From the Classroom to the Ballot: Tiffany Perkinz Makes Her Case for Texas Education

From the Classroom to the Ballot: Tiffany Perkinz Makes Her Case for Texas Education

In the State Board of Education District 7 race, a longtime English teacher asks voters to consider what classroom experience can bring to the table.

By Gabriel F. Gonzales II

There is a moment every teacher knows.

The classroom door closes. The bell rings. Twenty or thirty students are looking back at you, and whatever politicians, administrators, consultants, curriculum writers or people on social media have said about education suddenly becomes secondary.

Now you have to teach.

That reality is worth remembering as another election season brings arguments about Texas public education back into our mailboxes, television commercials and social media feeds.

In the race for Texas State Board of Education District 7, one of the candidates knows that moment personally.

Tiffany Perkinz is an English teacher.

Not someone who simply talks about teachers. Not someone whose only experience with public education comes from a boardroom or policy meeting. Perkinz has spent more than a decade teaching. Her professional background includes middle and high school English in public and private schools as well as work as an adjunct English instructor at Lamar University. She holds a Master of Arts in English and a Master of Education in Administration and is certified in Texas to teach English Language Arts in grades 7–12.

She is also raising six children in Texas public schools.

Now she is asking voters to send her from the classroom to the State Board of Education.

Perkinz, a Democrat, faces Republican incumbent Julie Pickren in the November 3 election for District 7. The race gives voters two candidates with distinctly different experiences and approaches to education. Pickren has the record of an incumbent state board member. Perkinz is making the case for what the perspective of a working educator could bring to that same table.

For those of us who teach, there is something immediately familiar about the way Perkinz talks about education.

She talks about literature. She talks about writing. She talks about teachers being trusted to teach. She talks about students learning to think rather than simply being told what to think.

Those may sound like campaign phrases until you have spent time in a classroom.

I teach English III and English IV. Every day, I see the enormous difference between assigning students something to read and actually teaching them to engage with it. Reading literature means asking questions. It means encountering ideas that may be unfamiliar. It means disagreeing with an author, a character, a classmate—and sometimes even the teacher—and learning how to explain why.

That is education.

Perkinz’s published platform reflects that philosophy. She says she supports teacher autonomy, local control, evidence-based science, broad history instruction and literature that exposes students to different perspectives. She has described her goal as creating classrooms that teach students how to think rather than what to think.

People are free to agree or disagree with the policies she proposes. That is what elections are for.

But her perspective did not suddenly appear when she became a candidate.

It comes from years spent doing the work.

The Teacher Behind the Candidate

Perkinz was born and raised in Southeast Texas. Her career has included teaching literature, composition and writing, along with helping students develop the reading and critical-thinking skills they will need after graduation.

She has worked with students beyond the traditional classroom as well, including freelance editing and writing and teaching online courses.

Her campaign biography describes someone who has experienced Texas education from two directions: as an educator responsible for students and as a mother navigating the public-school system with her own children.

That combination matters because education policy can look very different depending on where you are sitting.

From Austin, curriculum is a collection of standards.

From a classroom, curriculum is what you have to turn into tomorrow morning’s lesson.

From a policy document, teacher recruitment and retention are statistics.

Inside a school, they are the empty classroom down the hallway, the colleague considering whether this will be her final year, or the new teacher trying to survive the first six weeks.

From a spreadsheet, students become percentages.

Teachers know their names.

That does not mean teachers possess all the answers to education policy. We don’t. But it does mean that classroom experience deserves a serious place in conversations about how classrooms should operate.

Perkinz has already taken that perspective beyond her own school.

In May, she submitted comments to the Texas House Committee on Public Education during its examination of the state of Texas education. She identified herself as an English teacher with 12 years of classroom experience, a parent and a candidate for the State Board of Education.

Her concern was the process by which Texas develops curriculum standards.

She called for transparency and greater educator involvement, raising concerns about rushed timelines, teachers receiving late notice about work groups, educators being placed on committees outside their areas of expertise and what she described as insufficient opportunities for meaningful collaboration.

Her central argument was that academic standards affecting millions of Texas children should emerge from a transparent process in which educators have a meaningful role.

That is a substantive education issue.

And lately, substantive education issues have had to compete for oxygen.

Then Came the Commercial

The District 7 campaign recently became considerably more heated when Conservative Republicans of Texas PAC aired an advertisement supporting Pickren and attacking Perkinz.

Perkinz responded publicly.

The commercial and her response introduced the familiar ingredients of modern politics: ideological labels, accusations, organizational affiliations and competing interpretations of facts.

There are legitimate questions within that debate that deserve careful reporting and sourcing. There are also distinctions that can disappear quickly in a 30-second political advertisement.

Perkinz’s response was sometimes pointed. She challenged the characterization of her in the advertisement and raised questions of her own about Pickren.

But one part of her response stood out to me more than the political back-and-forth.

She kept returning to education.

That is where this race should live.

The State Board of Education helps shape decisions that eventually arrive in classrooms across Texas. Those decisions affect curriculum standards, instructional materials and what generations of Texas students are expected to learn.

Those responsibilities deserve more than slogans. They deserve questions.

What should a Texas graduate know? How much freedom should teachers have in deciding how to teach approved curriculum? How much control should remain with local communities? What does parental involvement look like in practice? How do we expose students to challenging ideas without telling them what conclusions they must reach? How do we teach history honestly while recognizing that Texans can disagree passionately about its meaning? How do we keep good teachers in classrooms?

Those are not Republican questions.

They are not Democratic questions.

They are education questions.

Looking Beyond the Labels

I have spent enough time around education and politics to know that people will immediately want to know which “side” someone is on.

Sometimes I think that instinct prevents us from hearing each other.

I do not need to agree with Tiffany Perkinz on every political issue to recognize something I value in this race: a classroom teacher asking voters to consider what classroom experience might contribute to the State Board of Education.

Nor should voters accept everything any candidate says simply because that candidate is an educator.

Ask questions. Check credentials. Read platforms. Examine records. Look at primary sources.

I recently did exactly that after questions arose publicly concerning Pickren’s educational credentials. Instead of repeating what I saw online, I started researching the institutions and accreditation information myself.

That experience reinforced something I wish happened more often in politics.

When somebody makes a claim, go look.

Sometimes the evidence confirms what you thought. Sometimes it complicates the story. Sometimes it sends you down another rabbit hole entirely.

But voters are better served by evidence than by memes.

Perkinz should be examined by exactly the same standard.

Her campaign says she wants greater teacher autonomy and local control. Ask how she would accomplish it.

She wants changes to curriculum standards adopted by the current board. Ask exactly what she would change.

She argues that classrooms should maintain political and religious neutrality. Ask what that means when applied to actual curriculum decisions.

Those questions give voters considerably more useful information than simply attaching a political label to her name.

The View From Room 209

Maybe my reaction to this race is shaped by where I spend my own days.

Room 209.

My students do not walk through that door thinking about State Board of Education elections.

They are thinking about graduation. Jobs. College. Relationships. Their families. Whatever happened before they arrived at school that morning.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I have to convince them that Hamlet matters, that Fahrenheit 451 has something to say to them, that writing clearly matters, and that reading something difficult is worth the effort.

Teachers across Texas are doing some version of that every day.

That is why I want to hear more education candidates talk about the classroom itself.

Tell me what you would do for the teacher standing in front of students Monday morning.

Tell me how your curriculum policy helps that student become a stronger reader.

Tell me how your decision improves instruction.

Tell me how you intend to recruit teachers, keep them and trust them enough to do their jobs.

Tell parents how you will make sure they are heard.

And tell students how the decisions made in Austin will prepare them for the world waiting outside the schoolhouse doors.

Tiffany Perkinz has entered the District 7 race arguing that her years in the classroom give her something important to contribute to those conversations.

Voters will decide what weight to give that experience.

They will also judge Julie Pickren’s record as the incumbent, the competing visions the candidates present and everything else they believe matters when they cast their ballots November 3.

That decision belongs entirely to them.

But before they make it, I hope they listen carefully when the conversation turns to classrooms.

Because long after the campaign commercials disappear, the signs come down and another election becomes history, teachers will still unlock their doors the next morning.

Students will still walk in.

The bell will still ring.

And someone will still have to teach.