This is an example of real harm resulting from the religious posing of Texas leaders. Harmony schools are charter schools in Texas. They are unquestionable successes in the realm of schooling. Two of their high schools were named in Newsweek as miracle schools representing the best of the best to be had in education in the entire United States, much less in Texas.
But that’s not good enough for those conspiracy theorists out there who see different as threatening and Muslim as terrorist. Almost since the day they opened their doors, Harmony Schools have been the target of hate groups throughout the state.
Led by the Texas Eagle Forum, a conservative pro-family organization, Harmony’s critics have issued a flurry of legislative alerts in recent weeks that said the state’s $25 billion endowment for “our children’s textbooks” was imperiled by “Turkish men, of whom we know very little other than most are not American citizens.”
They gathered enough momentum that earlier this week some conservative legislators cited the concerns when they voted against a key budget bill — and almost killed it.
But one conservative protector of the endowment, the Permanent School Fund, says the criticism of Harmony is unfounded.
“There is a lot of misinformation, a certain level of fear and a small helping of bigotry that needs to go away,” said State Board of Education member David Bradley, R-Beaumont.
Bradley said he would be the “first to sound the alarm” if there were anything to be alarmed about. But the board has not received substantive complaints from parents of the 16,000 children that attend any of the 33 Harmony campuses across the state, he said.
“The only thing these guys are guilty of are high scores and being Turkish,” Bradley said.
Austin-American Statesman
Love the way the article soft-pedals the Texas Eagle Forum. They are a hate group, and should be rightly labeled as such. I have yet to hear of anything they support that isn’t related in some fashion to the stupid people observation I made in the last post. Not content to simply make themselves look like idiots, these members of the Texas Eagle Forum, they want to incur unnecessary costs on the cash strapped school system, and the even more cash starved charter schools.
House General Investigating Committee Chairman Chuck Hopson, R-Jacksonville, said his committee has started a preliminary look-see into Harmony “and all the other charter school operators in the state.
“It’s nothing criminal. We just want to see whether they are spending our (state) money wisely,” he said. “There have been some concerns about (Harmony) building schools without competitive bidding, and about other issues, but we are going to looking at every one of the charters.”
Austin-American Statesman
Harmony schools are on record in that article as “welcoming the investigation” but I can’t imagine a group in their position daring to even suggest that the waste of time and money involved in investigating superior schools (for any other reason than to determine and duplicate their superior tactics) might not be welcome. Jack-booted fear mongers tend to not react well when their authority is questioned.
