Rick Green

Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's the WallBuilder Show, taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. Thanks for joining us. I'm Rick Green here with David and Tim Barton, and today the hot topic is education.

Guys, of course we talk a lot about education here. Well, partly because that's what we do, but also because the failure of our public schools and the Marxist takeover of our public schools. That's why we see what we see in politics now and in these corporate boardrooms. It's all downstream from educating multiple generations in this cultural Marxism. But there's some positive things happening. A lot of people have stepped into the fight here and are working on their local school boards. Today we're going to talk about how you work on, essentially, a state school board. It's the State Board of Education in Texas. Not every state's the same and it's different all across the country, but in our state, here in Texas, we have an opportunity to influence what the curriculum is going to look like. And, man, we've got some good news today, guys, but it's kind of teetering and it's going to require some action steps from our listeners in Texas today.

David Barton

Yeah, this goes to the role that Texas plays nationally in education because when you come to textbooks, Texas and California have one fourth of the nation's public school students, so textbooks generally are written for those two states and sold to everybody else. Now in Texas the way it works is a school district can have any curriculum they want, any curriculum school board votes for, but unless it's on the state approved list, the state is not going to pay for it. So if there's a curriculum on the state-approved list, then the state's going to pay for it and you're much more likely to see that show up in the school district, because most school districts don't feel like they've got enough money to pay for all the curriculum for everybody, so you let the state pay for it. Well, as it turns out, Texas has resisted kind of like Florida has, with Governor Santa's, resisted all the woke movements that have come into education. And over the last couple of sessions Texas has said hey, we're not doing DEI in the state, we're not doing the 1619 kind of project. And so what has happened with those particular things? We've seen schools like Texas A&M and University of Texas get rid of their DEI officers, going back to not teaching woke stuff. So Texas worked really hard not to become a woke public education kind of state and, like Florida, they've done a really good job.

And one of the pieces of legislation got passed last year in Texas, or last session, is called House Bill 1605. And that allows Texas to write its own curriculum, rather than saying, hey, we'll let the national guys write the curriculum, which tends to be very woke. We're a big enough state that we can create our own curriculum and use it. And so they pulled together all these traditional educators, classical educators, faith people and said, hey, what would a good Texas curriculum look like? And they came up with really a terrific curriculum.

And it is very much classical education. You are actually learning history and learning math and learning things with all the woke stuff. And it is very much classical education. You are actually learning history and learning math and learning things with all the woke stuff. And it also includes a lot of the faith stuff. You're going to learn the golden rule and the Good Samaritan and all these things that used to be center core to American values. So that's up. Well, you can imagine the left and the state of Texas does not want that curriculum going in, and so Texas Freedom Network and other groups like that have organized. And the reason it's important is Texas State Board of Education is going to vote in the next week or so on whether to adopt curriculum that was put forth in that bill, this new state of Texas kind of self-made curriculum, and if they do it's going to be really good.

The left is pushing to keep the other stuff, the national kind of curriculum, which is a lot more woke and not nearly as good,

Tim Barton

 and often, too, what will happen is they'll put out information and politically, sometimes you want to accuse the other side of doing what you're actually doing in the midst of it and so they might have words like saying, hey, they're trying to dismantle the education system, they're trying to harm our kids, we want to protect our kids and make sure they get a good education. And there are, at times, people who are good hearted, people who will see that information and not understand that when these leftists are writing that, what they're actually saying is we want to continue on with some of this Marxist, communist ideology, instead of going back to recognizing that America is not the greatest evil in the world, that not all white people have done evil things historically I mean just like things that shouldn't be controversial and yet you will see people that are buying into some of what they've heard because they don't actually know the truth of the content. They've just heard the narrative shaped by one side of the issue.

David Barton

And so what's happened is Texas has a real chance to reform this, but up to this point the conservative folks in the state have not really responded well because most didn't know this was going on. I heard last night that there's been now 2000 emails sent to the State Board of Education. Eighty percent of them say don't adopt this new curriculum. So it's the left that's showing up and talking At this point. There's four Republican State Board of Education members that are very key to whether this passes or not, whether the good stuff gets in and whether we go back to more classical, traditional kind of education without the wokeness. And so what happens in Texas? The legislature is really trying hard to make good corrections and get education back in the right direction, a traditional kind of education. And another thing they're working on is getting rid of what's called the Texas Association of School Boards. That's the really liberal kind of group. It's kind of like the National Education Association or it's kind of like the Chamber of Commerce with business groups. That's a liberal side, and so they're really trying to create some new institutions that are very much more rooted in truth and conservatism. So what we're asking is, if you happen to be in Texas now. This interview is going to be good for everybody because it gives a lot of great information on how this works and what goes on in your state. But if you're in Texas, we need you to please contact the State Board of Education. So let me go ahead and give that email right now. People will hear this.

As we're going through, we're going to have a state rep on who is key in the bill, key in the passage of this thing. But we need people who want good traditional education in Texas to write down this email and we'll have it on the website as well, so you can go there. But it's called SBOE and SBOE is State Board of Education. Sboe support State Board of Education support at TEA, which is Texas Education Agency. It's at teatexasgov. So again, it's SBOEsupport@tea.texas.gov.

We need you to just send a real simple message and the message is please adopt House Bill 1605 curriculum without any amendments. Just take it the way the legislature did it. Don't let the left amend this thing into oblivion. So again, it's SBOE@tea.texas.gov. Simple message support HB 1605 curriculum without amendments. If we can get that done, we can put Texas back on a radically different track from what it's been and, by the way, I've been told that about one-third of the members of the Texas Education Agency have quit in the last few months over this new curriculum coming out. They think it's too conservative, not woke, etc. So it's doing some good things already in the state of Texas. Now we need the people to get behind it and push it on across the finish line 

Rick Green

All right, we're going to take a quick break.

When we come back, Representative Steve Toth will be with us to talk about this. Stay with us. You're listening to the Wall Builder Show.

Break

Rick Green

Welcome back, I am excited. Steve Toth, one of the best guys in the entire political world. Not a politician, he is a patriot, a phenomenal state representative and a great friend to Patriot Academy. Steve, always good to see you. Man, I am so thankful for guys like you that are just men of integrity and character and stand bold, flawed jars of clay that God's still using. I don't know what else I can say, man, so many victories that we've had in Texas because of you, and so many times you've stood when very few people were willing to stand and it gave other people courage. So for our folks at home.

Steve Toth

I've just got to say this If you weren't out there mobilizing the troops, it would be nearly impossible for us to stand there's. You know, we're going to grow quite a bit this year in the Texas legislature and you've been a big part of that, huge part of that. I can't thank you enough.

Rick Green

Well, and Steve, you know because you work with homeschool, with private schools, public schools we've got a real challenge in America with the education system because the poison of cultural Marxism has been there for decades and decades and a lot of people just give up on and they say well, we want the public schools to burn, yada, yada, yada. Listen, 80% of the kids are still in public schools and we have to do everything we can to make the system less bad. We have to improve the system. We have to do everything we can to get good stuff back into the classroom and you've been working on that and working to say listen, when a kid comes to a public school, we're paying for it, public dollars are paying for it. We should be setting the agenda and making sure that there's good stuff being taught, because you go to our constitution not just here in Texas, all the state constitutions.

You go to the public education section. Why do you have it at the beginning? To have an informed citizenry. It's all about having good citizens, so let's talk about that. You had to really take the bull by the horns with what's going on in public schools in Texas and, of course, school choice is a big fight coming for you guys as well. We'll talk about that. But just a curriculum fight to make sure that the State Board of Education, who's elected by the people of Texas, can make sure that we've got some good stuff going in the classroom. You fought this one last session. Well, the session before and then last session as well. Tell us what those changes were.

Steve Toth

Yeah, so in the 87th session two years ago, house Bill 3979, that was my bill and Brandon Creighton and I got that over the finish line and it banned the teaching of critical race theory in our schools and you know,

Rick Green

 which teaches our kids to hate each other and hate their country?

And it's a horrible, horrible thing. It is the. It's the mechanism by which the cultural Marxism was getting in.

Steve Toth

It is. But here's the crazy thing is that we can we can put that in law in Texas education code and yet you still see Democrat members of the State Board of Education that are trying to weasel it into different documents, and that's really the hard part of that is that we've really got to go back next session and cut off funding for any ISD that wants to put this hate-filled content in front of our kids because they're tearing each other up right now, Rick, I mean it's just awful.

Rick Green

Yeah, well, it's why the fomented race relation. You know all the hatred. It's a Marxist idea, right? If we can divide people and make them hate, each other, government gets to step in and save the day, and it prevents the people from coming together. It's the opposite, of course, of MLK, right? He said you know content of the character, not color of the skin. So we're spitting on his grave when we do the CRT thing. Side note though, man, what about all of these Fortune 500 companies and these conservative what we thought were conservative brands Tractor Supply, John Deere, Jack Daniels? What was the other one? There was another big one, I'm skipping, oh, Harley Davidson.

Steve Toth

Yeah.

Rick Green

So they all go woke. And now they've all reversed. They've all said we're getting rid of the DEI, we're firing all those people that were doing DEI, we're going back to patriotism, and it's because Sunlight right is the best disinfectant we showed what they were doing, and Jack Daniels did it just last week before they got exposed.

Robbie Starbucks was just about to expose them. So at least in corporate America we're making some progress because we're using the dollar to say we're taking the dollar away from you, we're not buying from you. If you don't straighten this up, a lot harder to do that in the bureaucracies because they're so entrenched. But it's the same fight to get rid of this hatred of each other that CRT causes.

Steve Toth

It's embedded in the Texas Education Agency. It's embedded in the State Board of Education. It's embedded in the Ledge Council and the Texas Legislature. It's embedded in the ledge council and the Texas legislature. It's embedded in the staffers that go from office to office to office. Rick, it's like playing whack-a-mole buddy. It's awful.

Rick Green

It's in the church, man. It is in the church. These left-wing billionaires funded all of these efforts to come into the church and get these pastors, including Rick Warren and some of the biggest pastors in the country. Rick has been such a disappointment, bro. Oh it's in Sunday schools. These people are going to their churches and being told they got white privilege and they're not even allowed to speak in the Sunday school class.

Steve Toth

You were born on third base.

Rick Green

it's sick man, it's sick, it's sick and it's in the church. It is a disease. It's absolutely a disease. So, yeah, it is whack-a-mole. So how do you decide which one to hit? I mean, you've got to be going after it all over the place.

Steve Toth

So for me it's weird. When I got elected in the 83rd Legislative Session, I thought I was just coming to work on behalf of small businesses to keep government out of the regulatory hurdles that they put in front of small businesses, because we create 80% of the jobs in Texas. But it's like this found me In the 83rd legislative session. We passed a bill that did away with C-scope, which was Common Core, but we didn't really do away with Common Core. We thought we did, but we didn't. We didn't. We just opened the door up for Amplify and Pearson and all these other woke online curriculums to come in to our kids. And then again, the wild thing in the 87th session is critical race theory, and it was something that we cared deeply about but couldn't get any traction with the bill until one day and this is the backstory for getting House Bill 3979 passed one day an evangelical young Christian woman out of California whose name is Allison Weakley called her dad Dick Weekly. Does that name ring a bell, rick?

Rick Green

Wow, yeah, yeah, big builder in Houston and the Texans for lawsuit reform guy and

Rick Green

 she called him up and said Dad, what's with this critical race theory thing?

And do you know that there's a state rep by the name of Steve Toth there that has a bill that bans it? And, dad, I'm going to send you some reading material on it. And then, all of a sudden, dick said Allison, his name is Steve Toth and I'm going to call him tonight. And Rick, I said Dick, I'm carrying this bill, but my main priority is the gender mod bill. I'm here to pass a gender mod bill. And I said I can't.

I'm going to try and pass this but 

Rick Green

Meaning, by the way, Steve, for anybody watching that doesn't know what that is right. You're outlawing these.

Steve Toth

Mutilation of children, Gender mutilation of our little boys and little girls.

I had a bill and Krause had a bill and this is a totally God thing. Because they said, dick, it'll be a God thing if I move off this bill. Well, the very next morning I found out that they weren't going to consider my bill, they were going to go with Krause's bill. And I called up Dick and I said this is a God moment where God guides, God provides. I said you got me now because they gave my bill to somebody else and so this has become my major bill now. And he said you know it's funny, my daughter, Allison, says the same thing that God's really in this which I don't think Dick's like really religious.

Rick Green

No, and for people that don't know, I mean his issue is tort reform and in fact I've been crossways with him over his support of people that are bad on all the other issues but they're good on tort reform, right. But you know, god uses all of us, right, and so, yeah, and and I didn't know this backstory this is really good.

Steve Toth

anyways, he, he just gets committed to it and then all of a sudden um summer, for the Manhattan institute wrote a story about house bill 1776, which was a piece of garbage bill. Right, that's what the left always does the Patriot Act. I don't like the Patriot Act. There's nothing patriotic about illegal search and seizure and groping you in the airport. But so House Bill 1776 was a garbage bill and the Manhattan Institute exposed it for the garbage bill but then said however, Steve Toth's house bill 3979 is really a great bill.

Rick Green

Wow, okay, and by the way, I'm sorry I keep interrupting you, but for our listeners that are familiar, when I say HB 1776, I'm talking about HB 1776, my bill 25 years ago, not the one Steve's talking about now Celebrate Freedom Week was done 1776. I stood in line to get that number back in 2001. No this was during your session that you're trying to get all this other good stuff done, so this was like a almost like a Trojan horse bill, right?

Steve Toth

It was a total Trojan horse bill and the funny thing is that. The funny thing is that some of the individuals that really love this bill, that were pushing this bill, were like. I was like why do you think this bill is being sponsored over in the senate by democrats? Well, that's because we couldn't get any republicans to carry it well, that why yeah, and so what the bill was is basically action civics, which they, you know, we all want to teach the kids civics. Right, but Right, I don't want some pro-choice teacher to say I want you to go knock on doors in the Texas house for abortion.

Rick Green

Yeah, yeah.

Steve Toth

Or some BLM teacher to say I want you to go and knock on doors for Black Lives Matter. We don't, no, you're not going to use my kid and use them to do evil stuff on your behalf. It's not going to happen.

Rick Green

Right, right, yeah. So when yours finally got done, what did it? Specifically on the CRT thing, did it make it where they can't use that terminology? I mean, how did you- functionality.

Steve Toth

We went after the implementation. We went after the structure. We went after all the nooks and crannies in the way in which they implement critical race theory in the classroom without ever using the word critical race theory. 

Rick Green

No, kidding

Steve Toth

 Because that's all they do, right? The left is just. You know, they'll have 5,000 different names for something.

Rick Green

Right, right, and then you did you. Is that the one where you then had to go fight at the State Board of Education to implement? Once you got the bill passed in the legislature, then the state board was the one with the TEA setting the policy in the classroom, no.

Steve Toth

So here's the crazy thing Again these are the really early days of understanding critical race theory, right? And so my bill initially was just history. Well then we had all these teachers that are like hey, in English lit class, in science class, in math class.

Rick Green

They put it in everything.

Steve Toth

Yeah, it's in everything right. So, unfortunately the bill was so tight, we couldn't modify it, we couldn't amend it. So we petitioned the governor to come back in special session in July and expand the bill that basically includes all subjects.

Rick Green

Okay, and was that the one I was trying to remember? So this would have been summer of 2022? Okay, so 21 is when you passed it, and then summer of 2021 is when you 

Steve Toth

Amended it. It's the session,

Rick Green

 all right. So then fast forward to today and what they're the fight over what's in the classroom, what the curriculum is going to be in the classroom and what the state board is doing, because you had another bill this last session that essentially was that your bill, that allowed the state board to go back to the curriculum, you know, doing the curriculum guidelines. 

Steve Toth

No that wasn’t my bill, but 1605 covers that. And so here's the problem we created in the 83rd legislative session. Rick, you heard of CSCOPE right In 2013,. Right, it was in 80% of the schools, affecting 43% of our kids. It was Common Core, meaning math in English. Common Core is math in English, but there was a history component in it as well that taught that the animals that flew planes in the world trade towers were freedom fighters, but our founding fathers that poured tea in the harbor were domestic terrorists.

It taught that oil and gas was destroying America and that agriculture was destroying America. Well, what are the drivers of the Texas economy? Oil and gas and agriculture right, I mean it was just ridiculous.

But we got rid of it and we kind of patted ourselves on the back and believing, hey, we got rid of this awful content, but we didn't replace it with anything. And so schools went out and they just bought Pearson and Amplify, woke material, bad stuff, and it's in all of our schools. It's in all of our schools. Books don't exist anymore, for the most part Because they're doing everything digitally, everything's digital. Look at a 20-year-old when they I won't say write, when they print, because they can't write, they can't do cursive, they can't read cursive, they can't read the constitution, but they can't even print because they never learned the fine motor skills that comes with learning cursive, right. And so what we want is we want to get kids away from these screens and back to content, back to paper.

And so what we've done is we've given we're going to spend $700 million to coax districts back to paper. So this is an online curriculum that they can print the content out, and we're actually giving them money if they will print it out.

Rick Green

Yeah, and this is what got me interested is that somebody sent me some of the lesson plans and, bro, I'm telling you it's like it's stuff that we've wanted to get back in the classroom for decades, everything from how do you treat your neighbor Well, you treat them the way you want to be treated. What is that? It's the golden rule. Where does your neighbor Well, you treat them the way you want to be treated? What is that? It's the golden rule. Where's that come from? And then it goes into the Sermon on the Mount. It's pro-entrepreneurship, it's all of these really, really positive things back into the classroom and I'm just I literally no-transcript Open education resource. Is that right, oer?

Steve Toth

Yeah, so go ahead and Google search OER Bible studies.

Rick Green

OER Bible studies. Let me see what comes up.

Steve Toth

It means it's an online curriculum is all of that. It basically means.

Rick Green

Okay. So what's the opposition? Why are people afraid of it? 

Steve Toth

Because UNESCO coined the phrase OER. 

Rick Green

So, just because someone else used the phrase in a negative way, it's like saying water's bad because somebody used water in a bad way. Right,

Steve Toth

 yeah, someone drowned in it.

Rick Green

Yeah.

Well, and just because Bill Gates is a left-wing hack now doesn't mean that everybody threw out their Windows computer Now. I'm a Mac guy myself.

Steve Toth

I know it's just unfortunate, but I got to give our conservatives credit because the reality is that it's silly to even call it OER because it doesn't meet the qualifications for OER and I don't know if they just thought they were smart by half or what the deal is. But Wikipedia's OER is an example. You can go in and you can edit Wikipedia. Right, you can't edit this. It's copywritten and it's protected. You can't edit this. It's copywritten and it's protected. You can't change it. Someone out in the class? They can't edit the thing and change it. They can't take letters from the Birmingham jail as an example and remove the book of Esther, which Martin Luther King was quoting when he said if I perish, I perish. You can't take the I have a dream speech that is in this and remove the book of Isaiah from it and how it explains all that as well.

I mean, it's stupid.

Rick Green

So if you guys, if the state board is having hearings and such on this, how does that work? Like there's 15 of them and they will meet sometime in September, I guess.

Steve Toth

I think it's like September 9th or 10th, 9th and 10th and we need our people to show up.

Rick Green

Okay, gotcha, Because at the hearing they will decide whether or not to adopt. They get to make the decision on adopting this and making it available to the schools, the local schools.

Steve Toth

No, no, rick, look, hear this really clearly. Hb 1605 is law. The question is do we edit it? And the question is do the schools get the $700 million to implement it? So it's there. The schools can have it, but they're not going to get $60, $40, and $20 per kid which enables them to print it out. So it's in paper format.

Rick Green

That's what the state board is going to approve or not approve. That's what they're going to approve or not approve. Okay, and we know how money affects the equation, right? So if the school doesn't get the money, if the state board votes no, far fewer schools will use it.

Steve Toth

Correct, correct, which means they'll be stuck with the content that they've got, which is bad.

Rick Green

Our folks. That's all the time we have. If you want to see the whole interview, you can go to PatriotU. Right now it's available at patriotacademy.tv. That's patriotacademy.tv and all of the Tavern interviews are available there. I think we're at 30-something of them Fantastic guests in there talking about those revolutionary strategies and tactics to save the nation. But if you want to get the full interview with Representative Steve Toth, or if you're already a member over at Warrior Poets Society Network, you can find it there at Warrior Poets Society Network. Thanks so much for listening. You've been listening to the WallBuilders Show