Don’t Believe the Democrats’ Hype—Texas Education Will Only Get Worse Unless We Organize and Fight

Teacher Correspondent

In Texas, the Democratic Party mafia’s midterm electoral victories have raised up politicians who cynically used their associations with public schools as centerpieces of their respective campaigns.

Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa was formerly president of the Austin Independent School District (Austin ISD) Board of Trustees in 2015 and Senator-elect James Talarico taught sixth grade for two years and has a master’s degree in education policy.

The Democrats’ hype machine portrays this as a watershed moment that will usher in a new era for Texas’s ailing education system. However, the reality of the imperialist state bureaucracy and the nature of education under imperialism means that the people cannot put their faith in charlatans like Hinojosa or Talarico, but must develop their own organization and increase struggle to win gains for public education, and go even further.

Hinojosa made a splash soon after her election by saying she was going to fire Mike Morath, the commissioner of the Texas Education Agency (TEA), “on day one” of her new term. While Hinojosa tries to sound tough, the reality is that any replacement must be approved by the Texas State Senate, where Republicans hold a majority.

Pending full election results, the State Board of Education (SBOE) could potentially have an 8-7 Democrat majority. The SBOE sets curriculum standards and approves instructional materials for public schools in Texas through lengthy committee meetings and drawn-out hearings that can take years to implement, ensuring drastic upheavals are few and far between.

Regardless, any personnel changes at TEA or the SBOE will not alter existing state law. In 2025, Texas legislators passed its school voucher program, funneling $1 billion of public funds into private schools. This gutting of public education can only be repealed by filing another bill that makes it through both houses of the Texas legislature.

In recent years, TEA takeovers of school districts, where the state eliminates local control and appoints its own district leaders, have sowed chaos, leading to teacher resignations en masse, implementing empty curriculum that beats down educators and students, eliminating libraries, and more.

Hinojosa may try to curb takeovers, but under Texas law, when just one school in a district receives five consecutive TEA-rated failing grades, this requires either a closure of a campus or a full district takeover. Either way, struggling campuses, where the children of the poorest and deepest parts of the working class attend, will continue to be sacrificed in the name of “improvement.”

Talarico, as a US senator, will have even less direct impact on concretely changing the state of education in a US Congress that exists mainly for one party to hound its political enemies once it is in office while passing off bribes to its favored monopolies and the imperialist class as a whole.

Under policies enacted by both mafias, the general quality of public education is continually degraded. Across both his terms, Barack Obama accelerated the expansion of charter schools across the country, with the number of enrolled students more than doubling during his administration, according to the Institute of Education Sciences. He also opened classrooms to tech monopolies such as Google in order to sell the idea of a “Chromebook for every student.”

Democratic mafia control in states like Illinois and California has not stopped educators from leading some of the largest strikes out of any workforce, defying strike restrictions to demand higher wages and more resources for struggling schools.

The education system is not a neutral ground separate from the imperialists’ economic and social system. To reproduce workers, the ruling class will only provide the most basic level of education, which sinks lower and lower, especially as the monopolies increase competition for menial jobs and implement widespread automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the cost of labor.

The opportunists who conjure illusions of dramatic education reform cannot deliver because the reality of deepening economic crisis means the imperialists are forced to impose austerity to preserve their profits, with education being one of its first casualties. Instead of education, they will fund the police to repress a seething population and expand the military in order to plunder the oppressed nations and wage war against other imperialists. Or, in the case of the elections, they will spend a combined total of over $200 million dollars to elect Hinojosa and Talarico, a sum that could easily cover the current $180 million-dollar budget deficit of Austin ISD.

True popular education is not possible under these conditions. In the meantime, all those who believe in a scientific, free, quality public education must toss aside the misteachings of Hinojosa, Talarico, and their imperialist backers and get more organized, more combative. Under an opportunist government, the fight for public schools should only sharpen.

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Image Credit: Public domain, retrieved from PxHere (CC0).

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