The Disloyal Opposition
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Indeed, their greatest ire is reserved not for Democrats but for members of their own party who fail to support them. They go for the kill, and no one is exempt, not even Bush. Two years ago he called the first draft of a new curriculum “mushy” and demanded a revision, but when he backed a much improved rewrite against an alternative version proposed by the Double R’s, they blasted him. “Contrary to his campaign promises,” said Ballard, “he has embraced the education establishment. At this hour of need, leadership from the governor is lacking.” Unhappy with Christie, who voted in favor of a federal grant program they opposed, the Double R’s helped recruit a GOP primary opponent to run against him in 1996. (Christie won anyway.) Last year they turned their fire on vice chairman Monte Hasie of Lubbock, once regarded as the board’s staunchest conservative, when one of the Double R’s publicly accused him of a conflict of interest: Hasie had voted (along with all but one board member) to award investment contracts for the state’s $16 billion Permanent School Fund to firms that had made political contributions to his unsuccessful race for the state Senate. Technically this was not a conflict at all—the contributions involved a race that had nothing to do with the board—but that’s not the point. Elected officials rarely impugn the integrity of a colleague unless there is a very good reason, and Hasie was sure he knew what it was. “They’re trying to discredit me,” he told a reporter at the time. “They want my seat. There’s no question what this is about.” And they got it: A battle-weary Hasie did not seek reelection this year, and his successor is expected to become part of the Double R faction.
In a democracy it is no sin to oppose the majority. But the opposition is expected to be loyal, not to the majority but to the public interest. Its positions should be goodfaith efforts to improve the lot of society. The critics of the Double R’s question whether they really care about the public schools at all. None of the Double R’s has direct contact with public education; those with school-age children either send them to private schools or teach them at home. Most of their work on the board has been negative—opposing rather than proposing. It is going too far to say that the Double R’s would, as an Austin American-Statesman editorial suggested, “turn Texas classrooms into Sunday schools.” But it is fair to wonder, as Christie has, whether the Double R’s are on the board for any reason other than to promote their ideology. “Why are they there?” he asked me rhetorically. “Show me anybody who has been secretary of the PTA or had any involvement in a school. At some point you have to want to do something for kids.”
OFFUTT IS A CASE STUDY IN WHY THE conservative wing of the GOP, including the religious right, has been so successful in politics. Others only complain; they organize and vote. Offutt has proved that one person can change the politics of an entire state. Somewhat on the short side, with gray, thinning hair that is combed straight back, he has a soothing voice that belies his tenacity. He had never run for office before he was elected to the state board from San Antonio in 1992. Within two years, he had changed its balance of power and galvanized the religious right into a force in educational politics—although, he says, that is not what he set out to do. “I don’t come from the Christian Coalition or the American Family Association,” Offutt says. “A friend who was a member of the State Board of Education recruited me to run. We knew each other through Republican politics, and he told me he was going to run for the Legislature. I vaguely had the notion that there were problems with the public schools but no strong feeling what the problems were. I campaigned on keeping Austin off the backs of local districts and going back to basics. I had the naive idea that I’d figure out what the problems were, make rational arguments, and people would listen. I wasn’t there too many months before naiveté turned into awareness that minds can’t be changed. It comes down to core philosophical beliefs.”
The crucial moment for Offutt during that first year in office came when a woman with the Eagle Forum testified before the board. Afterward he walked over to her to deliver a compliment. “She was flabbergasted,” he recalls. “She had always been treated as a pariah. After that, those groups began coming to me.” Offutt had a constituency; now he needed reinforcements.
Nine months after going on the board, in September 1993, he went to see Fred Meyer, the state Republican party chairman. “I suggested that if the party paid more attention to the State Board of Education, we could have success in the 1994 elections,” Offutt says. “He said, ‘Great idea. Go do it. Use my name, get help from the party.’” Offutt had no idea how to find people who would run. He spent endless hours on the phone calling GOP county chairs and anybody else he could think of who might suggest a name. “Once I called someone on unrelated business,” he said, “and when he put me on hold, Rush Limbaugh was playing in the background instead of music, so I thought, ‘Why not ask him?’ He gave me the name of a local school board member. I got Donna Ballard’s name from my sister-in-law, who was the president of a Republican women’s club. I had never even met her until the last day for filing, when she came to Republican headquarters in Austin. I wasn’t looking for religious right people. I was looking for any warm-bodied conservative who was willing to run.”
Offutt’s recruits entered five races that year. Three of them won: Ballard and Randy Stevenson of Tyler defeated Democratic incumbents, assailing them over health textbooks that the board had adopted, and Richard Watson of Gorman won an open seat. Republicans had a one-vote majority on the education board, and Bush was pressing for education reform in the Legislature. It should have been the best of times for educational conservatives. But the Double R’s found themselves in conflict with members of their own party.
The issue was a federal grant program called Goals 2000, which provided money to schools to help raise student achievement. Stevenson had campaigned specifically against Goals 2000. Offutt opposed it. (The Double R’s “think the federal government is Russia,” says Will Davis, a longtime Democratic board member from Austin.) Bush, who favored Goals 2000—$87.7 million is a lot of money if it is used right—knew that he had a fight on his hands. He made the shrewd decision to appoint one of the most conservative Republican legislators, Carolyn Park of Bedford, a Goals 2000 skeptic, to head up a citizens panel that would come up with the state’s plan for using the money. His orders were (1) no federal strings attached and (2) no social programs. If Park gave the plan her blessing, then the Double R’s might drop their opposition.
She did. They didn’t. “I had listened to the propaganda,” she says. “The federal government is going to take over the Texas educational system, put health clinics in the schools, and distribute condoms. I got the federal legislation and read it cover to cover. A lot of things the opponents were telling me were not true. The program was completely voluntary. It had no strings attached; what is so ironic is that the program actually relieved Texas of some federal mandates. I went before the board and tried to tell them their fears weren’t justified. But with people who feel that way, you can talk until you’re blue in the face and it won’t make any difference.” Despite the objections of the Double R’s, Goals 2000 (now known as Academics 2000) passed. The money has been used primarily to improve reading in elementary schools. In Brownwood, for example, a $133,000 grant built a library media center, and third graders who participated saw their 1997 TAAS reading scores go up by an average of 29 points. “Everything that has come out of it has been good,” says Park.
Having estranged themselves from the governor, the Double R’s next went to work on alienating the Legislature. The new education reform law, backed by Bush, went into effect that summer. It took authority away from the state level—the Texas Education Agency and the state board—and gave it to the local level, something that the Double R’s had always said they were for. One of the most significant changes was to allow local districts to decide what textbooks they wanted to use. In the past the board had had near life-and-death power over textbooks. A school district was free to pick any book it wanted, but the state would only pay for books that the state board had approved. In controversial subjects like history and health, board members typically ordered publishers to make numerous changes at great expense—sometimes to correct factual errors, but often to satisfy members’ political concerns—and publishers had to comply or face exclusion from the lucrative Texas market. “The idea was to give districts more choices,” says State Senator Bill Ratliff, a Republican from Mount Pleasant who authored the education reform bill. “One size doesn’t fit all. A book that might be right for a rural district might not be right for the inner city. In subjects like health, we were ending up with only one or two books to choose from.”
