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.

See stories by Camille Phillips

Important read by my colleague, Dr. Huriya Jabbar on charter schools.  What a truism: 

"Because what’s bad for teachers is bad for students."

More focused quote:

For teachers, charter schools have introduced higher rates of turnover, the lack of collectively bargained contracts, and longer work hours for lower and less transparent pay. Teachers in charter schools work in precarious work environments without job security compared to traditional public schools. In several states, teachers who work in charter schools do not even need to be licensed or receive training.

I hope that we're wisening up as a society to how misguided a direction for reform that charter schools represent.  Not that there aren't some good ones.  That's not the point I'm making, but rather what I said, as a direction for reform—beginning with just how negative it is for teachers who happen to also mostly be women.

Hats off to Dr. Jabbar for this important work.

-Angela Valenzuela

Charter schools’ ‘Uberization’ of teaching profession hurts kids too

BY HURIYA JABBAR, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 10/17/18 02:30 PM EDT 442

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

Earlier this month, Secretary of Education

Betsy DeVos visited two of the highest

performing charter 

schools in New Orleans and praised 

the city as a “great example” for education

reform. It’s not a surprise 

that DeVos chose New Orleans for 

her visit. The Trump administration 

has championed charter schools, 

and researchers have shown that 

the school reforms in New Orleans 

after Hurricane Katrina have

 improved student outcomes. But

these reforms are not the best we can do.

Charter schools—publicly funded, but privately managed organizations that are typically released from many district regulations and union contracts—have rapidly expanded in urban areas across the U.S. over the last three decades. In New Orleans, over 90 percent of public school students now attend charter schools. In Detroit and Washington, D.C., half of all public school students do. Several other cities are emulating New Orleans, working to bring charter schools ‘to scale’ so that they make up the majority of schools in an area. 

But New Orleans has a long way to go before its schools provide a high-

quality education to all students, at least 

one that is worth emulating.

Even reformers in the city commonly say that most schools there are no longer failing, but they have only improved from an “F” to a “C.” The hard work is going from a “C” to an “A.” That requires hiring and retaining the best teachers. But the deregulated hiring practices that are characteristic of the charter movement may actually make it difficult for schools, in New Orleans and elsewhere, to ever reach that “A.”

Because what’s bad for teachers is bad for students.

The primary goal of charter schools is to increase and improve options for families, to encourage choice, and to introduce competition into public schools as if they were businesses. Conservatives argue that this element of market competition in the public school system will make all schools better.

Charter schools not only dramatically alter education for students and their families, but also for teachers. When charter schools predominate in a city, they de-professionalize teaching. Just as Uber and other ridesharing programs have displaced professional drivers, charter schools displace professional teachers.

For teachers, charter schools have introduced higher rates of turnover, the lack of collectively bargained contracts, and longer work hours for lower and less transparent pay. Teachers in charter schools work in precarious work environments without job security compared to traditional public schools. In several states, teachers who work in charter schools do not even need to be licensed or receive training.

I have interviewed nearly 200 teachers in cities with large shares of charter schools—New Orleans, Detroit, and San Antonio. Teachers have described to me how the lack of transparency and predictability in their salaries led them to move from school to school in search of better working conditions. This has led to tremendous turnover in schools that already want for stability.

In traditional school districts, job openings and salary scales are typically posted in a centralized location, to ensure equal opportunities and to limit allegations of discrimination. In charter schools, the lack of any transparent salary schedule, which describes how raises are awarded, could lead to pay disparities based on race and gender, patterns that we already observe in the private sector.

Charter school policies have fostered what economists call a “dual labor market” in education. In the traditional sector, teachers enjoy predictable hours, job stability, and protections. In the charter sector, teachers must endure short-term contract work, high mobility, and lower wages.

For example, it is difficult for an Uber driver to earn a living wage or move beyond short-term employment into a professional driving position. Charter school teachers feel similarly trapped. They are often unable to move into traditional public school positions that have higher salaries, reasonable work hours, pensions, and other long-term benefits.

When charter schools comprise a small segment of the labor market, they find teachers who tolerate high turnover, fewer job protections, and the lack of strong retirement benefits, by seeking those who are less experienced. When the charter sector encompasses the majority of schools in a city, however, it disrupts the entire system, not solely as reformers intend, and de-professionalizes the occupation.

But it’s not just teachers who pay the price for this disruption. Students’ lives and educations are also disrupted. Charter schools are often concentrated in urban areas and serve large proportions of low-income students and students of color, so the churn of teachers and instability often harm the students who need the most support and stability.

Constant churn prevents schools from collectively and continuously improving themselves, practices that are necessary to achieve real equity and excellence in education. Some turnover in schools can be positive, as when low-performing teachers are let go, but research shows that turnover can be so disruptive that it lowers student achievement in places where students struggle the most.

Students need stable schools as much as they need stable personal lives.

Efforts are underway to foster stability in several unstable occupations. In New York City, the taxi drivers’ union has started to organize drivers for Uber and Lyft, recognizing them as their peers rather than as a threat. Similarly, national teachers unions, such as the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, which have in the past resisted charter schools, are trying to organize and represent all teachers. These efforts have the potential to improve working conditions for teachers in charter schools and, ultimately, improve students’ experiences.

Betsy DeVos believes that charter schools and expansive school-choice policies are best for children. But state and local policymakers need only glance at actual charter-school operations to see that the situation is more complicated. Charter schools are losing large numbers of teachers because of poor working conditions. Traditional public schools, too, have a long way to go to provide teachers with livable wages, as the recent protests and strikes indicate. But their democratic structure has required them to be responsive to unions and teacher demands. And conditions are still often much worse in charter schools.

Charter schools have an important role to play alongside traditional public schools. But policymakers should reconsider taking charters “to scale” without considering the implications for teachers and students.

Teaching is not a “gig” – teachers facilitate the learning and knowledge for the next generation of citizens.

Policymakers should ensure that there are safeguards and job security for teachers. Simply, this can mean predictability and transparency in jobs and pay. These efforts can reduce turnover in charter schools, which, in turn, should improve student outcomes in ways that are sustainable.

Huriya Jabbar is an assistant professor in Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project.

‘Education savings accounts’ vouchers by another name by Greg Worthington

Kudos to Educational Policy and Planning Program student, Greg Worthington for his excellent analysis and critique of a policy proposal that you will be hearing about this legislative session in Texas, namely, Education Savings Accounts, or "ESAs."  

When you hear ESAs discussed, think vouchers.  This proposal will get a hearing in the Texas Senate on September 14, 2016.  

If you want to track this and other legislation this next session which begins officially in January—though hearings have already begun, as you can see—visit and bookmark the Texas Legislature Online.  

You can also login and create your own account in the MyTLO section of the Texas Legislature Online so that you can track bills via bill alerts that allow you to follow them as they make their way through the session.  

We've not yet begun the session but wanted to give folks a heads up regarding how they can get involved.  An immediate step you can take is to reach out to your legislators and staff to tell them how you feel about such proposals. It really can make a difference right now for them to hear from you.

This link tells helps you find who represents you: http://www.fyi.legis.state.tx.us/Home.aspx

Another rough and tumble session, to be sure...

Angela Valenzuela

‘Education savings accounts’ vouchers by another name

For the San Antonio Express-News

Published 12:00 am, Saturday, September 3, 2016

In July, the Texas Senate Committee on Education announced it will be studying a school choice program using education savings accounts, or ESAs.
ESAs may be a new concept to many Texans, but they’re simply a new form of vouchers that already exist in Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada and Tennessee.
What ESAs amount to is another effort to spend public money on narrow private interests and convert traditional public schools into businesses. This ultimately turns our children into dollar signs and exacerbates already deep racial and socioeconomic inequities.

So how do ESAs function? State Sen. Don Huffines, R-Dallas, and John D. Colyandro, executive director of the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute, wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News in June describing how ESAs would work:
“Parents apply for the program and un-enroll their child from public school. Next, the state funds an account that parents can use to pay for numerous services related to their child’s education. Parents could pay private school tuition or a tutor, purchase curriculum for homeschooling or a digital learning class, or save some money for college tuition, for example. If parents don’t use all of their ESA dollars in one year, they can roll over the remainder to the next school year.”

So what does this equal in state funding? When school choice proponents propose ESAs in any state, they usually suggest the state provide up to 90 percent of the funding that public school districts receive per student for yearly maintenance and operations.
In Texas, that’s about $7,800 per student. Additionally, students receiving special education services would be eligible for up to 100 percent of that funding.
ESAs have inherent fiscal issues that remain unaddressed.
Will ESAs be taxable or provide tax benefits like other government savings plans offered to individuals, such as health savings accounts and 529 college plan accounts?
Will ESAs keep up with increasing educational costs?
Will ESAs drastically increase noninstructional education costs, creating more overhead for taxpayers?
How do we safeguard against students being mislabeled for special education, thus giving parents more money than they need?
Additionally, no one has acknowledged students who need additional funding through Title I and bilingual education programs in traditional public schools. Will they receive extra funds?
These questions all need adequate explanations.
Another crucial issue is where this money will come from. Legal issues arise if funding for ESAs comes out of taxpayers’ pockets. ESA proponents in other states have asked for ESA funding to come from public school funds.
While there is no explicit prohibition in Texas on funding education outside of the public school system, ESAs are prohibited from receiving funding from Texas’ school funds.
ESAs fail to meet Texas’ narrow constitutional mandate “to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.”
Diverting funds from the support and maintenance of our already underfunded schools and toward private schools that almost always have parochial interests and aren’t held to the standards we set for public schools would be the opposite of that mandate.
ESA proponents want to make the accounts available to all families, including wealthy ones. This means taxpayers could be subsidizing private school tuition for the children of wealthy families, thus giving an unnecessary public handout to the wealthy.
There is also no promise that the best private schools will participate. Do we wish to give handouts to subpar private schools? And what if unsatisfied families bring their children, behind in the curriculum, back to public schools? We’d be setting up those students for failure while later spending additional taxpayer money on their remediation.
This creates problems for those who argue traditional public schools are plagued by wasteful spending and that corporate reforms such as establishing vouchers, charter schools and ESAs would force a more “efficient system of public free schools.
Those who make this claim argue that forcing schools to compete for students — as private businesses compete for customers — pressures traditional public schools to improve academics and frugality, or die in competition. This, according to the theory, benefits students still attending public schools. This hypothetical pressure is often called “the tide that lifts all boats.” But the tide is unfounded. Recent peer-reviewed empirical research has found damning evidence.
Larger school districts most often don’t feel competitive pressures from other school-choice options (of charter schools) for a variety of reasons. In many large urban areas, charter schools effectively enroll additional students from the growth in the school-age population. When charter schools actually drew significant numbers of students from traditional public schools, the effect was dispersed throughout the city and did not produce competitive pressure.
When schools responded to competition, spending more money on academics wasn’t the typical response. Instead, it inspired a variety of responses, with most schools spending more on marketing. Competing schools realized their academic program might be a top-notch product but that it wouldn’t sell without great marketing, just as in the real business world.
In a recent study by Huriya Jabbar, an education researcher and assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in New Orleans, where the entire district is made up of charters and parents choose where taxpayer money is spent (as with vouchers), marketing was by far the largest response by schools facing competition.
Other responses to competitive pressures included researching the market for better competitive strategies and avoiding competition by either offering something other schools don’t or circumventing regulations to cherry-pick the best students.
That is one of the worst things about competition in education. It turns kids into good and bad financial investments.
In New Orleans, one principal told Jabbar that “every kid is money.”
In other words, children become small piles of cash for school budgets instead of young humans to develop. Further, students with low test scores become liabilities, making those schools less able to compete in the market. This results in those students being locked out of the best schools and exacerbating already deep racial and socioeconomic inequities.
The imaginary rising tide of school choice only offers these results: schools turning into businesses, kids becoming good and bad money, and an increase in social inequity — all unconstitutionally funded by the taxpayer.
Whether school choice proponents recognize these effects of competition on our education system, the consequences are real and damaging. We don’t need more competition or for our schools to be run like businesses.
Our education system has always needed reform, but not by private corporate interests. Schools don’t need to be owned by corporations. They need to be democratically controlled by the communities they serve.
Schools shouldn’t compete but collaborate, especially with educators.
More important, policymakers and schools should radically increase collaboration with those communities that suffer most from our broken educational system — communities that are largely poor and have extremely high concentrations of minorities.
To this day, listening to these communities and their educators is an educational option we’ve never chosen.

Greg Worthington is a Ph.D. student in the Educational Policy and Planning Program in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Texas at Austin.

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