09/05/2026
Great post
Texas Educators,
I need you locked in with me for a few minutes. Look here, I have never been someone to be big on partisanship.
I grew up in the heart of conservatism in Midland, Texas. Even with that there was this level of mutual respect and dignity that seemed to be there. Neighbors could disagree on plenty and still show up for each other at the little league game or the church potluck.
Teachers were treated like the backbone of the community because that’s exactly what they were. Nobody was out here calling the woman who taught your kid to read a groomer or an indoctrinator just because somebody needed a villain for a fundraising email.
That world feels gone now, and not just in Austin. Something has shifted across this whole country in how we treat each other, how quick folks are to treat a neighbor like an enemy over something they’d have disagreed about on a Tuesday and still stood next to on a Wednesday come Sunday morning. I’m not gonna pretend one man did all of that. This is bigger than any single governor, and it’s been building for years.
But when it comes to our schools, I know exactly whose hand is on the wheel, and it’s been sitting in the governor’s mansion the whole time.
Greg Abbott has spent the better part of a decade starving the public schools y’all show up for every single day. He’s held basic funding flat while inflation ate away at every campus budget in this state, and then he stood in front of cameras acting surprised that districts are closing buildings and cutting teachers.
But that’s part of a calculated plan. Starve the thing you want to replace, then point at how bad off it looks and call it proof that it needed replacing all along.
And where’s that money going instead? Straight into the pockets of vendors who never have to answer to a single parent or taxpayer. Texas Education Freedom Accounts hand public dollars to private schools that can turn away any child they want and never have to show test scores, financial records, or anything else to the public that’s footing the bill.
Companies get to run the whole voucher payment infrastructure with barely any oversight. Testing corporations have made a fortune off the STAAR test for years while our kids get reduced to a single number and our teachers get judged off it.
Incentive programs sound nice until you realize how little of that money actually reaches the educators they were named after.
Grant programs force districts to spend with a narrow list of approved providers, sidelining the local folks who actually know their kids and their community.
That’s the game.
Starve public schools, hand the money to private vendors who never face a school board or a voter, and use the savings to fund tax cuts for the same donors bankrolling the campaigns.
And the whole time they’ve been doing this, they needed cover. So they turned on the educators themselves.
They called us groomers.
They accused us of indoctrinating children for teaching accurate history.
They banned books off library shelves faster than they ever funded a single classroom.
They passed laws policing what teachers can say about race and history, all without addressing overcrowded classrooms or burnt out staff.
Every baseless attack was never really about protecting kids. It was about softening y’all up so the public would believe public education was too broken to save and too dangerous to trust.
I know this firsthand because I lived it.
I had my own name and my own career run through that machine, accused of things that weren’t true, judged by people who never sat in my classroom or walked my halls, all because standing up for kids and telling the truth about history made me an inconvenient target.
I know what it costs to keep showing up for students while people who’ve never met you try to turn you into a villain on the evening news.
I know the exhaustion of it.
I know the fear that creeps in when you wonder if loving this profession is even worth what it’s taking from you.
The conservatism I grew up around in Midland respected local control, valued hard work, and understood that a strong public school was the backbone of a strong community.
What’s running Austin right now is a machine built to enrich a handful of vendors and donors, dressed up in the language of your values.
So here’s my plea, and I need every educator in this state to hear it.
Break ranks. Right now.
Today. I don’t care what letter sits next to your name on that voter registration card, because the kids counting on you don’t care either.
Your students need you.
Your colleagues need you.
Your own family needs you to stop voting against your own livelihood out of pure habit.
This is the moment.
Texas educators make up one of the largest workforces in this entire state, and if even a fraction of you show up together at that ballot box, you flip the whole thing.
Gina Hinojosa wins the governor’s mansion.
Mike Morath packs his bags.
Every vendor contract quietly draining your classrooms gets dragged into the light.
Every dollar that’s been funneled away from your students starts flowing back where it belongs.
You built these schools with your own two hands.
You held them together through every attack, every gutted budget, every insult hurled at you from a podium somebody never earned.
Now it’s time to take them back.
Vote like your classroom depends on it.
Vote like your paycheck depends on it.
Vote like your community depends on it, because all three of them do.
Break ranks. Vote for Texas. Vote for our kids.
Standing in the Gap,
Dr. James Whitfield
