FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 20, 2025
CONTACT: Nicole Hill, press@texasaft.org
Statement from Texas AFT President Zeph Capo on President Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Department of Education and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s appearance at the Thursday signing:
“It makes perfect sense for Gov. Greg Abbott to be on hand for the dismantling of the Department of Education. It was the only governmental entity holding his administration accountable for guaranteeing parents’ and students’ rights to a free and fair education.
This state was illegally capping the number of children receiving special education services as recently as 2017. It was only through the diligent work of disability advocates and journalists that the issue was brought to the fore, and the Department of Education intervened.
The Trump Administration may have scrubbed the online receipts for the department’s 2017 monitoring report on Texas’ illegal deprivation of student accommodations, but Texas educators remember; we still live with the consequences. To this day, this state desperately underfunds special education services, even more acutely than it underfunds its public schools as a whole.
On that note, attempting to shutter the federal agency that sends $3.66 billion annually to Texas public schools also aligns with the governor’s most recent mission: his relentless quest to starve our schools of resources, shame them for not meeting arbitrary standards, all so he can shutter and privatize them.
So yes, today, Gov. Abbott is exactly where we’d expect him to be — on the frontlines of destabilizing public education.”
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The Texas American Federation of Teachers represents 66,000 teachers, paraprofessionals, support personnel, and higher-education employees across the state. Texas AFT is affiliated with the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO.
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