Highlights from our interview with Senator Brandon Creighton.
Lone Star Standard: You passed legislation related to diversity, equity, and inclusion last session. Is there more to do?
Creighton: There’s much more to be done. When the Lieutenant Governor asked me to take over the chairmanship of Senate Education, he combined the Higher Education Committee with the K through 12 Public Education Committee. Those were separate for a very long time. And the Texas Senate that also brings in a workforce component which is very important to the future of our state. So, we started looking at reforms for K through 12 and for our university campuses, and how all of that ties to workforce. Immediately, we saw in the reform effort agenda that we were putting together, that it was very clear what was happening at the university level. Our Texas public universities, and this is usually thought of as Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, the things that happen out in California. But we were seeing in our Texas public universities, there was a giant neon sign above the human resources department hiring professors and faculty that said, if you’re not willing to sign a loyalist leftist, Marxist political oath, you need not apply. We just, coincidentally, compared that to the track record of D.E.I. over the last ten years and ramping up in a tremendous way on budgets and hiring after the George Floyd incident. It was exactly the path that we were seeing. UT Austin alone had 379 D.E.I employees. And their minority faculty recruitment and hiring went from 3.1% to 1.1% over ten years. They were going backwards. Diversity was not what they were truly trying to achieve. And we saw that when most of those D.E.I.-related faculty and student supporters commandeered the south lawn of the University of Texas campus.
Lone Star Standard: Should Texans feel like their elections are secure?
Creighton: I think that the answer is - it depends. It depends on who’s in charge of collecting the votes and who’s in charge of counting the votes. And separate from that Lone Star Standard, do we have state laws and funding to enforce the laws that are on the books if there is a law breaker, because we know there’s going to be a law breaker when it comes to election integrity. In my home county of Montgomery County, it’s one of the two recent examples in Texas of not only an election being thrown out tied to fraud, but there were actual convictions where people went to jail over it. And so a lot of people say there’s nothing to see here, right? There’s no examples of that. There are. That’s just all internet fodder. From my home area of Conroe, Woodlands, Lake Conroe, just north of Houston, the county contiguous with Harris we’ve got a recent example too. So, I think we have excellent laws on the books that we’ve tightened up, like we’ve gotten rid of Dominion Software. We have created paper ballot receipts, and we’ve passed laws for American-tested, American-trusted voting machines. We’ve done so many things that many what you would call swing states, contested states still have not done. But, we have a long way to go. Bryan Hughes and I. I’ll finish with this. We passed, together, a voter I.D. requirements for mail-in ballots. And just last year, over 1.2 million mail-in-ballots were purged for being fake. What would that do in this general election if we would not have passed those anti-fraud provisions?
Lone Star Standard: Will school choice hurt rural public schools?
Creighton: That sentiment surprises me coming from Republicans instead of Democrats because that sentiment is all about institutions and not students. It’s incredible that Republicans would talk about power, control, politics, institutions, administrators before kids. And It just simply isn’t true. We used 162 empirical studies on the Senate floor during our debate. All the success of other states on their school choice efforts. And there is absolutely zero evidence to show that there would be harm to public schools. In fact, ESA’s aren’t used that much in rural areas of Arizona or Florida. But, if a child with autism is seeking those types of skills or opportunities to evolve in their education and their mom or dad or guardian or grandparent sees it best, why would we hold them back? Why would we follow any state in America on education freedom for parents? Why would we be the 32nd state? We should have been first. So, I’m expecting that all of this success with school choice around the nation to be what Texas picks up on and prioritizes. Our workforce depends on it but our kids deserve it.
Lone Star Standard: You tried to pass the Texas Teachers Bill of Rights last session. What happened with that bill?
Creighton: The Teacher Bill of Rights was directly addressing what our 400,000 teachers in Texas in public schools are saying through their surveys, which is that compensation is not their highest concern. Safety is their highest concern. Second is validation from their administrators. And third is compensation. The Teacher Bill of Rights accomplished all three of those things and with an across the board pay raise and bonus structures. We would have prioritized the best teachers in this state and put a value on them, that it would almost be impossible for them to feel that Texas Republicans weren’t standing strong for them. Now, the teachers unions got ahold of that bill in the House after I passed it out of the Senate and they killed the bill because they couldn’t let a Republican pass a bill for teachers that they, themselves, as quote unquote, teachers organizations, didn’t enter the capital asking for those provisions and that kind of pay to start with. So they just wanted it to go to sleep.
