Texas House Approves Multi-Billion-Dollar Discriminatory Voucher Scam—IDRA Statement on the Passage of Senate Bill 2

Today is a sad day for public education in Texas.

After 12 hours of intense debate, the Texas House granted preliminary approval to two of the most scrutinized bills of the legislative session: a $7.7 billion public school funding initiative and a contentious proposal to establish a pathway for families to utilize state tax dollars for private school tuition.

The Texas House's decision on the latter, Senate Bill 2, represents a significant triumph for prominent Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who have been trying to pass vouchers for so many years now. He even primaried anti-voucher republicans from last session, putting up candidates to take their place who of course were in the count in support of vouchers. 

It's noteworthy that an amendment that recommended that this decision be put to the voters got voted down. This is unfortunate since voters would surely have voted against this. Texas voters have a long history of opposing vouchers. Their only way was to railroad it, and they did. Ultimately, this is a billionaire-class agenda against everybody else, "come hell or high water."

Due to discrepancies between the Senate and House versions of the bill, it must return to the Senate for another vote, leaving Lt. Gov. Patrick and the Senate with a critical decision. If he decides to make any changes to the just-approved version, it'll have to go back to the House for further deliberation.

Alternatively, Patrick and the Senate may accept all changes made to the bill by the House in which case it will go directly to Gov. Greg Abbott for final approval.

The governor is clearly happy about this, but this is terrible news for public education. And ultimately, it's so sad that they are undermining our democracy. I think of all the many small Texas towns that are already stretched for funds but whose communities' lives circle around that of the school and how they will be adversely impacted by this decision. 

This is a betrayal of theirs, and everybody's, trust.  IDRA provides guidance on next steps for the advocacy community below. Remember, we do have a vote, and it's not a good thing to vote to undermine public education, our "laboratories for democracy," as the late John Dewey once eloquently phrased it. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Texas House Approves Multi-Billion-Dollar Discriminatory Voucher Scam  IDRA Statement on the Passage of Senate Bill 2

Today, the Texas House passed Senate Bill 2, a $10 billion voucher bill that would threaten resources for the public schools that serve 5.5 million Texas children.    SB 2 vouchers would support private school costs for a small number of families, with very few requirements for public accountability and transparency.  Public schools serve children of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, abilities, immigrant students, emergent bilingual learners, and students from rural, urban and suburban communities.   But SB 2 would send public money to private schools that could refuse to admit students because of their disability, religion, sexual orientation or simply because they or their family are “not a good fit.”   Some Texas lawmakers continue to do the dastardly dance of the Texas three-step: defunding, demonizing and privatizing our public schools.  But Texas needs to strengthen our public schools, not weaken them, to ensure every child has a fair shot at a quality education. State proposals like House Bill 2, which also passed the House today, will be immediately undercut by this costly voucher program. We will never stop demanding investments that strengthen public schools for all students. Call to Action: Senate Bill 2 is not law unless it passes a few more hurdles. The measure will now go to a conference committee, where legislators from both chambers will finalize the specifics of the bill. Stay tuned! Once the conference committee members are announced, we will let you know how to contact them.

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IDRA is an independent, non-profit organization. Our mission is to achieve equal educational opportunity for every child through strong public schools that prepare all students to access and succeed in college. Reach Out To Us

Greg Abbott Failed to Persuade Lawmakers on School Vouchers. Now He’s Threatening Them. | Texas Monthly

Gov. Greg Abbott is desperate and going against the public will. He has just called a fourth special session of the legislature to both pass vouchers and his racial profiling bill to beat up on immigrants and asylum seekers with penalties that will result in eye-popping profits for the prison-industrial complex.

As you can see in this October 4, 2023 piece by Alexandra Samuels in the Texas Monthly, he's been bullying members of his own party to accomplish this. Vouchers not only represent horrible, self-serving, de-democratizing policy, but is not all research-based. Here is but one policy brief that is based exclusively on peer-reviewed research that says as much: Will School Vouchers Benefit Low-Income Families? Assessing the Evidence," by Jabbar, H., Holme, J., Lemke, M., LeClair, Sanchez, J., Torres, E.M. & Pernetti, M. (March, 2023).

Gov. Abbott isn't interested in this research as he is party, like Florida governor Ron DeSantis, to an extremist agenda for our country from which he will surely profit where public education, environmental protections, public lands, and so on, are at enormous risk. Moreover, as cited below, he masquerades his false agenda as an "ethical" response to "right-wing outrage over alleged “woke” public school administrators teaching kids about sex and racism, public school administrators."

If elections this week are any indication—and they are—this characterization of both public schools is wildly off base. For example, read about results of school board elections where far-right Moms For Liberty candidates overwhelmingly flopped per the following news items:

Moms for Liberty and the ‘parental rights’ agenda flopped in this week’s elections

On Tuesday, Voters Rejected Moms for Liberty and Its Agenda of Cruelty and Hate

Texans and Americans, generally, are wisening up to these well-heeled, anti-democratic, white supremacist, fascist organizations, thankfully, as they should. 

Do always take a close look at that glossy flyer in your mailbox and do your research before voting. Organizations like Moms for Liberty, Right Turn, and America First—the latter of which has a notoriously anti-Semitic history that you can read about in The Atlantic—are anathema to democracy.

All told, Senate Bill 1 is moving quickly in this fourth-called special session of the Texas State Legislature. 

Do not be deceived by phrases like "education freedom" or "education savings accounts" as these are euphemisms for school vouchers. This is nothing more than taking our hard-earned, taxpayer dollars and diverting them to private schools that will seriously damage an already under-funded public education system and diverting these dollars into private schools that actually do indoctrinate and are not at all accountable to the public in the way that elected school boards are. Hence, a loss of governance with public dollars!

Plus, there's nothing holding back these schools from raising their private school tuitions meaning that these schools will segregate by class—and because class and race overlap, racial segregation will increase, as well. 

As for rural education, the price that rural schools will pay should SB 1 become law, is both declining funding and opportunity, considering that private schools mostly do not exist in rural communities—Tyler, Texas, notwithstanding.

Go to this link if you want to know who represents you in the Texas State Legislature so that you can reach out to them as soon as possible.

-Angela Valenzuela

Greg Abbott Failed to Persuade Lawmakers on School Vouchers. Now He’s Threatening Them.

 

Ahead of a special legislative session, the governor has implied there will be political consequences for those who get in his way.

by Alexandra Samuels | October 4, 2023 | Texas Monthly 

Governor Greg Abbott on September 9, 2023.

Vasha Hunt/AP

After a busy legislative session in Austin, Travis Clardy was ready for a lazy Saturday morning. It was mid-June, and the Republican state representative was finally back home in Nacogdoches, sipping coffee on the balcony of his downtown loft and watching his constituents amble about El Camino Real de los Tejas, a.k.a. Main Street, the central artery of the East Texas city. He had all but forgotten that one of his bills, regarding occupational licensing, remained unsigned on Governor Greg Abbott’s desk. Traditionally, the governor’s approval is automatic for minor proposals such as his that pass with overwhelming bipartisan support.

Then Clardy’s phone began to ring. A staffer for the governor was on the line, telling him Abbott was going to veto the representative’s bill, which would’ve made continuing education programs for state-certified fire alarm technicians mandatory rather than voluntary. The governor’s staffer explained that the bill, in Abbott’s estimation, presented an unjustified obstacle to maintaining an occupational license. But those qualms, Clardy said, could’ve been fixed in a matter of minutes during the session. “If that had been a concern,” he recalled asking, “why am I hearing about this now, after he’s already signed the veto?” The answer became clear to Clardy later, when Abbott published a missive explaining his decision. In the second paragraph of the letter, Abbott wrote: “This bill can be reconsidered at a future special session only after education freedom is passed.”

Texas almost approved a school voucher program in the 1950s – to avoid desegregation, by Camille Phillips, Texas Public Radio

Drawing on Texas' own history surrounding vouchers, this piece is a good recounting of the motives behind Gov. Abbott's pro-voucher agenda despite evidence to the contrary as expressed herein:

It's clear that vouchers amount to a conservative agenda to divert hard-earned taxpayer dollars to private schools that—despite what proponents say—will still not be economically viable for low income families, especially since private schools are expensive, ranging in costs from $25-40K annually. Plus, as my colleague, Dr. Huriya Jabbar indicates, research overwhelmingly points in the direction of school choice exacerbating the very economic and racial/ethnic segregation that proponents falsely claim is mitigated by vouchers, ESAs, and charter schools. 

An apt sociological dictum applies quite well here: That which is good for the individual is not necessarily that which is good for the collective. And school vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs) are terrible news for public education that the rights, including Gov. Abbott, have worked tirelessly to demonize, despite clear evidence to the contrary that Texas families with children in public schools strongly support public education. Accordingly, read "Connected Through Our Schools" [Report] on Strong Public Support for Public Education in Texas."

There is no independent funding source for either vouchers, charter schools, or educational savings accounts. All of it comes from the same bucket of money that we all, with our taxes, pay into.

Jaime Puente, with Every Texan, is very much on point on how Abbott's agenda is a fool's errand backed up by a large body of evidence. Accordingly, also read Puente's "Vouchers: The 'Lost Cause' Fight of our Generation," by Jaime Puente, as well as a recent, up-to-date piece authored by Dr. Huriya Jabbar et al. titled, "Will School Vouchers Benefit Low-Income Families? Assessing the Evidence."

Texans, let's not be fools. We must continue to oppose vouchers. Vouchers are tantamount to a robbing the public purse to subsidize the education of already wealthy or economically solvent parents and families. In short, vouchers and ESAs are  a rip off for the vast majority of Texans.

Read the Texas Public Radio (TPR) article below or listen to it here on TPR.

-Angela Valenzuela

Texas almost approved a school voucher program in the 1950s – to avoid desegregation.

Texas Public Radio | By Camille Phillips

Published May 11, 2023 at 5:33 PM CDT

Courtesy

/

UNT Libraries Special Collections

Henry B. Gonzalez filibustered for hours to block a vote on racial segregation bills on the floor of the Texas Senate in 1957.

Republican lawmakers in Texas have made school vouchers a priority during the most recent legislative session, and their prize bill will likely cross a pivotal hurdle next week.

On Monday, May 15, the House Education Committee will discuss passing Senate bill 8 on to the full chamber for a vote. The bill would essentially allow families to use public funds for private school tuition.

Controversial since their inception, school vouchers have been around in the U.S. since at least the 1950s, when Southern states used them as a tool to circumvent desegregation.

Texas nearly joined them.

Segregation vouchers

In 1957,the Texas House approved a bill that would have given any family that withdrew their child from an integrated school a “tuition grant” to attend a private school.

The bill was part of a package of legislation sent to the state Senate with one goal: keeping schools segregated by race.

According to historian Gregg Michel with the University of Texas at San Antonio, Southern states across the country passed similar bill packages after the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

“Taken together, they all were designed to really thwart Brown,” Michel said, “which is why by ten years after Brown, something like 1% or 2% of schools had made progress towards desegregation.”

Michel said keeping schools separate but equal was part of the Texas Democratic Party’s platform in the mid-’50s (Democrats were in power at the time). In 1956, Gov. Allan Shiverssent Texas Rangers to Mansfield, Texas, to block the court-ordered integration of a high school there.

“If the executive of the state is not going to enforce it, that creates a problem on the ground,” Michel said. “And so, there was very little political will.”

Shivers also appointed a committee tocompile a report on ways to avoid desegregation; many of their ideas were included in the package of segregation bills passed by the Texas House in 1957.

But a small group of state senators managed to derail the passage of most of the segregation bills — including the voucher proposal.

San Antonio’s Henry B. Gonzalez, Texas’s first Latino state senator, and Laredo’s Abraham “Chick” Kazen, the son of Lebanese immigrants,led the group in a 36-hour filibuster.

“A remarkable, at the time longest ever, filibuster on the floor of the Senate,” Michel said. “Gonzalez was particularly effective and spoke for more than 20 hours himself. The senators who supported the segregationist laws sought for ways to stop the filibuster, and they couldn't do it. And they eventually negotiated it and caved.”

1957 Filibuster. Filmed by WBAP-TV in Fort Worth, Provided by UNT Libraries Special Collections

Modern race-based arguments

Decades later, voucher supporters’ arguments have flipped. Instead of helping white students leave an integrated public school, modern private school choice advocates like Derrell Bradford say vouchers give students of color access to private schools that can better meet their needs.

“I went to half of middle school and all of high school at (a private) all-boys day school on a scholarship, and it was the most important thing that ever happened to me,” said Bradford, president of 50 CAN, an organization that supports local groups advocating for school choice.

“I want every kid to have the same kind of opportunity that I had,” he said. “Sometimes it's your neighborhood school, and that's great, and sometimes it isn't. And the color of your skin and how much money your parents make and where you live shouldn't be the things that determine that.”

Bradford prefers a popular modern twist on vouchers called Education Savings Accounts, which give the funds to parents rather than private schools. He thinks it gives parents more power to choose the best form of education for their child.

However, opponents of vouchers and Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs, say they hurt students of color.

“There's no civil rights protections,” said Jaime Puente with the left-leaning think tank Every Texan. “If you’re a special-needs student, if you learned that you had some kind of learning disability… you're on your own.”

Puente said he understands wanting Black and Latino students to have access to prestigious private schools — he went to a Catholic boy’s school in Houston. But he doesn’t think vouchers or ESAs will give them that access because they don’t cover the full cost of tuition.

“$8,000 wouldn't have done anything for my family,” Puente said. “We still would have had to make sacrifices. These schools cost anywhere from $25,000 to $35,000 — almost $40,000 a year … And so, that's never going to be an option for the poorest student with the voucher.”

Puente thinks that money would be better served supporting public schools.

“It's ridiculous that we are having these conversations about vouchers and spending this amount of money on a tiniest fraction of the state when we should be talking about investing in the system as a whole so that we can lift everyone up,” Puente said, adding that the state has long underfunded public education.

Bradford argues that an ESA worth $8,000 would make it easier for a private school to raise scholarship money to cover the rest. He thinks private-school options are needed because public schools are highly segregated, and that makes them inherently unequal.

“We have a system of public schooling in this country that is based on place, and we have a system of place in this country that is based on race,” Bradford said.

He said ESAs can help level the playing field for low-income kids of color by giving them access to an education that isn’t based on where they live.

Choice reduces diversity

Research shows that school choice hasn’t lessened segregation. In fact, it's often made it worse.

“Initially there was some hope that choice, because it breaks up these ties between where you live and where you go to school, that there could be a potential for greater desegregation. But we haven't seen that happen,” said Huriya Jabbar, an education policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Jabbar said the robust research on the impact charter schools have on segregation is clear: “Individual charter schools are generally more racially segregated than the traditional public schools in their area,” she said. “School choice tends to, on average, increase or at least reproduce the segregation in public schools. It's not mitigating that segregation.”

Even though public schools are often highly segregated by race and income, Jabbar said they’re still the best hope for integration.

“We lose the potential to (integrate schools) if we give up on public schools,” she said.

She said it’s important to keep working to increase school diversity because research has shown it consistently improves student outcomes.

“We don't have evidence of another policy solution that can make schools equal and high quality on such a large scale,” Jabbar said.

Jabbar thinks ESAs and vouchers will most likely also have a negative impact on school diversity.

But Bradford isn’t concerned by that prediction because public schools are already segregated. He said segregation caused by school choice is “less pernicious” because it is not government-mandated.

“It is instead things like Black families wanting to be in an environment where they feel like their kids are going to be affirmed, and, not for nothing, their history not erased in a public policy fight,” Bradford said.

Avoiding “woke agendas”

Public-school advocates argue that people who want to erase Black history do so by promoting vouchers.

“Vouchers have been, and continue to be, a product of white supremacy,” said Jaime Puente with Every Texan during public testimony for SB8, the voucher bill.

Puente said the fight against vouchers and its racist undertones decades ago has re-emerged as a new battle – over books and curriculum.

Distrust of public schools is a key part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s argument for using public funds for private schools. At rallies for ESAs this spring, Abbott repeatedly claimed public schools are “indoctrinating” kids.

Jabbar also sees parallels between the push for segregation vouchers in the 1950s and the language voucher advocates use today.

“It's not surprising that those same types of policies are emerging right now, given our current social context, the racial reckoning the country is having, these attempts to stifle discussions around race and racism in schools,” Jabbar said.

Camille Phillips

Camille Phillips can be reached at camille@tpr.org, on Instagram at camille.m.phillips and on Twitter at @cmpcamille. TPR was founded by and is supported by our community. If you value our commitment to the highest standards of responsible journalism and are able to do so, please consider making your gift of support today.

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