Texas school board member faces calls to resign after his comments linking failing schools to Black teachers

Cy-Fair Independent School District board member Scott Henry this week is facing calls to resign after he linked schools' dropout rates with the number of Black teachers they hire.

During a meeting on Monday, Henry criticized a report that faulted the district for not doing enough to hire a more diverse faculty, and the report said that lack of diversity was harmful to students' learning experiences.

"Cy-Fair has what? 13% black teachers?" Henry said, according to local news station KHOU. "Houston ISD is 36%. Their dropout rate is 4%. I don’t want to be 4%. I don’t want to be HISD. I want to be a shining example. I want to be the district standard."

Henry's comments drew a swift rebuke from many other Texas officials, including Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who called for his resignation.

"Divisiveness and racism are what’s hurting our students," she wrote on Twitter. "Not diversity. Resign."

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Henry, however, is now arguing that his words are being "twisted" and that he did not intend to imply that schools were performing poorly due to Black teachers.

Rather, he says, he was trying to demonstrate that simply having a diverse faculty did not lead to higher quality education, and he faulted the diversity report for supposedly listing lack of diversity as "the only metric" for determining students' quality of education.

However, NBC News reporter Mike Hixenbaugh points out that the report does not actually list faculty diversity as the lone factor in schools' success.

Watch the video below.

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