The Democratic nominee for Texas governor stood in front of the Houston ISD administrative offices on Tuesday morning and didn’t mince words about the current state of public education.
“It’s dystopian,” said Gina Hinojosa. “If we have a generation of kids being taught by AI instead of teachers, we will raise a generation of sociopaths instead of productive citizens. That’s where we are headed right now. It’s a future that none of us want. It’s a future that’s about maximizing profits.”
The state representative from Austin is hoping to unseat Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in November and has said that if elected, she’ll reform public education, starting with the termination of TEA Commissioner Mike Morath, the man behind the 2023 state takeover of HISD.
The press conference was called to denounce the state’s plan to turn 100 public schools, nine of which are in Houston ISD, into artificial intelligence academies. Hinojosa said the transition to AI schools, just in Houston, will cost taxpayers $4.5 million.
“I am here to talk about the catastrophic impacts of AI on our children and Greg Abbott’s plan to experiment on our children with AI,” Hinojosa said. “These are schools where teachers are replaced by education guides and where kids spend hours in front of screens.”
HISD has said that its “Future 2” model does not replace teachers with AI.
A group of retired educators, media and Hinojosa supporters attended the Tuesday morning press conference at the Hattie Mae White Educational Support Center. One of the attendees was Patrick Huff, a retired Klein ISD principal who said he’d been a lifelong Republican until he witnessed what he referred to as the decline of the Texas education system.
“We’re here to support Gina and her plan to right the ship of education and bring back local control and remove the A-F ratings,” he said. “We used to fail students. Now we fail schools. When they fail, they open themselves up for takeover, and that’s where we are now.”
AI schools are the next step toward dismantling public education, Huff said, noting that state takeovers were followed by a $1 billion school voucher program that has diverted funds from public schools to private academies.
“They want to bring all education under one tent and control it,” he said. “Abbott won’t pay attention. Morath won’t pay attention. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. It doesn’t matter what you advocate for. Every part of the agenda that parents and teachers have objected to has been Republican-led for the last 30 years. We’ve got an individual from another party who is saying she’s going to change it, and we’re behind her.”
Hinojosa claims that Abbott has accepted millions in campaign contributions from billionaire donors, including Alpha Schools co-founder Mackenzie Price and school choice advocate Jeff Yass, who are financially invested in implementing AI in Texas schools and expanding the “voucher scam.”
She said she’ll appoint an educator to replace Morath at the TEA, pause the A-F accountability rating system and end the voucher program, “returning school districts that have been taken over back to their communities, and wiping clean Abbott’s no-bid vendor contracts and using that money to make Texas teachers among the highest paid in the country.”
That’s music to the ears of Cissy Reynolds-Perez, a retired Kingsville ISD superintendent who drove from Corpus Christi with seven friends on Tuesday to support Hinojosa at the press conference.
“I started this group called the Rockin’ Retired Educators because there are many of us who have a lot of energy and see what has been happening over the past few years in public education,” she said. “We want to step up and do something about it. The vouchers are helping to decrease enrollment, which means there are going to be fewer teachers paying into the Teacher Retirement System, which is going to drain the TRS. We live off that. It’s our livelihood.”
Reynolds-Perez led the charge with Kingsville ISD and more than 100 other districts to sue the TEA in 2023 over accountability ratings. The districts were granted an injunction by a district judge who said the state could not assign performance ratings for the 2022-23 school year while the matter was being litigated, but the state appealed and the final judgment was in favor of the TEA.
“When the commissioner decided to change the rules in the middle of the game, we asked for a pause,” she said. “It was so unfair. It was wrong for the kids, wrong for the communities and wrong for the schools. When they released the scores under the new rule changes, there were more Fs. They wanted to show that public schools were failing so they could pass the vouchers.”
HISD parent Marcia Nuñez Jones said the curriculum in the majority of Houston schools is “AI slop.”
“There are incorrect choices on math worksheets, misspelled words on maps and inaccurate depictions in social studies,” Jones said. “Teachers use precious planning time correcting errors and changing the required slide decks to make them more developmentally appropriate for their students. Our state-appointed superintendent has mismanaged our budget from day one. He invests our precious tax dollars on projects like Future 2 schools, which focus on AI curriculum and limit human interaction.”
Hinojosa said her plan is to “secure the American dream, and we start by saving Texas schools.”
“When there is accountability, this kind of nonsense doesn’t happen. They took the schools away from the people so they could have their way with our kids and use them as commodities instead of the children that they are.”
