Bradley Buckley is a Texas veterinarian and Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives for House District 54, which includes part of Bell County and all of Lampasas County in Central Texas. He serves as the Chairman of the Texas House Committee on Public Education. 

Here are the highlights from our interview with Chairman Buckley. 

Lone Star Standard: How did you become passionate about education?

Buckley: My family has a long history in education. My mother was a first grade teacher and early childhood specialist. My grandparents were both teachers. My granddad was a long-time football coach in Killeen, athletic director, and teacher. And I taught everything from mathematics to driver’s education. My kids are all public school graduates. It’s always something that I’ve been very passionate about. But I’m more concerned about the outcomes and how, if we look over time, I felt like the kids that we would expect to succeed are those that face challenges. We are really having a tough time getting kids to where they need to be. And, of course, that impacts their future and impacts the future of Texas and the future of our country. And if there is any place we can really have an impact, I feel like it’s in education. We need to make sure that we have a system of opportunities that really empowers parents and empowers our schools to do good work for kids to launch them into the future.

Lone Star Standard: What is Texas doing to address learning losses kids face from the pandemic?

Buckley: COVID sort of revealed something I think we already knew, and it exacerbated it. The estimates were that the pandemic left us with an average of 2.7 years of learning loss and trillions of dollars of impact on the future economy. This is not just something we are seeing isolated among test scores. There is an impact on the future that many kids were negatively impacted by that event. We could research it across the world and see that they’ve had significant disruptions in school too. And we really see it impact every facet of their future. And, so, what we see is something that we already knew even before COVID. Kids aren’t achieving at the level that they could. The first thing that we did was to pilot and to make available to schools these high quality instructional materials that were really built to close the learning loss gap. And by high quality, we mean rigorous lessons that are designed to be delivered in a way that could close the gaps and improve achievement. And there is a science to that. There are certain things we can do that get better outcomes.

Lone Star Standard: What are the new Open Education Resources released by the TEA?

Buckley: Open Education Resources means that the curriculum is readily available to anyone. It’s owned by the state but it is available and free to those that would like to use it. It was designed with a very specific intent and that is to provide high quality materials to teachers so they can spend more time planning the delivery of an effective lesson to students and not have to spend a lot of time outside of class and on the weekends designing the lessons. These materials cover the standards that the State Board of Education has approved. We looked at too many lessons being taught in Texas classrooms that really were, over time, lowered the bar and students weren’t being taught on grade level, and they didn’t cover enough of the standards that we expect our kids to know. For example, you’ve probably heard of the STAR test. We talked about how it was too hard or it was above grade level. Well, it was actually on grade level. However, kids weren’t being introduced and taught things at the pace and at the grade level they should be. These materials aim to correct that. And the pilot programs we’ve seen double digit gains.

Lone Star Standard: What is your view on Representative Troxclair’s proposal to ban cellphones in Texas schools?

Buckley: I don’t know what the right number is. I think probably like 0, 434 is probably too many disruptions in the classroom. Also teachers are begging for this. We know that. We know that a lot of our physical altercation, what we call fighting, it all comes from text message conflicts where students are kind of setting up fights. It also contributes to some of the vaping issues we have. The kids are telling each other where they can hide and vape. And then the well being and some of the pressures that we see social media creating on our kids. Jonathan Haidt, Representative Troxclair references him in her op-ed, has a book out called the Anxious Generation. A lot of the mental health issues tracks directly to when smartphones became readily available for kids. And these algorithms that literally create a curated life for kids that no one can measure up to. In my veterinary clinic, I have young people from different school districts that are in work study programs here. And they don’t engage. Not every kid but a lot of kids don’t engage like they used to. They’re more reluctant to really ask a question. So pull the phones out and banning cell phones and coming up with a way where parents can be confident that their kids are safe.

This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

Listen to the full discussion here: https://texas-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-23-brad-buckley.