I really think, you've got to stop and think about it this way.

And I do think there's some material that's perhaps objectionable to certain age groups. But at the same time, I also believe that in order to learn, one of the things we need to do is teach students to think. And if you're going to do that, you don't think necessarily in an environment that's comfortable to you. You end up thinking, causing yourself to think as you become uncomfortable. And sometimes there are things that, like I said, there are things that are to me unobjectionable. I've got seven children and I certainly didn't want any of them exposed to some of these things but at the same time I did want them to learn and learning means that you're going to be uncomfortable if you're going to really learn to think.

Okay okay and and I do want to throw in too, there are proposals to add a law or legislation in the state of Texas that would mimic the Florida law that prompted a lot of controversy over the last year about at what age you can start talking about sexual orientation and gender ideology. I believe the two proposals here in the state of Texas, though, would extend that prohibition to fifth grade, and then there's another that extends it through eighth grade. So I'd like to hear, we'll go in the reverse order, Representative Harrison, and come through and let each of you speak to that possibility. I'll be very brief. Real short on time, one quick comment on the previous issue. I'm really sick and tired of losing the semantics war on this stuff. I am unaware of a single book that a single elected official in Texas

has proposed to ban. There is no book banning proposals in Texas, period, full stop. And people need to learn the difference between a local school board choosing not to spend tax dollars on pornography for children and banning books.

They're not the same thing. On the issue of legislation, which I will support, to prohibit certain topics for elementary school age, very young, impressionable children, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade in Texas. Let me tell you, any teacher, I'd probably go further, I mean any adult, but

any teacher who's talking to third graders about transitioning or gender identity, if you're a taxpayer-funded bureaucrat in Texas, I want you unceremoniously fired immediately. That has no place in the elementary schools in the state of Texas, and I look forward to working with my colleagues in Texas to end that here in Texas. Short answer, I would say at least the eighth grade. I think we're making final decisions on exactly where that will come out in our parental bill of rights,

but at least the eighth grade. And to Representative Dutton's previous mention of those that compare explicit language and pornographic imagery to the Bible, I think they should just be absolutely ashamed of making that reference. And any mention of severing off the Bible in a section, and I know that's not what Harold was advocating, but it's just these ideas that are out there that would be grouped together with these ridiculous, inappropriate books that are in our kids' libraries

is, again, just a reflection of where we are right now in this absurd death of common sense and some of these discussions, and we're going to handle that this session. So I get irritated when I hear, maybe fifth grade, maybe eighth grade. Why are we talking about gender ideology and sexual preference in our schools? Why are we even talking about that? And no, I do not believe that our tax dollars

should be funding schools in a special section in our schools. I don't want my tax dollars funding that. And also, yes, show me where the Bible is inappropriate at all. Show me. I disagree with that as well. Last word? Well, thank you again for inviting me. I find it somewhat contradictory that we're talking about, on the one hand,

we're talking about books and what students see and read, but on the other hand, we're talking about only less than 30% of our children being able to read. And so, I just, I just, it bothers me because I recognize that there are, there are differences out there for sure. And we ought to have differences. There ought to be differences between ideas and between philosophies. But at the end of the day, we ought to come together to figure out how to arrive at a conclusion that makes Texas a better place to live, work, and raise a family. Thank you all so very much for being here.

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