6 November 9 - 15, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Famers Nolan Ryan or Ivan “Pudge” Rodri- guez. In fact, Nadel was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame himself in 2014 after being included in the team’s own hall in 2012. 196 In 2021 and 2022 the Rangers lost a whop- ping 196 games. It’s an impressive number in that a team has to almost try to lose that of- ten. To go from 94 losses in 2022 to 90 wins in 2023 is more than a remarkable turn- around. It stands as one of the biggest swings in MLB history. But adding in the 2021 season makes this year seem more his- toric. According to Baseball America, the two-year swing the Rangers have engi- neered is the greatest turnaround in Major League history. 30,000,000 When free-agent pitcher Jacob deGrom signed a massive contract with the Rangers in the offseason that would pay him $30 million in 2023, fans were excited, but cau- tiously so. The lefty had been one of the best pitchers in the Major Leagues for years, but also one of its more injury-prone stars. When in June, after only a few starts, deGrom announced he would miss the rest of the season due to injury, it seemed as though that $30 million had been wasted and that the Rangers’ chances for postsea- son success were tanked as well. ▼ LEGISLATURE SEPERATE AND NOT EQUAL CRITICS WARN PASSING VOUCHERS WILL REVIVE SEGREGATED SCHOOLS. BY SIMONE CARTER F or months, certain Texas Republican leaders have tried — and seriously struggled — to carry school voucher legislation past the finish line. So, last week, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he’d sweeten the deal for holdouts by expanding the special session agenda to include teacher raises and additional public school funding. The House had not voted on the plan as of publication time. But critics of the privatized-ed push argue that, no matter how you slice it, voucher pro- grams would primarily help affluent white families and harm communities of color. Passing vouchers would lead to more segregated schools, both racially and eco- nomically, according to an October press re- lease from the Texas NAACP and Texas Legislative Black Caucus. TLBC Chair Ron Reynolds, a Democratic state representative from Missouri City, told the Observer that most African Americans — as well as low-income white and Hispanic people — can’t afford private schools. That’s even with a voucher. For example, under one proposal, partici- pating families would receive $8,000 to send their kid to private school. But Reyn- olds said some private-school tuitions can cost as much as $20,000. “Even if you give them an $8,000 subsidy, they can’t come up with the rest of the money,” he said. “So basically, it’s no good for them. It only subsidizes the rich and the well-off and the well-to-do.” He also highlighted another key point: “Private schools, unlike public schools, don’t have to accept every student.” The GOP-majority Texas Legislature in 2021 barred so-called critical race theory from public schools, even though districts have roundly denied teaching the college- level academic framework. And earlier this year, conservative lawmakers doubled down by banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices in higher education. Public-ed proponents argue that the voucher system will worsen inequities by si- phoning taxpayer money away from already chronically underfunded public schools. As another state representative put it in a post on X (formerly Twitter): It’s “welfare for the wealthy.” Reynolds explained that Black people weren’t allowed to attend Anglo universities until the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Texas has an ugly history when it comes to race rela- tions, he added, and now, vouchers could get added into the mix. Private schools often aren’t diverse and can reject students at will. “This voucher system, it really exacer- bates the haves and the have-nots,” Reyn- olds said. “It gives the ‘haves’ a subsidy to subsidize their private school tuition that most of them can already afford, and the ‘have-nots’ are left at the neighborhood pub- lic schools with even less resources than they had to begin with. So this is bad for Texas.” The modern voucher push can be traced to racist backlash following the 1954 U.S. Su- preme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Edu- cation, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. “There is simply no denying the historical connection be- tween the birth of private school voucher policies and segregationist defiance to Brown,” a prominent teachers advocate wrote in a 2017 piece for Dissent magazine. Ever since that landmark decision, “you’ve seen this voucher movement in Texas,” said Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe. Bledsoe told the Observer that aside from race, school vouchers would also discrimi- nate against Texans in rural areas. Often, these counties don’t have private schools at all. GOP representatives from rural parts of the state have indeed fought against vouch- ers’ passage. People motivated by hate support voucher programs because they would al- low white children to move away from pub- lic schools with ethnic and racial minorities, Bledsoe said. “You’ll have a mass exodus from the pub- lic schools, primarily of white students, and so you’re going to decrease diversity sub- stantially,” he added. Speaking with the Observer, Paige Dug- gins-Clay, chief legal analyst with the Inter- cultural Development Research Association, cited a recent report showing that a signifi- cantly higher number of white students at- tend private schools compared with their non-white peers. Around 13% of the state’s public school population is Black, but that number in pri- vate schools is only 6%, according to the re- port. And although more than half of the student body in public schools is Latino, the same is true for less than a quarter of kids in private schools. Duggins-Clay said voucher programs ef- fectively fund discrimination; she’s not aware of any meaningful civil rights protec- tions in other states’ voucher laws. She added that private schools under Senate Bill 1 would be able to discriminate for reasons like religious identity and the amorphous category of “institutional values.” The vast majority of private schools are pa- rochial in nature, meaning they’re connected to a certain faith and can turn away pupils with differing religious views, she said. They can also refuse to admit LGBTQ+ students or to hire educators from that community. To be sure, some private schools have ex- cellent academic programs, Duggins-Clay said. But there’s a lack of reliable evidence showing that vouchers would boost academic outcomes. Rather, the opposite is true. Studies indicate that students who bene- fit from vouchers don’t perform better than their public-ed peers, she added. Many have even returned to public schools, where they then get remediated for learning loss. Private institutions also aren’t held to the same academic and fiscal standards as pub- lic schools, such as standardized testing or the accountability rating system, Duggins- Clay said. “Even though it’s imperfect, and we can always improve the public school system, there are at least some mechanisms for over- sight and accountability,” she continued. “None of that is present in private schools.” ▼ TECHNOLOGY TECHNICAL NIGHTMARES HACKS AND IT PROBLEMS CONTINUE TO PLAGUE DALLAS AND DALLAS COUNTY. BY JACOB VAUGHN I t’s been quite the year for Dallas County IT. After many months of various tech troubles, it seems the county has yet an- other hacker hurdle to navigate. The ransomware group Play reportedly threatened to release private Dallas County data to the public unless the group receives payment. According to reports, the hacker group made a post on Oct. 28 to the dark web claiming it had stolen an unspecified number of files and planned to release them unless an unspecified ransom was paid. Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins said in a statement last week that the county became aware of a “cybersecurity incident” on Oct. 19. “We immediately took steps to contain the incident and engaged an exter- nal cybersecurity firm to conduct a compre- hensive forensic investigation,” Lewis Jenkins said. “Our foremost priority is the safety and security of our employees, the residents, and the public we serve.” He said the county has put in place stringent secu- rity protocols to safeguard its systems and data and is collaborating with external cy- bersecurity specialists and law enforcement. Boyd Clewis, vice president of the Baxter Clewis Training Academy, which trains peo- ple in cybersecurity, has noticed the county’s recent problems. “It seems like the never-ending cycle of cyber issues with Dallas County,” Clewis said. However, he added that these kinds of attacks are pretty typical for local govern- ment agencies, and he wouldn’t chalk it up to incompetence. “I don’t think it’s incom- petence at all,” he said. “But what I have no- ticed is that specifically in spaces such as local government and what not, the re- sources are not allocated to protect the local government’s applications, security infra- structure, et cetera, until after a catastrophic event has happened.” Clewis doesn’t think this has to do with red tape or bureaucracy. It’s just hard for people to see the return on investment with something like cybersecurity, because when it works as it should, nothing seems to be happening. “If I make an investment in something, I want to see a return on in- vestment,” Clewis said. “But when it comes to cybersecurity, it’s one of those things where the return is your company not be- ing in the news for something catastrophic happening.” Dallas has been in the news a lot over the last couple of years because of various IT and cybersecurity incidents. The latest at- tack comes on the heels of other cy- Luca Bravo/Unsplash Play, the group behind the ransomware attack, has previously posted data belonging to its victims. Unfair Park from p4 >> p8
