A North Texas school board member who promotes critical race theory—and is paid by a company that provides CRT-based training to his district—is stepping down.
Fort Worth Independent School District trustee Jacinto Ramos announced his resignation this week and said he will leave as soon as voters replace him in a special election. That could happen as soon as May 7.
The resignation follows months of blowback from parents over the district spending millions on divisive “racial equity” policies that have failed to improve students’ academic performance.
“The money being used to play to the radical leftist crowd should be used to benefit the children of the district rather than playing politics,” a district employee told Texas Scorecard last July, after Scorecard reported FWISD spends $2 million a year on race and equity efforts.
It turns out Ramos benefits from the district’s racial equity spending. He earns $103,000 a year from Leadership ISD, a vendor of racial equity training attended by multiple FWISD employees.
He’s also on the board of the Texas Association of School Boards, a taxpayer-funded lobbying group that advocates for promoting “equity” as well as “diversity and cultural awareness initiatives” like the ones Leadership ISD sells.
Ramos gained notoriety in 2018, when he lectured FWISD students about CRT and “white America.”
I want you to learn two things about critical race theory. One is that we have to message and package things right now. It’s called interest convergence, that sometimes white America has to see how it’s relevant to them before we can do something about it. That’s part of that theory.
In his resignation letter, Ramos said he was proud of FWISD’s record of “creating greater education equity” and passing a “Racial and Ethnic Policy.” Two-thirds of the urban district’s 76,000 students are Hispanic.
Ramos also said the district still has “serious work to do to ensure a quality and equitable education for all our students.”
Last year’s statewide assessments of academic performance (the STAAR test) showed dismal reading and math scores for FWISD students—even compared to nearby Dallas ISD, another large urban district that also has about 85 percent economically disadvantaged students.
Ramos was first elected to the school board in 2013.
Within a few years, the district had embraced “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies rooted in critical race theory.
He was re-elected to a third term in May 2021, running unopposed.
Soon after, citizens began to push back in earnest against the district’s racially divisive policies, joining parents across the state and nation protesting “woke” identity politics in schools.
Faced with increasing public opposition, the district decided last week to ban the public from its controversial Racial Equity Committee meetings.
In January, FWISD Superintendent Kent Scribner announced he’s leaving when his contract expires in 2024. Scribner is also a proponent of CRT-based policies. In his resignation letter, Scribner said he was “most proud” of the district’s “work in the area of racial equity.”
At FWISD’s next board meeting on March 22, trustees may vote to add a special election for Ramos’s District 1 seat to the May 7 ballot. A special election to replace the late District 4 trustee Daphne Brookins is already on the ballot.
