Two of them, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Texas Justice Foundation, both nonprofits, are funded by Leininger and operate out of the same San Antonio business address as Leininger's PAC, Texans for Governmental Integrity. Both groups are aggressively opposed to the state's new curriculum -- the Texas Public Policy Foundation has even drafted an "alternative" TEKS on behalf of social conservatives on the board -- as well as to every education reform being discussed anywhere in the country today. It's difficult to tell whether that opposition simply mirrors Ballard's or if it is actually shaping the way she thinks and votes.
"One of the things that is frustrating is that, as board members, we talk to each other but we make our own decisions," says board member Mary Helen Berlanga, a Democrat from Corpus Christi. "But it's like Donna Ballard can't make her own decisions. She has to turn to these people so they can send her a little note and tell her what to do. I mean, it's tacky. Who was elected to represent that area?"
One organization that has helped Ballard articulate her message is the nonprofit Texas Family Research Center, also in San Antonio. The research center is headed by Anne Newman, who worked with Ballard to oppose the teen-pregnancy commission and went on to help her election campaign. Each month, Newman publishes something called "The Notebook Policy Series" that for the last year has been deconstructing education reform in a most urgent tone.
"TEA's 'Master Plan': Education or Trained Labor?" was the lead topic in the March 1996 issue, which made the observation that the "American system of government is slowly being reconstructed into a socialist state, built upon the foundational theme of 'It takes a village to raise a child.' " The following month, Newman dubbed Schools-to-Work "Marc and Hillary's Youth Training System" in a Notebook Series dissection that featured a prediction by the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly that education would be taken over by work force development boards.
In September and again in November, Newman outlined the influence Tucker and Goals 2000 are having on the development of the state's new curriculum -- a scenario that, according to Ballard, is at the heart of the federal government's takeover of public education.
"The most obvious thing that's offensive is that it isn't just academic," Ballard says. "It's behavioral and attitudinal, and it's all part of having this national curriculum and national assessment. The people who are in charge of doing that and promoting that, they have ideas about change that some of us don't agree with. I'm seeing the change, and I'm not too happy about it."
Neither is a Montgomery County woman named Joy, who dropped by Ballard's office one morning last month. Joy, who was accompanied by another woman, entered Ballard's tiny office clutching a vocabulary assignment that her second-grader had brought home from school.
The lesson materials were about 15 mimeographed sheets of paper, each with a single word printed at the top. Below that were questions that asked students to define the word and then relate how they've witnessed examples of the concept in real life. For example, for the word "change," Joy's daughter and her classmates were asked what they might like to change about themselves.
While the assignment seemed innocent enough, right down to the bunnies and butterflies printed along the margins of each page, Joy explained that it was part of the psychological testing that schools are subjecting students to these days. Joy feared that her daughter's answers would be added to a national data base being created to help the federal government track children for the Schools-to-Work network.
What if someone -- an employer, a university admissions officer or a government bureaucrat -- decided her daughter didn't give the appropriate responses, Joy wondered. Would she be judged deficient in some way and assigned to a remedial class? Later, would she have trouble getting a good job or furthering her education?
This is far from the paranoia that it might appear to be, said Ballard. "This is happening everywhere, in Greenwood and Midland, in San Antonio and White Oak."
That it was happening in Montgomery County was all that mattered to Joy. She's already pulled her kids from public school and has enrolled them in a private institution. It's not just the possibility that the government is gathering "intimate" details of her children that concerns Joy, but a whole host of progressive notions that smack of outcome-based education, such as group grading and the elimination of honors courses and high-school valedictorians.
Ballard nodded her head in agreement. "That's real typical, see, of this radical egalitarianism," she said. "You have your heterogeneous groupings, and everybody can learn."
After pausing for a second, Ballard began again in a singsong voice that chimed with mock optimism. "Everybody can learn exactly the same as anyone else as long as they're permitted in the proper environment.
"So, in other words," she continued, this time with an edge in her voice, "we can't have any competition or anything like that and we end up dumbing down. The only way to achieve that is to teach to the lowest ability child, and it's devastating to our system, absolutely devastating."
