“Right now, education is trash.” That was the first thing out my mouth when I sat down with Gina Hinojosa, no warmup, no small talk, jumping right into it, because when your state is sitting at the bottom of the country in what it spends on a child and the top of the country in what it spends on a cage, you do not have time for pleasantries. She did not flinch, she did not spin it, she did not hit me with that consultant tested nothing talk, she said education in Texas is a reflection of our leadership, and then she started running down receipts like she been waiting on somebody to ask. Teachers walking away from the classroom because of disrespect, because they are policed in all sorts of ways now, because of underpay. More uncertified teachers entering Texas classrooms than certified teachers joining the profession, for the first time in the history of this state. A Central Texas school district where the human resources director told her most of his teachers come from Mexico on visas because he cannot find people here to work in the classroom.

Man, hold on, hold on, hold on. We are not even going to go past that. At a time where our state is criminalizing a bunch of individuals that is coming from Mexico, we also have a bunch of our students that is having a low quality education based on how much we are not funding it, and the population being criminalized for coming into our state is also the population trying to help our kids raise the quality of education in our state. Sit with that contradiction. Every accusation is a confession, y’all. The same state government that put razor wire in the river and buoys in the water is quietly stamping visas so Mexican educators can come save the classrooms that Greg Abbott starved. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a whole state pissing on our legs and telling us it is raining.

This essay is what happens when you take that sit down and run it through the archive. I am going to tell you who Gina Hinojosa is, I am going to lay out what she said, and then I am going to do what Education Is Elevation always does, put the present inside the history that produced it, because the curriculum fight in Texas did not start with Trump in 2016, it did not start with critical race theory panic in 2021, it started when Texas was still an idea inside a land deal, and both parties, hear me clearly, both parties have kept the machinery of forgetting well oiled ever since.

Who Is Gina Hinojosa

Gina Hinojosa is the 2026 Democratic nominee for governor of Texas. She was born and raised in Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley, a proud product of Texas public schools, a former civil rights and union side lawyer, and a mother who got into politics the way a lot of mothers do, because the state came for her child’s school. She ran for the Austin ISD school board when budget cuts threatened her son’s elementary campus, rose to school board president, and then won a seat in the Texas House in 2016, where she has served five terms representing central Austin, sitting on the Public Education Committee and becoming one of the loudest and most consistent opponents of Greg Abbott’s billion dollar private school voucher program. In 2021 she helped lead the quorum break, when Texas House Democrats left the state and flew to Washington to fight for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act after Republicans tried to ban Sunday morning voting and shut down souls to the polls. In March 2026 she won the Democratic primary with nearly sixty percent of the vote in a nine candidate field, and this November she faces Abbott, his war chest of more than one hundred million dollars, and a Republican lock on the governor’s mansion that has held since Ann Richards walked out of it in 1995. If she wins, she becomes the first Latina governor of a state that is about forty percent Latino, which she answered better than any consultant could when I asked her about it. Why wouldn’t we have one? We are Texan. Texas is all of us.

What She Said: Corruption Wearing a Culture War Costume

The spine of Hinojosa’s whole analysis is one sentence she kept coming back to like a broken record, her words, not mine: corruption is the source of almost all our problems, and the culture war is the costume corruption wears to the function. Everything is broken in this state, she told me. Government is broken. Our leaders, and Greg Abbott is mostly responsible because he is the governor, they just do politics all the time. They do not govern. Our schools have become ground zero for culture wars, and it did not used to be that way. When she was on the school board, before 2016, the hardcore fights were over which school got bond money for a parking lot. Then the machinery changed what schools are for.

Her receipts on the ground are brutal. One hundred fifty whole school districts in Texas are operating four days a week because they cannot afford to operate five. Not one campus, not one struggling charter, one hundred fifty districts. So I asked the question every working parent in rural Texas is asking, what are kids doing on that fifth day when their parents are at work? Money that should be flowing into classrooms is flowing into vendor contracts, and she said the quiet part with her chest, corrupt vendor contracts to Greg Abbott’s donors. She sits on the public education committee and told me they are not even allowed to vote on bills that are just about kids in the classroom. It is all vendor contracts. Her plan reads like a repossession notice. Fire Mike Morath, the Texas Education Agency commissioner, a tech guy, and put an educator in the seat. Give Houston its school district back to the people of Houston, because it is never the right answer to take schools away from parents and community, the people with skin in the game. Wipe clean the teaching to the test, the canned curriculum, the contracts, and use that money to pay Texas teachers among the highest in the nation. Then hold what she called an unsession, a whole legislative session dedicated to undoing the things the state has stacked on top of teachers, and just let people teach.

The part that should be taught in every civics class is her breakdown of the Bluebonnet curriculum. Pay attention to the sequence, because the sequence is the scam. The state curriculum that now has Christian nationalism baked into it did not start out as a theology project. It started out as a billion dollar vendor contract to Abbott’s donors, canned, timed, scripted lesson plans that teachers hated. Then everybody came out against it together, teachers, public school parents, even MAGA moms, all united in hating the same bill and calling out the corruption. So what did they do? They put the Christian nationalism in. It was not there before. They gave it a new name, Bluebonnet, and suddenly a united front against corruption became a culture war that splits neighbors down the middle. Hinojosa named the play perfectly: he is distracting you with one hand while he takes your money with the other hand. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Then the conversation went where Texas conversations always end up if you follow the money far enough, into the cages. She told me about the halfway house in Austin run by CoreCivic, a private prison corporation, where a man told her to his face that the state of Texas brought him to Austin from an out of state prison, released him onto streets where he knew nobody, and left him with nothing. Less than a third of the people in that facility were even from Travis County. They ship human beings to wherever the company has beds, because every bed is a billable head, and if people are not rehabilitated they reoffend and go right back into the machine that profits from them. She connected it straight to the ICE raids, to Texas being the only state that locks up little kids with their parents because Abbott built the licensing to allow what would be child abuse anywhere else, to the Texas National Guard staffing private detention centers on the taxpayer dime so the corporations can fatten their margins. I told her I was going to see if she would say the word, and she said it. Greg Abbott is trafficking. Trafficking ex offenders onto our streets, back in and out of the system. Shonda Rhimes could not have wrote this better, and I do not even look for this truth. It falls on my lap.

Both Sides of the Aisle, One Side of the Erasure

Now here is the structural critique, and I need y’all to hold two things at the same time, because two things can be true. Greg Abbott is uniquely corrupt, and the Texas curriculum was anti Black and anti Indigenous long before Greg Abbott ever touched it. The bipartisan beef, the red team blue team wrestling promo we watch every election cycle, functions as a mystification, because it teaches us to experience curriculum as a possession fight between two parties when the deeper truth is that both parties have administered a schooling system built on the same settler foundation. Charles Mills gave us the language for this in The Racial Contract when he described an epistemology of ignorance, a structured, socially produced way of not knowing that white polities require to see themselves as innocent. Apply Mills here. The Texas curriculum is not missing Black and Indigenous history by accident, the ignorance is the product, manufactured on schedule like any other deliverable in any other vendor contract. Arnold Farr and George Yancy push it further, whiteness maintains itself precisely by never having to examine the conditions of its own construction, and a seventh grade Texas history course with zero Black Texans in it is that non examination made mandatory and graded. Patrick Wolfe taught us that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, organized around a logic of elimination, and Sandy Grande reminds us in Red Pedagogy that the schoolhouse has always been one of settler society’s primary elimination technologies. So when Democrats governed Texas for a hundred straight years and wrote Lost Cause textbooks, and when Republicans governed Texas for thirty straight years and wrote critical race theory bans, the party changed and the erasure held its shape. Derrick Bell called that the permanence of racism, and Cedric Robinson would tell us why it holds, because antiblackness is not a glitch in the operating system of racial capitalism, it is the engine, and Texas schooling, from the cotton ledger to the STAAR contract, has always been an appendage of that economy. The culture war is not a fight over whether the machine runs. It is a fight over whose logo goes on it.

Hinojosa, to her credit, did not duck this when I pressed. I told her I am 35, and when I was in seventh grade Greg Abbott was not the governor, Rick Perry was, and we was not learning anything about Black history then either. The issue predates 2016. It is a structural issue within the curriculum that goes back, man, maybe back to the beginning of Texas. She agreed, and she went further than most Democrats will go on camera. Thirty year one party rule is real, she said, and there is one party responsible for where Texas is right now, but Democrats who have been elected have gone along. Too many elected Democrats have gone along with an economic model where government invests in corporations at the expense of people. She said young voters are sometimes reasonable to ask what is the difference, and that Democrats need to stop defending the indefensible. Just admit it, that is rarer than a snowstorm in Corpus. The question this essay asks is whether that honesty can survive contact with a curriculum apparatus that both parties built.

Critical Historical Context: From Come and Take It to Bluebonnet

Let me take y’all to school right quick, because you cannot understand the Bluebonnet fight without understanding that Texas was founded as a real estate transaction with slavery as the business model and Indigenous removal as the site preparation. In 1821 the newly independent Mexican government began granting empresario contracts, and Stephen F. Austin got the biggest one, authorization to settle Anglo families on land that was Karankawa, Tonkawa, Caddo, and Comanche land, land the settlers wanted cleared, in every sense of that word, so cotton could go in the ground and enslaved Africans could be forced to work it up. When Mexico moved against slavery, culminating in President Vicente Guerrero, a man of African and Indigenous descent, issuing an abolition decree in 1829, the Anglo colonists lawyered around it, rebranding enslaved people as ninety nine year indentured servants. When Mexico centralized and the loopholes started closing, Texans reached for their rifles and their flags, and yes, that includes the come and take it flag they print on truck decals today, a banner flown in a war that secured, among other things, the right to keep human beings as property. The 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas said it with no shame, Section 9 declared that all persons of color who were slaves for life shall remain in the like state of servitude, and it barred free Black people from even living in the republic without congressional permission. Then came Mirabeau Lamar, the republic’s second president, who announced an extermination war against Indigenous nations and drove the Cherokee and Comanche out with fire and cavalry. That is the founding. Not a footnote to the founding. The founding.

Juneteenth sits on top of that foundation like a truth the state cannot digest. June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger reads General Order Number 3 in Galveston, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, because Texas had become the place enslavers ran to with the people they held in bondage, the last stronghold of the trade. Freedom came to Texas late, at gunpoint, and incompletely, and Black Texans turned that day into the mother of all freedom celebrations anyway. Crazy how the state that gave the world Juneteenth teaches a seventh grade Texas history course where, as I told Hinojosa directly, there is not one Black person within the curriculum. Santa Anna is there. David Crockett is there. The Alamo gets the full cinematic treatment. The people whose stolen labor the whole project was organized around get a blank page.

That blank page was manufactured, and we know the manufacturers by name. After Reconstruction was drowned, the United Daughters of the Confederacy ran a decades long campaign to control what Southern children learned, and Texas was a crown jewel. Mildred Lewis Rutherford published her Measuring Rod in 1920, an actual checklist instructing school boards to reject any textbook that called the Confederacy a rebellion or spoke ill of slavery, and pro Southern textbook committees enforced it. The same era threw up the Confederate monuments, and a second wave of monuments and school namings rolled out in the 1950s and 1960s, not as memory but as a message, aimed dead at Brown v. Board and the movement. So when I told Hinojosa the erasure runs through the Daughters of the Confederacy and the monument campaigns, that is not vibes, that is documented textbook procurement policy, and here is the bipartisan sting, all of it happened under Democratic state governments, because the Texas Democratic Party of that era was the party of Jim Crow. The jerseys flipped in the twentieth century. The playbook stayed in the locker room.

Fast forward and watch the structure persist under new management. In 2010 the State Board of Education rewrote social studies standards to soften slavery as a cause of the Civil War, listing it behind sectionalism and states rights, and it took until 2018 for the board to partially walk that back. In 2015 a McGraw Hill geography textbook used in Texas classrooms captioned the Atlantic slave trade as bringing millions of workers from Africa, workers, like they was on a shuttle bus to a shift, and it took a Black mother in Pearland, Roni Dean Burren, going viral to force a correction. In 2021 Senate Bill 3 gutted requirements to teach the history of white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan as morally wrong and chilled every classroom conversation about race under the banner of banning critical race theory. In 2023 House Bill 900 supercharged book removals, and the state seized the Houston Independent School District, the largest district in Texas, majority Black and Brown, stripping an elected board from the community, which is the takeover Hinojosa promised to reverse. In November 2024 the State Board of Education approved Bluebonnet Learning, the state authored curriculum salted with Bible content, with a financial incentive per student for districts that adopt it, which is how you get scripture into a classroom, not through a church door but through a budget line. Then in 2025 Abbott signed the billion dollar voucher program, draining public money toward private schools while public districts cut to four day weeks. Every era, same architecture. The curriculum protects the founding. The founding protects the money.

The Curriculum Is the Crime Scene: What Erasure Does to a Child

Now let me put my education degrees on the table, because this is the part where people think we are being sentimental about representation, and we are actually being clinical about learning science and power. Carter G. Woodson wrote in 1933 that if you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions, that when you make a man feel he is inferior you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, he will seek it himself. That is not a metaphor, that is a description of curriculum as an instrument. Paulo Freire named the mechanism, the banking model of education, where students are treated as empty vaults to be filled with deposits chosen by the powerful, and Texas has turned banking education into a literal banking relationship, canned, timed, scripted lesson plans purchased through vendor contracts, teachers policed into script readers, children processed through STAAR like inventory. Michael Apple would call the Texas history TEKS a textbook case of the hidden curriculum, the lessons underneath the lessons, and the hidden curriculum of a Texas history course with no Black Texans and no honest account of Indigenous dispossession is simple: this state was built by white men, belongs to white men, and everybody else is scenery. Erhabor Ighodaro and Greg Wiggan gave us the term curriculum violence, the deliberate manipulation of academic content that damages students psychologically and intellectually, and I want y’all to understand that a Latina child taught that Texas independence means her people were the villains, and a Black child taught Juneteenth in a course that never mentions a single Black Texan, are both experiencing curriculum violence on the taxpayer dime. Hinojosa said it plain in our conversation, if little kids cannot see in their history that people other than white men achieved great things, why would they believe in themselves? Feel me, this is why I am such a stickler on the curriculum, because if we cannot see ourselves in it, it is going to impact how we move and navigate. The classroom is where the state teaches children who is grievable, who is credible, and who is disposable, and then we act shocked when the graduates fund the cages.

Who Catches the Most Hell When the Schoolhouse Fails

Education Is Elevation does not do single axis analysis, so let us run this through Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Combahee River Collective, who taught us that systems of oppression are interlocking and that the people standing at the intersections catch traffic from every direction. Start with Black women educators, because the profession Hinojosa wants to restore was partly built by them and then gutted at their expense. After Brown v. Board, tens of thousands of Black teachers and principals across the South, most of them Black women, were dismissed, demoted, or pushed out as white districts integrated students but not staff, a professional massacre scholars estimate at roughly thirty eight thousand educators, and Texas took its share. So when Texas classrooms today are staffed by uncertified emergency hires while Black women with education degrees carry student debt into other professions, that is not a pipeline problem, that is a repossession that never got paid back. Now look at the students. Monique Morris documented in Pushout how Black girls are criminalized in schools for the same behaviors white girls get grace for, and the Georgetown Law study on adultification found that adults perceive Black girls as young as five as needing less nurturing and less protection. Marry that to a Texas discipline apparatus and a curriculum that never shows a Black girl a single Black Texan woman worth studying, no Barbara Jordan in seventh grade, and Moya Bailey’s misogynoir stops being academic vocabulary and starts being a hallway experience.

Then follow the four day week home. When one hundred fifty districts cut Friday, the childcare gap does not fall on the state, it falls on mothers, disproportionately Black and Latina mothers working hourly jobs without flexibility, which means a budget decision in Austin becomes unpaid domestic labor in Nacogdoches, exactly the transfer Angela Davis has spent a career mapping, the state offloading its social costs onto the unwaged work of women of color. Follow the special education story, where the Houston Chronicle exposed that the Texas Education Agency had for years operated an effective cap steering districts to keep special education enrollment near eight and a half percent, denying services to tens of thousands of children, and know that disabled Black and Brown children sit at the sharpest point of that denial, more likely to be disciplined than diagnosed. Follow the ICE raids into the classroom, because Plyler v. Doe, a Texas case, is the reason undocumented children have a constitutional right to public education at all, and every raid, every detention of a parent, every child locked up with their family in a Texas licensed facility teaches immigrant children that the schoolhouse door and the cage door are closer than the law pretends. Follow the HISD takeover, where the state stripped an elected school board from the largest Black and Brown district in Texas, which means Black grandmothers who organized for decades to win school board seats, the most accessible rung of American democracy, watched appointed managers replace their votes. Rural white families on four day weeks, Latina mothers dodging checkpoints to make parent teacher night, Black girls pushed out, disabled kids denied, that is not a coalition of separate grievances, that is one machine billing different communities at different rates, and Cheryl Harris would remind us the machine still pays dividends to whiteness as property even while it shortchanges poor white kids on the material end. The evidence don’t support the culture war framing. The evidence supports the invoice.

The Magnifying Glass Clause: Allyship With Receipts

I want to close the interview portion with the exchange that mattered most to me, because it models something Black communities and Democratic leadership have needed language for. I told Hinojosa straight up, I am much more of the radical texture of Texans, I am further left than her, and I want her to win, I am advocating for her to win, and precisely because of that, when she wins she should not expect me to holster my critique. I would rather put my magnifying glass on her, to her face, than pretend, because there is not going to be no switch up. Some politicians hear that and get defensive, iMa bE honest, most politicians hear that and start reciting their record like a hostage video. She asked to respond, and what she said belongs in a political science syllabus. Real change does not happen in the Capitol. Real change happens in our communities and puts pressure on politicians, because politicians mostly do not act because it is right, they act because they will be held accountable by voters. Then the sentence I want carved somewhere: you have to hold me accountable, because I am powerless if you don’t. That is Ella Baker’s whole theory of social change coming out of a gubernatorial nominee’s mouth, strong people don’t need strong leaders, movements make leaders move. Whether she governs like that sentence is a different question, and it is exactly the question my magnifying glass exists to ask. But a candidate who invites the pressure instead of pathologizing the critic is already governing different than the emperor we got, because let us keep it real, we do not have governors in Texas right now. We have emperors in Texas, and it is us and like fifteen billionaire dudes at the top.

Five Key Takeaways

* The culture war is a costume corruption wears. The Bluebonnet curriculum began as a billion dollar vendor contract that teachers, parents, and even MAGA moms united against, and the Christian nationalism was added afterward to shatter that coalition. Distraction with one hand, extraction with the other.

* The erasure is older than the parties fighting over it. From the 1836 constitution that constitutionalized slavery, to Lamar’s extermination war, to the Daughters of the Confederacy’s textbook Measuring Rod, to SB 3 and Bluebonnet, Democratic and Republican governments alike have curated a curriculum that protects the settler founding. Bipartisan beef mystifies a shared architecture.

* Curriculum is material, not symbolic. A seventh grade Texas history course with zero Black Texans is curriculum violence with measurable downstream effects on belief, belonging, discipline, and civic participation, exactly as Woodson warned in 1933.

* The schoolhouse and the cage share a balance sheet. Four day school weeks, an eight and a half percent special education cap, a billion dollar voucher drain, private prison halfway houses, family detention with National Guard staffing, one racial capitalist machine billing different communities at different rates.

* Accountability is the price of the endorsement. Hinojosa is running on firing Morath, returning HISD to Houston, an unsession to unburden teachers, top of the nation teacher pay, and $1,500 checks to households, and she explicitly asked to be held accountable. The magnifying glass stays out either way.

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If this essay taught you more about the Texas curriculum in twenty minutes than seventh grade taught you in nine months, that is not an accident, that is the void I built Education Is Elevation to fill, because the state has proven, from the Measuring Rod to Bluebonnet, that it will not teach this history on purpose. Every paid subscription is a counter vendor contract, except the vendor is a Black educator and the deliverable is the truth they keep trying to repossess.

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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Related Readings: A Bibliography

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Apple, Michael W. Ideology and Curriculum. Routledge, 1979.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021.

Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books, 1992.

Burrough, Bryan, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. Penguin Press, 2021.

Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” 1977.

Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. University Press of Florida, 2003.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 1991.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. Random House, 1981.

Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia González. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017.

Fenwick, Leslie T. Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership. Harvard Education Press, 2022.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.

Gordon Reed, Annette. On Juneteenth. Liveright, 2021.

Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, 1993.

Ighodaro, Erhabor, and Greg Wiggan. Curriculum Violence: America’s New Civil Rights Issue. Nova Science Publishers, 2011.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Moreno Ramos, Rubén, et al. Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), case history and commentary.

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