Foster: Push for school vouchers in Texas hits brick wall
Published 6:00 am Friday, November 3, 2023
“This year Gov. Greg Abbott made ‘school choice’ or vouchers, one of his top legislative priorities. He counted on riding the wave of ‘parental rights’ crusades into the national political arena. But Texans didn’t buy it.”
That’s the analysis of the Texas Observer in the July/August 2023 edition that examines the proponents of vouchers and the stubborn resistance trying to protect funding for public schools.
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Since 1995, the Coalition for Public School in Texas has organized about 50 groups representing millions of Texans. The diverse group includes the American Civil Liberties Union and the Texas Baptist Christian Rights Commission. For 28 years, including this year, they have beaten back efforts to privatize public schools by using a voucher system.
Abbott and the state Senate made multiple attempts to pass a voucher plan, even after the House voted not to use public dollars for private schools. Some of the governor’s schemes included efforts to buy off rural school districts and back-door deals to vote without any public hearing.
Those efforts were countered by thousands of emails and phone calls and dozens of opposition rallies featuring coalition members. But Abbott has called a special session to enact a voucher plan despite warnings that opposition to vouchers is only increasing among House members like Rep. Jay Dean of Longview.
The Observer interviewed two of the coalition leaders to explain the reasoning for opposing school vouchers, Charles Luke and the Rev. Charles Johnson. Here are excerpts from that published interview:
What are the conditions in rural schools in Texas?
Johnson: The big headline is we’re sitting on a $33 billion pot of money. And the governor wants the money to go to private schools instead of public schools. That’s the nub of the matter right there. So we didn’t get the classroom support we needed; we didn’t get the teacher salary increases, even though our classes are too full. And with teacher retention so low, you have fewer teachers working harder, longer hours without the fair pay associated with that extra effort. All this time, we have money in the bank; we have all these infrastructure needs, and we’re spending all our time using the voucher issue to hold hostage school finance.
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Luke: The other issue that hasn’t been talked about is that schools are trying to make it under double-digit inflation. Everything they’re purchasing, from construction materials to food for the cafeteria, has gone up since COVID. So they’re doing all of this without any extra money. At the same time, we’re limiting their ability to raise local taxes.
What should religious liberty look like in public schools?
Johnson: This is our number one objection to the privatization of public education. The public school is the laboratory of American democracy, where children learn to respect each other across all kinds of differences. And the protection of religious liberty is a fundamental human right. Government has no proper authority over religion. Period. Now our children can already express themselves religiously in schools in all kinds of ways. They can have a silent prayer. Religious organizations can meet on their own time before or after school or during lunch hour for a prayer group. Principals spend a good bit of their time protecting individual religious expressions of children and teaching tolerance to children for all the diverse expressions of religion. One of the foundational pieces of curriculum in a public school is tolerance, respect, and anti-bullying. It is the social and emotional support that children need to grow up into full adulthood. So, it is an egregious violation of human rights for public dollars to advance a religious doctrine.
Do you think the anti-”critical race theory” narrative is on its way out then?
Johnson: Absolutely. We’re addressing all these manufactured crises that don’t have any real direct existential connection to where Texans live and what they need: a great public school for ranch kids, roads to get products to market, broadband, water. All those things are very important. That’s what we ought to be addressing here in Austin.
Luke: I think the people of Texas are just worn out. They’re angry and frustrated, and then there’s this narrative that keeps on coming up, this baloney narrative that we don’t really see happening anywhere. After decades of being in the schools, I can count on one hand the number of times somebody taught something that shouldn’t be taught. But here’s the problem: A lot of these people, who are pushing this problem and pushing the privatization of public schools, haven’t been inside a public school in years. And every time I hit a pothole that didn’t get filled in because the state spent money fighting “critical race theory,” well, that’s a frustration for me.