Friends:
This historic perspective on vouchers by Jaime Puente published on the Every Texan blog is a must-read. We must push back vigorously against this white supremacist agenda that is poised to be a major issue in the coming 88th Texas Legislative Session in January, 2023.
-Angela Valenzuela
Vouchers: The "Lost Cause" Fight of Our Generation
- JAIME PUENTE
- SEPTEMBER 22, 2022
- Every Texan blog Education, K-12 Public Education
Public education is the tie that binds our nation and state together. Despite
our history as Americans and Texans brutally divided by class, race, and
gender, educators have — since our earliest days — fostered the collective
identity and imagined community we call the United States. By instilling in
countless generations of increasingly diverse students the literature and
history behind the idea of “E Pluribus Unum,” public schools have made
out of many students one nation. But, we stand — once again — at a
crossroads.Texas public education and democracy itself are under attack,
and it is time to declare that we choose the unity of diversity built on the
bedrock of publicly-funded community schools.
Despite the overwhelming support for public schools and the consistent
rejection of vouchers, anti-democratic forces running our state are
promising legislation — the details of which are yet to be determined
— to undo generations of struggle that followed the Brown v. Board (1954)
decision. Almost 70 years ago, Texas governor Allan Shivers responded
to the Warren Court’s rejection of the separate but equal doctrine by
establishing the Texas Advisory Committee on Segregation in the Public
Schools.
The report and recommendations produced by the 40-person all-male
and all-white committee included classic neo-confederate claims of “states’
rights” and attempted to deny the supremacy of the federal government
in our society. The report also recommended policymakers create a system
to use public education dollars to pay private school tuition for white
supremacist parents who wanted to reject desegregation efforts at all costs
— just not at their own expense. That bill, like many to follow, died an
appropriate death before having the chance to become law.
Vouchers are, and have been, a favored tactic against efforts to make our
public education system more equitable. As early as 1955, the White
Nationalist movement that desired a whites-only United States used a
variety of tools to resist or delay desegregation. Vouchers were so common
among those grasping to save Jim Crow from drowning in the sea of history
that the same Supreme Court that decided Brown v. Board routinely
ruled against legislation intended to use public education dollars for private,
segregated schools.
Fast forward 60 years and the conditions are different, but the goals are
the same. In 2017, vouchers were cloaked under the moniker “Education
Savings Accounts.” This time, the forthcoming bill escalates recent
broadsides against the Long Civil Rights Movement. Attacks on ethnic studies
and the movement for culturally relevant curriculums along with AstroTurf
efforts targeting LGBTQ students and the books reflecting their experiences
have both been precursors to the push for vouchers. Each of these issues
is routinely cited as justification for the elimination of public schools in
our state.
Texans, Black, brown, and white, have a long history of working to remove
white supremacy and White Christian nationalism from our state’s public
education system. Generations of students, parents, teachers, and
communities risked their lives and their futures to fight for the gains vouchers
threaten today. Class sizes, culturally relevant curriculums, and the very
right to attend school and be the person you know yourself to be were all
achieved through the struggle and sacrifices of the Long Civil Rights
Movement. For example, before the Chicano Movement in the 1960s
and 1970s, Mexican American children in Texas were often beaten and
humiliated for speaking Spanish. Today, bans on young trans people
participating in sports prevent Texas children from being themselves.
Once again, justice- and equality-minded Texans, like our Black, brown,
and white forebears, are fighting the anti-American forces using children’s
lives to attack public education and the democracy it sustains.
The Brown decision was a wake-up call for the lost-cause folks. Angry
and defeated, some white Americans clung to the racial dictatorship that
excluded non-white Americans from opportunity and self-determination.
In towns and communities across the nation — not just in the South —
opponents of desegregation could be as violent and confrontational as
they could be unassuming and strategic. For example, while some white
Texans staged a full-on January 6th-style revolt in Mansfield, others such
as academics and politicians began advancing more subtle defenses of
white supremacy by attacking public education itself. If the government
was going to mandate desegregation in public schools, then public
education — like the federal government — was the problem. Nearly 70
years later, Texans are faced with another opportunity to reject the anti-
democratic forces of white supremacy threatening the hard-fought wins
of the Civil Rights Movement.
Not only are vouchers a direct attack on post-Civil Rights Movement America,
they are also just bad public policy. Texas funds public schools using
formulas based on student attendance, and siphoning students out of public
schools using vouchers hurts all students and threatens the entire system.
This model is especially harmful to rural Texans who rely on public schools
not only for their children’s education but also to serve as the institutional
core of their community. Schools in rural areas are often a hub for social,
recreational, and cultural life, and they play a vital role in improving community
health.
In a recent survey of private schools across Texas conducted by Every Texan,
we found vast stretches of the state where there are no private schools to
choose from, and in places like Midland and Odessa, the few private schools
that do exist could never support the growing student population. Across the
Midland/Odessa region, four private schools enroll a total of 2,162 students,
while the Midland and Ector County school districts serve more than 57,000
students. The 84 private schools sampled statewide could only serve one of
those districts.
The Texas public school population is 5.3 million students across 1,200 district
and almost 9,000 campuses. Private schools are not a choice for millions of
rural Texas students, and even in the cities where most private schools are
located, vouchers will lock lower-income students and families in perpetually
underfunded and under-resourced segregated schools.
In 2017, voucher legislation offered Texans a deal that would have taken 75%
of the previous year’s per-student formula funding from the system, 90% if the
student qualified for special education services. Texas, on average, spent
$9,065 per student in 2016, which means that the vouchers offered by SB 3
in the 85th regular session were only worth $8,229 ($9,876 when adjusted for
2022 inflation). Of the private schools we looked at, only 27 had tuition less
than what SB 3 would have offered, far out of reach of the 17 most elite
institutions that charge tuition three times that amount. The inaccessibility
of tuition does not even account for the cost of books and extracurricular
activities, or the “right” private schools will have to deny admission to
whomever they want. Vouchers are not serious public policy simply because
they have no chance at being, nor are they designed to be, an effective
education solution for every Texas student.
Private schools cannot accommodate the growing number of Texas children
who are constitutionally guaranteed a free, high-quality education. If
established under the current leadership, vouchers will be used to further
dismantle the hard-fought unity of diversity in Texas public schools. The same
forces pushing vouchers are also working to undermine our faith in the
American government by attacking our elections process. Protecting our
system of free public schools is essential to the survival of the American
experiment. The truths we hold to be self-evident and the values of E Pluribus
Unum, that generations of Texans made more equal and more reflective of
American diversity, are only possible if we fortify the citadel of public
education in the next Texas Legislative Session. Texans have rejected
vouchers for almost 70 years. Looking ahead to 2023, Texans must, once
more, reject vouchers and embrace public education.
