Conservatives flip two Houston school board seats

The Houston Independent School District board consists of nine members. None is a conservative.

That will change soon, however, because conservative candidates won two seats in a runoff election on Saturday. One of them (a man who once lost his job with the city due to sexual harassment allegations) won by fewer than 100 votes in a district where turnout was less than seven percent. The other won more convincingly in a district with 12 percent turnout.

Both districts encompass parts of Houston that traditionally lean Republican. However, both are represented by liberals, and one of the two districts voted Democratic in the last two presidential and U.S. House races, according to Karen Townsend at Hot Air.

Observers and one of the losing candidates say that two issues drove the victories by the conservatives: (1) the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools and (2) the mask mandates in public schools. One of the losing incumbents moaned:

Knocking on doors in District 7, it was pretty clear to me that the impression that voters have of public schools, if they don’t themselves have children in public schools, is informed by Fox News and national news coverage that has nothing to do with what our kids are being taught.

The head of something called Houstonians for Greater Public Schools added:

I do think the Republicans, both nationally and here locally, were able to hammer home a very clear message that resonated with a lot of voters that ultimately led them to victory.

The liberal incumbents denied that Houston’s schools teach CRT and noted that Texas law prohibits teaching it. Apparently, not enough voters believed the first assertion.

I don’t know what is taught in Houston’s schools. However, the denial that CRT is being taught in this or that set of public schools is often a semantic dodge. In fact, “Critical Race Theory” is a rather benign description of what’s being taught in some public schools. Better descriptions of this form of indoctrination are “whites are racist theory” (WART) or simply “white people stink.”

Liberal school board members can deny all they want that schools in their district are teaching CRT. The best option for voters who are concerned about the matter is to vote for candidates who denounce the teaching of CRT in no uncertain terms.

Unfortunately, the Houston ISD will still be under control of liberals by a 7-2 margin. What’s encouraging about the Houston results is that, as noted, anti-CRT candidates won in Republican-leaning and/or “purple” areas. If this becomes a national trend, anti-CRT candidates will begin to control many school boards throughout America.

However, even in those school districts, most teachers will likely be liberals. And there is probably not that much school boards can do to prevent liberal teachers from providing at least some leftist indoctrination of students on matters pertaining to race, among other matters. (By this indoctrination, I don’t mean teaching about slavery or Jim Crow. That history should, of course, be taught and has been for many decades. I mean teaching, for example, that racism is the central fact about America’s founding and that it predominates in America today.)

Still, electing conservative school boards will help stem the CRT tide at least to some extent. In addition, if the anti-CRT cause and other cases of pushback against the leftist education agenda are helping elect conservatives to school boards, they can also help elect conservatives to other important offices including governor — as arguably occurred last month in Virginia.