Dallas school leaders are “doing their homework” on a potential legal battle related to a pair of bills that target how students are taught about race and racism.
Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said Thursday during a board briefing that educators nationwide have major concerns about such legislation.
In Texas, the House gave its approval to a related bill on Tuesday. Supporters cast the legislation as an attempt to keep “critical race theory” out of schools, but that opponents say would have a chilling effect on classrooms and disrupt anti-racism work.
Dallas ISD trustees voted Monday in opposition of the state’s legislation. The district, which serves mostly Black and Hispanic students, is working on several racial equity initiatives that Hinojosa said could be threatened by the bills.
If Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signs the legislation, “we’re going to have some huge difficult decisions to make,” Hinojosa told the board during the briefing. “I don’t like to threaten litigation very often, especially not from behind a microphone, but some of us have been talking.”
School leaders have been discussing “potential litigation” as similar bills are being passed in other states, he said.
“I don’t have the authority to sue anybody, only the board can do that, but we’re doing our homework because if this law does pass, the stakes get very high, very quickly,” Hinojosa said.
Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands, and Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, are carrying bills through their respective chambers with wide-ranging impacts on social studies classrooms. Their legislation is opposed by several education, civics and business groups, in part because they view it as an infringement on speech.
The bills would:
-- Prohibit teachers from receiving training that “presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame.”
-- Ban teachers from being compelled to discuss particular current events or a “widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.”
-- Keep districts from awarding course credit or extra credit to students who participate in political activism, lobbying or public policy internships.
-- Prohibit districts from accept private funding for curriculum development or professional development on certain subjects -- which they often rely on for teacher training.
In DISD, all employees are going through training on unconscious bias and dismantling racism. Like many districts across the country, the district passed a “Black Lives Matter” resolution and it committed to tackling why Black students have long been overrepresented in discipline statistics and underrepresented in gifted classrooms.
“We couldn’t even take donations from outside groups to do that instruction,” Hinojosa said. “Our [professional development] department would have to reinvent a lot of the things they’re doing.”
Within the classroom, teachers could not include in their courses the idea that a person “by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” or that someone should feel any guilt on account of their race, among other concepts.
Teachers also would not be permitted to require an understanding of “The 1619 Project,” an award-winning series of articles from The New York Times that sought to reframe American history around slavery’s consequences and the contributions of Black people. It provoked rage among many conservatives, including former President Donald Trump.
Democratic lawmakers in Texas have slammed the bill as an Orwellian overreach of power and an attempt to whitewash history.
Several other red states have championed similar bills, filled with somewhat vague language, but with the stated goal of rooting out “critical race theory.” The academic framework — which, among other things, probes the ways in which government policies uphold systemic racism — has become a target of some fervent conservatives.
North Carolina, Idaho and Oklahoma are among the other places where this debate has raged.
“Of the legislative language so far, none of the bills are fully constitutional,” Joe Cohn, the legislative and policy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told The Atlantic earlier this month regarding bills introduced targeting higher education, “and if it isn’t fully constitutional, there’s a word for that: It means it’s unconstitutional.”
Toth said during debate on the House floor that he discussed the legislation with the Texas’ attorney general.
Amid hours of debates on the floor, Toth amended his bill to read: “If any provision of this Act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the invalidity does not affect other provisions.”
Hinojosa said much of the bill’s language could be up to interpretation.
“We can not throw out the progress that we’ve made,” he said. “But a lot of this is going to be up to interpretation and challenge.”
The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
