by Gail Collins
“We’ve run out of white folks to flee”
Murdock, the former state demographer turned sociology professor, was sitting up in his aerie at Rice University in Houston, at the top of a remarkable old building that boasts only a small, balky elevator. (For a while, Rice liked to put its sociologists up where only the eagles could get at them. Sadly, Murdock and his colleagues have now been moved to a more normal perch.) His desk and bookcase were filled with printouts. Murdock, who was also once head of the US Bureau of the Census, thinks a lot about numbers—births, deaths, migration patterns. “Texas’s future is clearly tied to its minority populations. In particular, how well Hispanic and African American populations do is going to be how well Texas does in the long run,” he said.
There’s nowhere that points to the future more than Houston, where the exurbs keep growing but the new arrivals from the city are different from the generations that preceded them in one way: they’re Asian, Hispanic, and black. “We’ve run out of white folks to flee,” said Richard Murray, director of the Survey Research Institute at the University of Houston.
Harris County, where Houston is located, is now less than one-third Anglo. And all the trend lines point in the same direction: nearly three-quarters of the county’s residents sixty years of age and over are white non-Hispanics, while more than two-thirds of adults under thirty are Hispanic, Asian, or African American. “I think older people tend to think they’re not going to be around to see the most dramatic transitions,” says Murdock. “The younger population not only knows from the numbers, they know from looking around in their classes, in the places they go. The younger population is much more open to diversity. But whether they’ll be more accepting of power sharing when they move along—we’ll see.”
Murdock has made it his great mission to educate the state about what’s coming. The degree to which Texas is prepared to become a majority Hispanic state, he feels, will decree the success to which the state will march into the future.
And where Texas goes, so goes the nation.
“This is the US,” says Murdock, pointing to one of his many piles of printouts. “Look at the under-eighteen. Had there not been Hispanic growth in the number of children, we’d have had the largest decline in the number of children since the 1930s.”
“Hablamos rocketry”
If there’s a single thing that will decide which way Texas goes, it’s the schools. But the dropout rate, particularly among minority kids, is huge. “We’re very proud in Texas,” said Sanborn. “We really want to believe Texas is the best. If we’re bad in something, there must be something wrong—the statistics are lying. And part of the reason is we don’t want to spend the money to fix it.”
What happened to the Texas Miracle? Well, there are some terrific public schools in Texas. Houston has some great magnet schools. Austin has places like the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, where the students, who are almost all economically disadvantaged, are as curious and outgoing as the best-socialized prep school students in the state. Down by the Rio Grande in west Texas, the students and teachers of Presidio School District gear up for a new academic year with the overheated obsession of a Texas football team preparing for state finals. “I don’t buy into the testing system—I’m more concerned with how many kids are ready to go to college,” says Dennis McEntire, the superintendent. He’s a large guy with a bristly head of grey hair who wears a jacket and tie in the stupendous late summer heat.
In the summer of 2011, the Presidio schools made something of a splash when McEntire was quoted as saying that he might ask the state for a waiver to drop down to a four-day week in order to deal with state budget cuts. He was not, he admits now, seriously considering it. But there was reason to pay attention, since seven years before Presidio had shocked the Texas world when it balanced the school budget by doing away with football.
Presidio is not at the top of the heap when it comes to the all-powerful state test scores, but it does pretty well for one of the poorest districts in the state. McEntire says the graduation rate is high, and that 77 percent of graduates go on to further education. After classes end there is tutoring until five o’clock, and the cafeteria ceiling has vanished behind all the college banners draped there. Presidio, which has a history of getting, and leveraging, government grants, also has an award-winning rocketry program. “Hablamos rocketry,” says Shella Condino, the science teacher who mentors it. “The kids I work with—they’re in English as a second language. They’re not the brightest in the class. But they can write technical reports for NASA.”
The city of Presidio has one of the highest hunger rates, and poverty rates, and everything-else-depressing rates in the state, but the school district had socked away a rainy day fund to get it through the first shock of the state education cuts in 2011. Other districts that were less blessed with government largesse or less willing to give up football were reeling from the $4 billion the state legislature cut from education funding. This was after the legislature made its disastrous attempt to reform the business and property taxes and wound up with a huge void in the place where revenues and expenditures were supposed to meet.
Rather than raise taxes, Rick Perry and Co. cut what amounted to $537 per student in state education aid. Soon, the Ross Perot reforms of 1984 began to teeter. One was the legal limit of twenty-two elementary school students to each teacher, as the state began handing out waivers like popcorn, having added “financial hardship” to the special reasons why classes could be made larger. The uncapped higher grades exploded. Meanwhile, the inequality between rich and poor districts was sparking another wave of legal action.
While Presidio’s football-cutting option did not seem popular, school districts were laying off faculty and support staff, and imposing new charges on students’ families. A district north of Fort Worth announced it would bill students $185 a semester if they wanted to ride the school bus. Other districts dropped their pre-K programs back to the minimum the state required—part-time, for only the poorest of students.
A little north of Presidio, there’s Marfa, an absolutely fascinating little place that you might call the Texas version of Taos, except for the definite lack of ski slopes. Marfa has attracted an influx of artists, but its school population is mainly children of local agricultural workers and the Perry cuts left its budget in crisis. It, too, was looking at bus service. “We will no longer bring in the children from town,” said Teloa Swinnea, the school superintendent. “It’s not the law. The parents think it is, but it’s not.” Next stop, Swinnea said grimly, was football. But nobody else in the home of the beloved Marfa Shorthorns seemed able to imagine that could happen.
Things seemed likely to get much worse as the schools’ rainy day funds dried up. Texas was already forty-seventh in the nation when it comes to state aid per pupil, forty-third in high school graduation rate, and forty-fifth in SAT scores. It’s hard to call that leading the way.
“Failure to provide equal and quality education—it’s really tragic,” said Cisneros. He recalled a conversation with a businessman who runs a major consumer goods firm with outlets all around the state. “He told me they were consciously moving downscale in their marketing, in their product mix, because every analysis they have tells them incomes are going to be declining because of the gap in education.”
BUT TO GET back to where we started, I asked Cisneros about the Alamo. “I came to terms with it a long time ago,” he shrugged. “It’s not about wars or Mexicans versus Americans or victory or death. It’s just something that happened.”
In a way, it’s what’s still happening now. The modern battle for the soul of Texas began with Ross Perot and his commission, and it was fought over the question of whether all the state’s children would be seriously, rigorously, and perhaps even expensively, educated, or whether those privileges would be reserved for a wealthier, mostly Anglo minority while the masses of Texas young people just learned to be literate enough for manual labor and the low-en
d side of the service economy. Right now, Texas seems to need a leader who’s ready to draw the line and dare the people to step over. Victory or death.
Epilogue
It seems only fair to leave Texas with the Alamo. But where does Texas leave the rest of us?
If you’re a diehard states’-righter, as most of Texas’s leading politicians are, the answer would probably be that this is the wrong question. What Texas does is its own business, they say, since the states are individual boats, each bobbing along on its own—although certainly prepared to join together in times of national crisis when the country needs the whole fleet. But not some made-up crisis, like the collapse of the auto industry. Serious, manly crises, like wars, hurricanes, and forest fires.
Personally, I prefer to think that all Americans are in the same boat. And Texas has a lot to do with where we’re heading. We’ve seen how Texas politicians played central roles in the deregulation of financial markets and the near elimination of energy conservation as a national policy, and how the state served as the model for federal savings and loan deregulation and federal education reform. (Neither one quite worked out the way their architects imagined, but as we have noted a number of times in this journey, nobody’s perfect.) Texans also led the way in the destruction of all major legislation aimed at dealing with global warming, even as their home state was alternately being drowned by hurricanes and dried to a crisp with droughts. But of course that has nothing to do with the ozone layer. Only God can change the planet’s temperature. Like with a volcano or something. Just ask Tom DeLay.
It’s lucky that Texas has such a hard time growing presidential candidates, that Phil Gramm lacked charm and Rick Perry was so short on coherence. Otherwise, we might have had nothing but Texans in the White House for the last thirty years or so. As it was, the two we did have got us into three wars in the Middle East, while extricating us from a grand total of one.
Now, as the country lurches through the second decade of the twenty-first century, Texas politicians and business leaders have tried to define the debate on growing the economy, arguing that the right formula is as close to zero taxes and zero regulation as possible. Governor Perry has declared his right—he seems to regard it as a kind of moral duty—to poach jobs away from states that follow a different model. But while Texas may look like a corporate dream, it’s a high-tax state for low-income workers. The lack of regulations puts it near the top of the pile when it comes to unenviable achievements like air and water pollution or on-the-job worker fatalities. Jobs—particularly low-wage jobs—may be easier to find than in some other states, but health care benefits, unemployment compensation, and disability coverage are considerably tougher to locate. When the number of white-collar jobs for college-trained workers grew, they were filled in large part by young people who had been educated in other states, on other taxpayers’ dimes.
The country as a whole has been watching the gap between the privileged minority and the struggling majority grow, and Texas has been doing way more than its share to keep pushing us in that direction.
Texas frames its political worldview on the ideology of empty places, which holds that virtually any amount of government is too much government. Plus nobody needs it anyway because there’s plenty of room. You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone. It’s an inarguable worldview unless a) There really isn’t plenty of room, or b) You are not actually leaving me alone.
We feel Texas’s influence in our lives every day, but we’ll be feeling it much more in the future, due to its enormous population growth, helped along by those interesting sex education classes and the almost complete lack of state family planning funds. To be fair, it’s hardly the only state where public schools teach their students that sexual relations should be regarded in about the same way as transmission of the Ebola virus. And Texas does have a harder educational challenge than many, due to the enormous number of poor minority students. But that’s really sort of the point. It’s that huge Latino-fueled population growth that gives the state’s businesses an edge and creates the pool of low-wage workers that helps fuel that famous economic miracle. In return, the great challenge for Texas is to educate its children to do better, to replace the 170,000 college graduates the state imports every year from other states with a Texas-grown generation of professional workers of tomorrow.
Very few people seem to feel particularly confident that’s going to happen.
So there we are. Texas can use its great advantages—the space, the cheap housing, the exploding population—to create a model of possibilities for the twenty-first century. It can prepare its young people so well that in a generation they’ll be taking off to fill jobs all around the country, the way places like New York and Illinois are sending their college graduates to Texas now. Or it can just demonstrate how easy it is to create a two-tiered economy in which the failing underclass looks resentfully at the happy sliver on the top.
The rest of the country can’t do all that much to dictate where Texas goes, what with states’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights. But if Texas goes south, it’s taking us along.
Acknowledgments
Normally, this is my favorite part of writing a book—when you get to thank all the people who helped you along the way. In the case of this particular book, however, I got assistance, advice, support, and good information from so many incredibly smart and helpful people it’s a little embarrassing.
The idea for As Texas Goes . . . came from Bob Weil at Liveright Publishing/W. W. Norton, who was also, to my incredible good fortune, my editor at every step along the road. Although it’s certainly true that without him the book would never have been written, I’d rather point out that without him the book would have been unreadable.
At the beginning of this project, Abby Livingston of Roll Call did me the enormous favor of recommending a fellow Texan, Annie Boehnke, as a researcher. Before she went off to pursue an advanced degree in architecture at Harvard, Annie got me through all the initial chapters, as well as the education section. I would not have survived her departure if it hadn’t been for another Texas native, the incomparable Amanda Sterling. Besides Annie and Amanda, I got invaluable research help from Sean Beherec, Alexa Garcia-Ditta, Rachael Greenberg, Isabella Moschen, and Katherine Stevens.
Thanks to James Haley for his suggestions and help with Texas history, to Bob Semple for doing the same when I got to the environment, and to Joe Nocera when it came to financial deregulation. Trish Hall got me through the first chapters, and special thanks to Evan Smith for reading the whole thing and for introducing me to Mimi Swartz and John Wilburn, who took me on an enlightening tour of Houston. It convinced me great cities can thrive without zoning, although I still don’t think I’d want a tire recapping business to set up shop on my block.
I cannot possibly thank all the Texans who were generous with their time and expertise. The whole project was inspired by a column that was inspired by a suggestion from Sylvia Acevedo, who has now been a source of information and ideas for two of my books. The very fact that I got to spend time with Paula and Nizar Djabbarah was an incentive to do the project. Many thanks to the hospitable people of Marfa, Texas, especially Tom Michael and Katherine Shaughnessy Michael. Also on the gracious-host-and-guide front, I am grateful to Jan Demetri, Mary Margaret and Ray Farabee, Bill Hobby, Steve Klineberg, Kathy and Don Mauro, John Mixon, and Jan Jarboe Russell. Thanks to all the amazing journalists I met in Texas, and the hundreds of others whose work I read and used shamelessly.
The people I interviewed who were quoted directly in the book are listed in the notes for each chapter, but please do not hold any of them responsible for my conclusions. Dozens of others also generously gave me their time, and the information they shared informs every page. I can’t name them all, but they know who they are, and I hope at least some of them will be pleased with the way this all came out.
Finally, thanks to Alice Martell, who has been way more than an agent for my entire book-writing ca
reer. And above all, to my beloved husband Dan, who really does put up with a lot.
NOTES
Except when otherwise noted, direct quotes are taken from interviews by the author. The names of interviewees are at the beginning of each chapter.
Prologue
3 “We didn’t”: Rick Perry, speech at Tea Party rally, Austin, April 15, 2009, available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbWz1RYGE3Q.
4 “We’ve got a great”: Associated Press, “Colorful Quotes from Rick Perry Throughout the Years,” Texas on the Potomac (blog), chron.com (Houston Chronicle online edition), August 2011.
4 “Man allegedly beat”: Gail Collins, “Day of the Armadillo,” New York Times, November 2, 2011.
7 “Dead armadillos”: Ibid.
1: Remember the Alamo
Interviews: Frank Cahoon, James Haley, Stephen Harrigan, Jan Jarboe Russell, Karen Thompson.
12 “We are very”: “Governor says Texas is one state that could leave the union, though he’s not pushing it,” W. Gardner Selby and Jason Embry, Austin American-Statesman, April 17, 2009.
12 Rasmussen poll: “Texas Secession Poll,” Huffington Post, May 18, 2009.
13 to nominate Donald Trump: “WSJ/NBC Poll: Donald Trump No. 2,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2011.
13 “Texans, more so”: Brian McCall, The Power of the Texas Governor: Connally to Bush (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 58.
