When the Gablers’ protégé, Neal Frey, gained control of Educational Research Analysts…he took a different approach. Grace journeys to Longview, Texas to meet the man himself and witness the last vestige of the Gablers’ enterprise.
When the Gablers’ protégé, Neal Frey, gained control of Educational Research Analysts…he took a different approach. Grace journeys to Longview, Texas to meet the man himself and witness the last vestige of the Gablers’ enterprise.
Teaching Texas
Chapter 3: The Pilgrimage to Longview
Transcript
Navigation system:
In a quarter mile you will arrive at your destination.
Grace:
Okay.
GRACE
At the end of June, my producer Sara and I flew to Texas. I nearly missed the flight. We landed late, the car rental pickup took well over an hour. And this meant that when we finally started driving east out of Dallas, we were running behind schedule.
[tape of Grace and Sara in the car plays quietly underneath]
Along the way we stopped at a Bucees so I could change out of my plane clothes and into something more presentable. Sara, smartly, got a sandwich. I got another cup of coffee and we kept driving.
We were on our way to Longview, Texas. An old oil town about two and a half hours outside of Dallas. Sara helped me navigate and prep for our interview while I tried to get comfortable with the fact that the going speed seems to be about 85 mph.
Oh, and it was well over a hundred degrees.
Navigation system:
You have arrived.
As we pulled off the highway and wound through the streets of Longview, we finally caught sight of the derelict stripmall we’d come all this way to find.
Grace:
Oh my god that’s his bright yellow car. And it's like that like banana cream color. Alrighty, here we go. Okay.
GRACE:
The unmarked door was on the side of the building.
[Grace knocks]
GRACE:
We yanked it open and were immediately facing a staircase with an American Flag at the top. The door at the top of the steps had a little paper sign that said “Educational Research Analysts.”
Grace:
Hi, I'm Grace.
Judy Frey:
You're Grace. I'm Judy.
Grace:
Judy.
Sara:
I'm Sara.
Judy:
Sara. Hi.
Sara:
Nice to meet you.
Judy:
Good to meet you.
Grace:
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
Judy:
Oh, you're welcome. Let me get, uh, you some cold water.
Grace:
Oh, appreciate it.
GRACE:
Educational Research Analysts is the textbook review organization founded by Mel and Norma Gabler. As we entered, we were confronted with more thick, hot air. There was no AC in this office. Nor were there any windows. Instead, we were immediately absorbed into wall-to-wall dark wood paneling, orange carpet and fluorescent lighting. It was a little like going back in time.
Grace:
Oh thank you so much.
Judy:
You are welcome.
Sara:
Thank you.
Judy:
We’re sorry to make you exist in this kind of place.
Grace:
No no no!
Sara:
No, you’re good!
Grace:
It’s our delight.
GRACE:
Judy Frey grabbed us each a bottle of water from a small break room where her son sat on an old desktop computer, looking at what I imagine was a textbook on his screen. He didn’t turn to acknowledge us at any point. And that’s not because there was a lot going on. Or that there was a constant flood of people in and out of this place. It felt deserted, obscure, and just about as unlikely as the Gablers’ whole story itself.
And then, the man we’d come to see rounded the corner.
Dressed in a sharp button down shirt, cufflinks and thick black-rimmed glasses, with eyebrows that stuck several inches off his face, pushing a walker was Neal Frey, the acetic textbook analyst.
From Wonder Media Network, I’m Grace Lynch and this is Teaching Texas, episode three.
Our interview with Neal got off to a weird start. We followed Judy to the end of a long hallway to Neal’s office. The room was full of several fans blasting at full volume – completely ruining our audio recording. I sat there, panicked, fearing we’d walk away from this journey without any usable tape. Judy settled into a seat against the wall perpendicular to Neal’s desk. She’d sit there, pretty silently, for the duration of our stay.
Neal shuffled into the room, and without giving us a second to insert ourselves, started rustling through papers on his desk, talking a mile a minute.
[Neal Frey begins speaking unintelligibly underneath]
His style of speech is a bit of an audio producer’s nightmare. He mumbles mostly, then suddenly shouts, cackles and goes back to mumbling. And then, as if the room needed one more element of chaos, the fluorescent lights started flickering overhead. It was like a high school theater production trying to infuse a scene with drama. It was that over the top and absurd.
After about 20 minutes of this insanity – miraculously – the room short-circuited. The main fans stopped working. Only a weak one in the hall remained. Suddenly, I could hear Neal. And he started letting me ask questions.
As the most loyal of the Gablers’ disciples, I was keen to know what Neal thought of them.
Neal Frey:
Gablers were not highly educated, but they were very astute, smart, natively intelligent people. They always thought that education would have ruined them. And that might be true if they had gone with education.But they were very, very astute. We always-we were philosophically always compatible.
GRACE:
Unlike the Gablers, Neal graduated college. He had a masters degree and pursued a PhD for a time, but didn’t complete it. He taught at the college level for several years before a mentor connected him with Gablers.
Still, Neal and the Gablers were ideologically compatible. Their worth ethic was on par too.
Neal Frey:
I'm, I’m a detailed fanatic, hyper perfectionist. How are you gonna gain the respect? One way. prove several times that you have, you have mastered detail, mastered the detail, both of the textbook approval process and of textbook content as well as, or better than they have. And once you prove that two or three times, and it's an airtight case, they'll back off and respect you. But if you make it-it's better, it's better not to site one, not to cite 10 factual errors than cite nine right when they have one wrong, cause they'll crucify you. If they find one thing wrong, they'll crucify and you've lost your credibility. It's a, a very deadly process to be a Christian conservative in these, in these secular liberal circles.
GRACE:
It’s worth taking a second to note that Neal’s a detail fanatic about all sorts of things, not just textbooks. Neal fasts five days out of the week. Monday through Friday. No food! Water, yeah, but nothing else. Saturday he eats 40 prunes, that’s 4-0 prunes, and then eats normally for the rest of Saturday and Sunday. Mondays, he said, are typically for rest. It’s also the day the holy spirit speaks to him. Neal graciously made an exception for us and took our meeting on a Monday.
Neal does this extreme form of fasting because he believes it stimulates stem cell regeneration and will reverse the aging process. He intends to live to be 126. He’s currently 78.
While that would be reason enough alone to try and interview him, the reason we drove to this oven of an office is because Neal represents the last vestige of the Gablers enterprise. And lucky for us, he was ready to talk about it.
Neal Frey:
I will say this on the factual errors, Gablers never said they found those factual errors. Publishers knew where they were coming from. But a lot of, a lot of the public thought that Mel and Norma Gabler sitting at the kitchen table found these factual errors. And that is laughable. The Gablers never said they found them. Our organization found them, but I was perfectly happy, I mean, to let them get the credit for it. I never envied them at all. Judy will tell you. In fact, I I thought it was sort of humorous because some people who should have known better thought that Gablers were finding factual errors themselves. I've never told anybody else this. We were always, we were always so compatible. We always got along really well together. I never, I'd never, never begrudged-never begrudged them getting credit for it. I liked them. Uh, it helped the organization. Uh, but like I say, when publishers would come down here, uh, Mrs. Gabler would sit here but I did all the talking.
GRACE:
In all my research into the Gablers, I’ve never seen Neal given credit for finding the bulk of the errors. We obviously can’t ask the Gablers about it themselves. But when I asked Jim about his parents’ work, he said he remembered his dad going line by line through the books. But that would have been before Neal joined the team. So this remains unconfirmed. Yet after talking to Neal, I’m inclined to believe it. The Gablers’ rise has always been a surreal story. Trying to figure out how these two people, with no higher education, would have been able to fact-check textbooks at this level has confounded not only me, but textbook editors and education professionals alike. It would make a whole lot of sense for there to be another player in the story. Someone who had a bit more formal training.
I think there’s a chance Neal was the brains behind the operation. Mel was the visionary, and Norma, the mouthpiece. Neal clearly revered Mel. Norma, however ,I got the sense may have rubbed him the wrong way.
Neal Frey:
There were two sides to Norma Gabler. One of them was the gracious side. The other side was a bitchy side. I see both sides. Not many people have.
GRACE:
I was pretty stunned when Neal called Norma a bitch in front of us. And that depiction is hard to square with her TV persona. Perhaps the two were just oil and water. We know that Norma was outspoken and media savvy. Neal’s the total opposite. So unsurprisingly, when age caught up with the Gablers and Neal took over Educational Research Analysts, he took a different approach.
Dan Quinn was monitoring the State Board of Education for Texas Freedom Network when Neal took over for the Gablers.
Dan Quinn:
He's a little bit quieter. He typically doesn't, or didn't show up at state board meetings, uh, the way the Gablers did. The Gablers would come and publicly testify. It was a big deal. Um, Neal stayed in the background. But by the time Neal took over the organization, the religious right faction on the board that had been growing since the early nineties had reached its peak. All Neal had to do was sit down with some of the religious right members of the board and the background and feed them what he wanted them to do.
GRACE:
Neal was grandfathered into a system that allowed him to marionette from the background. Which is what Neal felt the Gablers should have been doing all along.
Neal Frey:
About the only thing we ever disagreed with was, was this. They wanted to motivate the mom and pop to the kitchen table. My viewpoint was the bottom 90% don't matter. If you reach the 10% elite, the 90% will follow. Now they didn't buy that.
GRACE:
Neal’s approach – which relied on influencing those with power rather than mobilizing the people – was an effective pivot for Educational Research Analysts for a couple of reasons.
The first is that things had gotten a bit crowded in the public square. In the early days of the textbook hearings the Gablers attended, you could only speak if you were in opposition to the book in question. You could not speak in favor of the book. The reason being, trying to get the list narrowed down to just five was hard. The focus of these meetings was to find reasons to eliminate the books. That was the pressing need. That’s one of those things that seems pretty innocent on its own, but it’s a contributing factor to the Gablers ability to become so influential. There was only opposition. No balancing view point. It's as if the Gablers were the sole constituency. The only opinion the Board ever needed to consider.
But in 1983, that rule finally changed. A progressive lobbying group called People for the American Way drafted new language that would remove these restrictions on who could testify at public hearings. After years of campaigning, the board relented. People for the American Way, represented the first meaningful opposition to the Gablers.
While their balancing voice slowed the Gablers down, it certainly didn’t stop them. Plenty of their biggest moments, many of which we covered in our last episode, happened well after People for the American Way was established.
Then, In the mid nineties, another balancing force arrived on the scene: Texas Freedom Network. Here’s Carisa Lopez, their current senior political director.
Carisa Lopez:
We were founded in 1995 by Cecil Richards when she was at a state board of education meeting, they were talking about health textbooks and she wrote a note to her friend that said, it's worse than I imagined, and then she founded TFN.
GRACE:
Texas Freedom Network saw a huge issue with the State Board of Education. Aside from a group of highly-animated citizens, no one really knew what was going on with the Board. And that’s a bit by design.
In most states, similar boards or groups that deal with school curriculum are appointed positions. So they’re not subject to political pressures. But that’s not the case in Texas.
And these more obscure elected positions don’t receive a lot of attention. I had Dan break it down for me:
Dan Quinn:
So there's 15 districts, they're elected in partisan elections. So there's 31 senate districts in the state, but only 15 state board seats. So they're more than twice the size of senate districts. Some are sprawling over dozens and dozens of counties. They're so large that to be able to communicate with voters during an election would just cost an enormous amount of money. Most people in Texas, particularly at that time, if they knew there was a state board of education, they weren't sure what it did. They almost certainly didn't know who their state board member was.
GRACE:
Enter: Texas Freedom Network. Carisa told me this public outreach is really TFN’s primary objective:
Carisa Lopez:
We see our job is to make the public aware of what's happening at the SBOE because oftentimes it is very much overlooked, right? It is a body that a lot of people don't pay attention to. The election might be at the top of someone’s ballot but they don’t know who that person is. It also is kind of by design, the board is-the, being an SBOE member is an unpaid position. They have no staff, right. And so it's not a very high profile position.
GRACE:
These positions might not be high profile, but they are very powerful. Because these members aren’t paid they — reasonably — cannot dedicate all of their time to this work. Even if it is incredibly important work. So they rely heavily on advisors they trust. People like Neal.
If you remember in our last episode, Dan told us about how in 2004, publishers self-censored their health textbook to avoid any mentions of contraception or LGBTQ people. Well, it turns out the Texas State Board of Education wanted even further revisions. And Neal was behind it.
Dan Quinn:
So at the very last meeting, the final adoption, final approval, one of the religious right board members, uh, raised objections to how the health textbooks, uh, talked about marriage. She said they have all of these asexual stealth phrases, you know, marriage partners, couples. She says, it's a man and woman. These textbooks should make clear that under Texas law marriage is between a man and a woman.
GRACE:
So words like “couple” and “partners” were too ambiguous. The board wanted language that specifically excluded LGBTQ people.
Dan Quinn:
Then she went further. Textbooks should be talking about homosexuality in this way. Basically she wanted the, the passages in the textbooks to essentially say: gay people there's just something wrong with 'em. They’re asocial. They're-they have all of the- they're alcoholics, they're drug addicts, they're diseased. Uh, and you know, all of us are sitting in the audience thinking, “what in God's name is going on here?” aA the very last meeting, she brings this up. Te Democrats were in incensed by this. They were like, “how could you possibly bring that up? Where in the world did you get this from?” Neal Frey.
GRACE:
That board member Dan is referring to is Terri Leo. Neal brought her up a lot during our visit. They’re very politically aligned. He also mentioned a large file of documents he’d sent her over the years.
Neal Frey:
This long file of everything I ever sent Terri…
GRACE:
Dan’s very familiar with these documents Neal sent Terri.
Dan Quinn:
So he had fed her the sheet. We have it, or had it, on file for many years. We got a copy of the sheet that he had provided. It was vile all the way through. Ultimately the publishers resisted making most of the changes, but they did go back and more explicitly defined marriage as a union of one man and one woman.
GRACE:
Up to this point we’ve really only zeroed in on how the Gablers, and now Neal, affected textbook content and selection. For good reason. That’s how this whole thing got started. But there’s another lever of control that the board can pull that is just as important, if not more so: the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. Or, TEKS.
Carisa Lopez:
The state board of education is solely responsible for creating curriculum standards in Texas.
GRACE:
Carisa Lopez again.
Carisa Lopez:
There's a lot of players in this, but ultimately the state board of education themselves, the individual board members can put or remove anything they want in these standards, and then textbook publishers create textbooks based on those standards, right?
GRACE:
Back in the 1980s, there was a nationwide movement to create curriculum standards. And Texas was part of that. First, they made what they called the “Essential Elements” which outlined what a child should learn by the end of any given school year. This also made it possible for the State Board to approve more textbooks – up from 5 to 8. The logic was, more books could be acceptable if there were stronger standards in general.
Then in the late 90s, the process evolved even further. And that’s how we arrived at the TEKS.
David Anderson:
In 1995, when the education code was rewritten under, under the leadership of the I Senator bill Ratliff, [start to fade down, Grace comes in over him]
GRACE:
That’s David Anderson. Our Texas textbook industry aficionado.
David Anderson:
Texas essential knowledge and skills will tell teachers and parents what students should know and be able to do in any grade or subject or high school course. From there, you would build a state assessment that would reflect those standards, build it within the standards, and you would create an instructional materials review process that said, if these are the standards for student learning, this is what we wanna see in the books.
GRACE:
When Texas passed the TEKS in ‘97, suddenly there was no limit on the number of textbooks that could be adopted. While that might seem like Texas letting publishers off the hook, David confirmed for me that it actually had the opposite effect.
David Anderson:
And I can cite a specific example. One company, the Scott Forsman Company, submitted a, a US history book. And in the teacher's edition, they overprinted the state standards, the, the, in those days it was the essential elements that described what opportunities the teacher would present the students in that class.
GRACE:
So not only are publishers writing their books to meet the Texas standards, they’re including guides in the Teacher’s edition that illustrate just how precisely their book matches the TEKS.
David Anderson:
That kick-started the industry, basically the cottage industry, for correlations in Texas, and that very next year, almost every significant publisher in Texas developed a correlation that showed how, how their program matched those essential elements.
GRACE:
To recap, the Texas State Board of Education creates these curriculum standards called TEKS. And textbook publishers then write their books specifically to meet the TEKS. Their selling point, as David describes, is being able to illustrate their adherence to the Texas standards. So if you can believe it, the adoption of TEKS made textbook publishers even more hamstrung to delivering Texas-specific materials.
Now, the State Board of Education doesn’t create these standards from scratch. They have what they call “working groups” of teachers, community members and subject matter experts who compile suggested drafts. There’s opportunities for public comment, and the two bodies go back and forth making revisions. That is, until the very end of the process when the board votes to adopt the TEKS. At that point, with no further review or public comment available, board members can, with just a simple majority, make amendments.
So that’s why the board is so powerful. Because despite the fact that there’s no requirement for them to have any background in education, they get to unilaterally change the curriculum standards if they want. So that means publishers care a lot about what these folks have to say. And they care even more about the people who are feeding them those opinions.
Neal Frey:
Uh, acouple years ago anow retired texas sales rep, I know him well, and, and the retired editor of a major publisher, one of the major publishers, asked if they come visit us in this office. And so they came out from McKinney and wherever the other place was to talk to a bit. They used to let us see the pre publication drafts ad I would hand annotate stuff in the draft before it went to the press.
GRACE:
When Neal told me that people from major publishers were asking for his notes on unpublished drafts of textbooks…I think I kind of blacked out. Which honestly, could have been from the heat and the fact that I’d officially sweat through my pants at this point and was fully merging with the seat itself. I just couldn’t imagine publishing titans driving all the way to this nondescript strip mall and sitting in this room with no windows and no AC. To speak, not with academics or scholars, but with Neal freaking Frey. A non-profit textbook reviewer and ideologue. It felt absolutely ridiculous. So ridiculous in fact, that once I returned home and kind of got my bearings, I had to ask Dan if what Neal said was actually true. There’s just no way that’s real…right?
Dan Quinn:
Oh yes. The pilgrimage to Longview.
GRACE:
Dan immediately knew what I was talking about.
Dan Quinn:
So they would bring passages and they'd, uh, run them by the Gablers or, or by Neal. “Are you okay with this? Do you have any objections to it? Do we need to make any changes? You don't have objections to it?” I can tell you they never did that with the Texas Freedom Network, but they sure did with the Gablers. Now we at TFN did meet with publishers, but that was on our request.
GRACE:
So publishers would willingly make the pilgrimage to Longview, but wouldn’t sit down with other activists, like Texas Freedom Network, unless provoked. This was a known and accepted part of the textbook publishing industry.
One of the most common questions publishers would pose to Neal during these trips was something we’d been wondering about ourselves: how are you finding all these errors?
Neal Frey:
And I said, “if I, if I promise to tell you the truth, do you promise to believe me?” “Yeah.” “I pray about it. and the holy spirit shows me the errors.” And you could tell from the looks that one of them believed the word of that. Uh, but it's, it's true.
GRACE:
Neal prays and the holy spirit shows him the errors. Not exactly a replicable process. When I spoke with Jim Gabler about his parents, he said that they saw their work as a ministry. And I see how that connects to Neal’s approach. Whether they’re divinely inspired or not, the fact that Neal keeps finding these errors is what’s, against all odds, kept him a figure of authority in the field.
And Neal’s really proud of that.
Neal Frey:
Why should people take our word over theirs? They're the professionals. Our answer is because we found 25, 30, 35 factual errors in a book that you missed. So that proves that we read the book better than you did, and they should take our word rather than theirs. There's no answer to that. You didn't read the book or you're ignorant. Take your pick. Cause we know, and to tell the truth, I say, to tell the truth, yes, I know the subject better than they do. I really do. These people are public school educated and the editor, the question, “do editors do this on purpose? Or are they, are they, are they miseducated?” Uh, and much of the time is, they're miseducated. They don't know the other side.
GRACE:
“The other side” Neal is referring to, are the histories and sources he’s found persuasive over the years.
The walls of Neal’s office were covered in thick anthologies like: Americana Encyclopedia, Britannica, World Books. All of them brown, just like the wood paneling, with light gold lettering. They were all in a perfect row except for one, which was oddly sideways. Neal said a lot of these books pre-date the Civil War. Based on the looks of it — and the relative age of some of the other items in the room — I believe it. These books are also where he’s getting a lot of his information.
So Neal’s lens for finding errors is based on divine inspiration, hundred-year-old sources and of course, his conservative Christian morality. As a reminder, he’s the one who made it so that health books in the early aughts had to say “man and woman” instead of “married partners.”
On the Christian morality front, Neal’s not all that different from the Gablers. But the way he talks about these issues is a lot more fire and brimstone.
Neal Frey:
Texas shouldn't have to pay for moral depravity with public funds, that's moral depravity. Uh, if they're gonna try to change students' lifestyles, uh, pressure them to enter into shutting them up if they're opposed to LGBT stuff, [start to fade out, continue quietly under Grace]
GRACE:
That’s a homophobic rant Neal went on in front of me and my producer, Sara. Pretty unprompted too, I might add. I’m not going to play the whole thing because it’s cruel and doesn’t reflect the ethics of our network. However, this tirade illuminated the ideology behind Neal’s work. Because when I pushed Neal on his view, he gave an interesting answer.
Grace:
But to be fair, that's your view of moral depravity, right? Someone could have a different–
Neal Frey:
That's from my view, it's biblical.
Grace:
And if someone doesn't live by the Christian Bible,
Neal Frey:
Well, they, they're entitled to their beliefs, but not, but not, not to generate them with public funds.
GRACE:
The first thing that jumped out to me was referring to the Bible as a sort of neutral source of information. It’s not my point of view, it’s the Bible’s! As if the Bible is a sort of objective historical document and not in fact a religious text. Mel and Norma did this a lot too. Joan chronicled in her book: how they’d often identify errors and provide “the Holy Bible” as their source for the fact-check.
Of course, Educational Research Analysts aren’t the only folks suggesting the Bible is a neutral guide to public life. That idea is actually a foundational element of the religious and political ideology of something called Christian Nationalism.
I want to introduce you now to David Brockman. He’s the nonresident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Religion and Public Policy. David has written extensively about the rise of Christian Nationalism in America.
David Brockman:
Christian nationalism holds that the, the founders, the, the persons responsible for the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, um, intended for the United States to be an explicitly Christian nation governed by Bible-based laws.
GRACE:
Christian Nationalism used to be more of a fringe faction of the GOP. Recently in American politics, it’s a lot more prevalent. But it’s often presented in veiled language.
David Brockman:
The Christian nationalist agenda has been pushed without explicitly talking about the, the Bible or Christianity or these, say religious exemptions, are couched as protecting religion or sincerely held belief. But really many of these laws are coming from Christian conservatives who are attempting to push their particular beliefs on the rest of the populations.
GRACE:
If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the exact playbook for the Gablers, Neal, and many other people you’ll meet in this show. Another important element of Christian Nationalism is the idea that America has strayed from its original biblical founding.
David Brockman:
There's a kind of, um, story, a narrative of decline. The nation started out as an explicitly Judeo-Christian nation, um, governed by Bible-based laws and policies and so forth and that we've drifted away from that over the years, particularly in the 20th century and particularly since, uh, the 1940s.
GRACE:
Which means Christian Nationalists also have to address who is responsible for this decline. The Gablers suspected Communists. And it’s very possible Neal agrees with that too. But when we talked to him, he put forward another culprit.
Neal Frey:
When it comes to changing students, values and behavior standards behind their parents back
Grace:
Why do you feel it's behind their parents’ back?
Neal Frey:
Because many times students are told not to tell your parents we're doing this. They're told to keep their parents in the dark because they know what will happen when the parents find out. It's deliberately, deliberately perverting them on the sly with their parents left in the dark. They know what they're doing.
Grace:
Who's the “they” in that sentence?
Neal Frey:
They is, is teachers that- the teacher- a lot, not just librarians, but including librarians, uh, those and, and teachers who come out of, out of education schools who are, who are, are taught to, to, to socialize children away from their parents' values, what they're taught at and- mainly what they're taught at home. It's, it's very diabolical. It's not, it's not accidental.
GRACE:
Teachers. The demonization of teachers feels like a departure from the Gablers. I certainly didn’t see this coming from Neal. And yet here he is, accusing them of what he called a “satanic agenda.”
And as I’m watching this hate pour out of Neal’s mouth I’m also realizing just how disheveled everything around me is.
When we walked into Educational Research Analysts, it was evidently in decay. There are whole rooms that clearly haven’t been used in years. Lots of empty shelves. Random books left in corners. It certainly didn’t look like the hub of productivity I’d read about. Looking at Neal sitting so low in his chair that his sternum barely cleared the desk, I could sense that Educational Research Analysts was on its last leg.
Neal Frey:
I'm having to sell off assets to keep us going here. And, uh, I've probably got enough, uh, to keep us going maybe three or four more years at the most. My prayer is this: Lord. Unlike men, You do not waste resources. Are you sure you squeezed the last drop of your investment out of, out of education research? I think he's saying no. Keep those newsletters coming. And I also say, Lord, you know, I can't do it myself. I must have Judy. I can't do it myself.
GRACE:
Neal admitted that he’d lost a lot of steam in the past few years. He claimed he was as mentally sharp as ever, but that physically he was slowing.
Neal Frey:
My youngest daughter and husband, they've offered to take us into their homes if and when we ever reach our dotage. So we don't have to worry about a nursing home. God forbid we should ever have to take them up on it.
GRACE:
This was the last thing I expected from this visit: Seeing Neal choke up while contemplating him and Judy aging and moving in with their daughter.
It dawned on me that Neal might be seeing this chapter of his life closing and thinking of this as one of the last — if not the last — interviews he ever gives. It’d make sense why he told us so much stuff he’d never admitted before. Like claiming he was the man behind the Gablers’ success all along. Or why he’d so quickly turned emotional when trying to accept that, what he believes is God’s calling for him, is coming to an end. Even though he’d said some pretty heinous things that afternoon, I felt for him in that moment when he teared up.
But he quickly got himself together. And returned to his faith in God. God would keep him going if he were meant to keep going.
Neal Frey:
My life, including this job, has been a series of implausible improbabilities. Educational Research Analysts is too implausible an organization to exist unless God were in it.
GRACE:
It’s worth repeating what Neal just said because I couldn’t help but smile the first time I heard it: Educational Research Analysts is too implausible an organization to exist unless God were in it.
I don’t know if I believe that God had a hand in creating Educational Research Analysts, but I can agree that it’s about as implausible of an organization as I can imagine.
As we closed, I asked Neal if he had any regrets. Anything he’d wished he’d accomplished. His answer? Evolution. He wanted textbooks in Texas to use a “two-model approach.” Meaning, including both creationism and evolution in textbooks. The courts said “no,” so Neal had a solution:
Neal Frey:
Hey look guys, we can't have a two model approach. Uh, but what we can have is, is discussion of naturalistic strengths and weaknesses and evolution, which do not imply scientific creationism, intelligent design, or young earth.
GRACE
Except, Neal could never get his fellow anti-evolutionists to stick to this script. They always brought arguments back to creationism. And Neal never felt like they executed their argument strategically enough.
I took a leap and asked Neal about someone in particular I thought he might be referring to.
Grace:
Don McLeroy, would he be someone who's struggled to make the argument from the perspective you are saying now?
Neal Frey:
Yeah, I think so. I think so. Don’s heart is in the right place. Uh, don't repeat this. Uh, but he, he, he is not politically sagacious. He can't see the political implications of this stuff.
GRACE
I gave Neal a knowing smile and motioned that we should probably get back on the road. Neal didn’t know this, but our next stop was Bryan, Texas to sit down with Don McLeroy himself.
Grace:
Well, thank you. for sharing so much with us today.
Neal Frey:
Sure.
Grace:
I really appreciate it.
Sara:
And for all these resources as well.
Grace:
Yes, this is great is really, really helpful. And it is okay if- I I'm gonna walk out of here with a big, big old stack of paper.
[slowly fade out]
Sara and I thanked Judy and Neal for their time. Judy, remember, had been sitting in the room with us, silently, the entire time. We peeled ourselves off our seats. Neal never broke a sweat. Judy, however, seemed desperate to go to a room with more fans. We slowly cobbled together the massive pile of news clippings and resource sheets that they’d kindly printed out for us and made our way back down the orange and brown hallway. Their son still didn’t turn his head.
Neal Frey:
Run along.
Grace:
Alrighty. Well sir, it was really lovely to meet you. Thank you so much.
Neal Frey:
I've told you two some things I've never said an interview.
Grace:
Well, I appreciate you telling it to us.
Judy Frey:
Can we get to hear it sometime?
Grace:
Oh, we can send it to you for sure.
The door closed behind us and we descended back down the steps and into our rental car. Cranked the AC and exhaled. We pulled back onto the road and headed southwest to meet the notorious evolution-skeptic, Don McLeroy.
Don McLeroy:
Guess who many explanations they have to explain evolution and how that happens. Zero. They have no evidence.
GRACE:
Next week on Teaching Texas, the creationist dentist who helmed the conservative christian majority on the State Board of Education.
Teaching Texas is created by me, Grace Lynch. It’s produced by myself and Adesuwa Agbonile. Our editor is Lindsey Kratochwill. Production assistance by Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer. Original theme music by Chelsea Daniel.