Democratic Swing Vote Steps of Texas SBOE
State Board of Education former Chair (and current member) Don McLeroy wasn't too concerned about losing Democratic swing-vote Rick Agosto. At least not at first.
"The big impact will be if I depart," McLeroy said over the phone.
And later: "Frankly, as far as some of these key battles where we actually can’t come to a total consensus, I don’t think it will make much difference, as long as I can get reelected."
During the brief interview, McLeroy was pretty adamant that Agosto's votes didn't play a major role in furthering the conservative agenda, and ...
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schafersman
McLeroy: "If he depended on the San Antonio newspaper and the Austin American Statesman and the Texas Freedom Network — they make us out to be awful sometimes."
That's because McLeroy and his six cronies ARE awful. And not "sometimes," but all the time. All seven hold the most extreme views possible. For example, they believe in Special Creationism and that the Earth is 6-10,000 years old. That would be irrelevant except for the fact that these bizarre beliefs (and many others) guide their education policies. Each new science standard they inserted into the initially good proposed standards written by qualified scientists and science teachers was poorly-written, unscientific, and had the intention of causing harm to science education. Whether that harm is actually realized will depend on yet another outrageous battle in Austin when Biology textbooks come up for adoption in a year or two. Rick Agosto voted along with the Magnificent Radical-Right Seven to insert these malicious and defective standards, so other Democrats will not miss him when he leaves.
Watch for their new dirty work when in January and March next year when it comes time to amend the Social Studies standards by majority vote. Right now, they want to deny the necessity of keeping information about the Hispanic heritage of Texas in the standards, and they want to insert more positive information about American exceptionalism, a topic that is judged negatively by almost all social studies experts. The Magnificent Seven vote as a unified bloc, so all they need is to pick up one more vote. Whose will it be?