Good Example of an Armchair Theorist Working as Handmaiden to the Race-Evasive, Privatizing, Far Right

This person who works with the Cato Institute doesn't know the first thing about discrimination. His argument of "healthy," as opposed to "unhealthy" discrimination is not anchored in any actual history or context of either race or class relations, but rather, hypotheticals.

For the record, there is no such thing as healthy or unhealthy discrimination. There should be NO discrimination against people, period.

Tests, to which the author alludes, are a somewhat different matter. They are SUPPOSED to discriminate—that is, between a correct and incorrect answer to a question. INSTEAD, however, they systematically discriminate by race and class. This is well established in the research literature. However, the author is positing a form of "choice making" that is not sustainable as an argument in light of a prevalence of dog whistle politics that seek to engineer individuals' choices via processes of "othering" and boundary maintenance.

The author could have really benefited from the Ethnic Studies classroom in order to make a compelling, well-reasoned argument. It all sounds so patronizing and ultimately deceptive. Minimally, it doesn't pass the sniff test. In this vein, on X or Twitter, I sided with @NILSHeadley on this one:

What about community values? Where do school boards that reflect communities' values come in? Oh yeah, the Koch Foundation, Wilks and Dunn, and Moms for Liberty and other organizations got that covered. Or at least they think they do with all the fiery political conflagrations they're setting off in school boards across the country. Not being cynical. Just real.

In sum, this piece is a good example of pseudo-scholars making pseudo arguments, getting paid to work as handmaiden to the power- and race-evasive, privatizing agenda of the extremist right dressed up as "school choice."

-Angela Valenzuela

Legalizing Discrimination Would Improve the Education System

Policy makers should realize that there are types of discrimination that are actually beneficial for teachers, students, and the rest of society.

Thursday, September 29, 2016 | by Corey DeAngelis

School choice programs around the world prohibit discrimination in hiring employees and enrolling students. While discrimination policies aim to protect employees and children, the result is the opposite. Discrimination in hiring employees increases the likelihood that children are educated by teachers that are aligned with their interests and abilities. Discrimination in enrolling students increases the probability that all students are in a successful, specialized learning environment.

Unhealthy Discrimination Hurts Producers

We can all agree that the intentions behind this policy are well-meaning. We don’t want public funding to go to schools that are run by malevolent people. For simplicity, let’s assume that people running private schools are indeed racist, sexist, evil individuals. Even if we allow all types of discrimination, the evil individuals in charge of the private schools will financially pay for the act.

For example, let’s assume that the people in charge of school X are racist. They can choose to hire a teacher of race 1 or race 2. If they are racist against race 2, they will likely choose to hire race 1, regardless of the actual quality of the teacher. If an alternative school, Y, does not practice the same discrimination, they will benefit by having a larger pool of teacher candidates. Ultimately, this would lead to a competitive advantage for school Y for not being racist! Families would recognize this advantage, choose school Y, and force school X to face a shutdown condition. Allowing families to choose their schools will only work to eliminate unhealthy discrimination such as racism in hiring.

Healthy Discrimination

Some types of discrimination are actually beneficial to teachers, students, and the rest of society. When a school has a specialized mission and focus, it needs to be able to hire specialized individuals. Protecting candidates that would not help achieve the specialized mission of the organization harms the other teachers and students in the school.

Imagine a given school that has a mission of academic success for various types of athletes. Forcing the school to hire teachers and enroll students that do not have a sports-related background will work against the overall mission. Since the students are interested in academics and sports, it may be desirable to relate class lessons to different sports activities. For example, a physics teacher could incorporate exercises that are based on the movement and force of a football or softball over time. If a candidate is unable to demonstrate sufficient background knowledge on sports, they will not be able to make classes engaging for the students. Protecting candidates from this type of discrimination will only hurt the students.

Additionally, the school would need to be able to discriminate based on the ability levels and learning styles of the incoming students. If we forced the school to accept all athletes, the academic mission would be sure to fail. Protecting the students with low academic abilities will hurt the advanced students and make the teacher’s job extremely difficult. Perhaps even more importantly, protecting these students may actually result in hurting them the most. Placing these low-performing students in this environment would not likely be suitable for their individual academic needs. Being exposed to this highly-competitive academic environment could actually hurt their confidence levels and prevent them from learning.

Although there are certain types of unhealthy discrimination, it is not optimal for bureaucrats to determine which types are permissible for the rest of society. Instead, we should allow families in society to choose the schools that do not partake in the discriminatory practices that they deem to be non-permissible. Additionally, policymakers should realize that there are types of discrimination that are actually beneficial for teachers, students, and the rest of society.

Corey DeAngelis

Corey A. DeAngelis is the Director of School Choice at Reason Foundation and an adjunct scholar at Cato Institute.

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

I love the quotes in this piece by Jes Adams, a Tyler resident and mother of two children attending Tyler middle-schools because it captures the absolute truth behind Gov. Abbott's pro-voucher agenda:

“It’s interesting that he [Abbott] keeps saying ‘indoctrination,’ but he’s saying it at a private Christian school,” said Jes Adams, a 37-year-old mother who has two middle-school-aged children in Tyler. Adams was among the parents who protested Abbott’s event at Grace Community School. “It feels very much like he’s saying that Christianity is the way you’re supposed to go, and that anything that deviates from it is indoctrination.”

Yep, that's what he's saying in a nutshell. I guess that's what it means to prepare a run against Ron DeSantis.

Should SB 8 become law, East Texas public schools in the long run will, like other public schools statewide, be seriously harmed by this privatization agenda.

-Angela Valenzuela

In East Texas, skepticism over private school tuition assistance persists despite push from conservative leaders

Gov. Greg Abbott and other conservatives say families need options to escape “woke” education in public schools. East Texas parents and school leaders say the national talking points are off base.

BY POOJA SALHOTRA APRIL 7, 20235 AM CENTRAL

The Grace Community campus in Tyler on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. -Emil T. Lippe for TxTribune.

TYLER — On a Thursday evening in March, parents and community leaders inside Grace Community School erupted into applause as Gov. Greg Abbott demanded the Texas Legislature protect parents’ rights.

Outside the school — one of the largest private Christian schools in East Texas — Abbott’s visit elicited jeers. More than a dozen public school advocates and parents held signs in protest and offered a pro-public-school message to any passersby who would listen.

“We’re out here protesting Gov. Abbott because he’s trying to take away money from our public schools and give them to these private Christian schools, and I don’t think that’s right,” Cody Grace, a public school parent and former Democratic nominee for the Texas House, said in a video posted to Twitter during the protest he helped organize.

That night in Tyler is emblematic of the debate taking place inside the Texas Legislature this year. Abbott has thrown his support behind parents’ rights and “school choice,” a catchall term for policies that allow parents to send their kids to a school different from their assigned public school.

Many rural lawmakers remain wary of such policies — even as supporters dangle additional money for their schools.

The governor’s push for education savings accounts is part of his efforts to give parents more rights and to fight what he calls a “woke” agenda in public schools. Smith County, where Tyler sits, is home to 64 public schools, and Tyler has one of the largest concentrations of private religious schools outside of the state’s major metropolitan areas, according to data analyzed by The Dallas Morning News.

School leaders — already wary that such a dramatic expansion of school choice would drain their limited financial resources — and some parents in Tyler and the surrounding communities say Abbott is driving a false narrative. There is no indication of a “woke” agenda in the region’s public schools, they say.

At least one rural school leader is going as far as saying that if an education savings account policy becomes law, taxpayer dollars could be used for true indoctrination at religious schools.

“Their job is to spread Christianity,” Stan Surratt, superintendent of Lindale Independent School District said about Christian schools like Grace Community School. “That’s not the problem. The problem is, you shouldn’t use state funding for that.”

Senate Bill 8 is the leading school-choice policy proposal this legislative session. It would give parents who opt out of public schools the option to receive up to $8,000 of taxpayer money per student. Students who are currently enrolled in a public school or who are entering prekindergarten or kindergarten for the first time would be eligible for the program. The dollars could be used for private school tuition at an accredited private school, tutoring or other education-related expenses such as textbooks.

The legislation also includes restrictions on classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity and lays out a parental bill of rights.

The bill passed the Senate on Thursday and faces a tough road to final passage in the state House, which approved a largely symbolic amendment to the state budget Thursday that limits state money from going to "school vouchers or other similar programs."

"Vouchers Are Not About School Choice. Here's How We Know," by Peter Greene

I like how Peter Greene lays his argument against vouchers bare: 

"It's about not having to pay taxes to educate Those People's Children" (while using those people's tax dollars to cover their children's private school education). 

Thanks to Diane Ravitch for sharing.

 -Angela Valenzuela

"Vouchers Are Not About School Choice. Here's How We Know," by Peter Greene

Wednesday, January 25, 2023 | Curmudgucation

The new wave of voucher bills being rammed through red state legislatures all demonstrate a truth about school voucher policies-- vouchers are not about choice. They're about peeling people away from the public school system in order to defund and dismantle that system.

What makes me think so? Here it is. Sometimes it's not about what people say, but about what they don't say. If the concern were really and truly choice for every student, then voucher fans would be addressing some of the real obstacles to school choice. 

This door doesn't lead where they told you it would. 

 For one, they would be addressing discriminatory and exclusionary policies. Yet when have we ever heard a voucher supporter say, "These discriminatory policies have to stop. LGBTQ+ students deserve just as much school choice as any other students." The closest thing we ever get is "Well, then they can start an LGBTQ-friendly school of their own." Yet when that happens, pro-voucher politicians target that school with terms like "perversion." And of course in some states, such a school can never happen because talking about LGBTQ students or Black history has been outlawed. And voucher laws are written to hold the private school right to discriminate as it wishes inviolable. 

If someone were serious about voucher based choice, they would also address cost. Vouchers are typically far too small to pay for tuition to top schools in the state. If voucher supporters were really interested in making sure that, as Jeb Bush says, "each and every...student can access the education of their choice," there would be a robust discussion about how to bridge the gap between meager vouchers and expensive schools. 

 Yet we never hear voucher advocates saying, "We need to find the way to fully fund vouchers so that they provide a real choice to students." 

Choice advocates like to point at the inequity of the public system--parent choice is limited by their ability to buy an expensive house in a wealthy neighborhood. But the current crop of voucher programs doesn't change that a bit--a voucher offers little to change the fact that how much "freedom" you get depends on how wealthy you are. It has been done. 

But when Croydon, NH set up a school choice program, a voucher-like system that bore the full cost of sending a student to the school of their choice, local libertarians tried to shut it down because they wanted lower taxes. 

 Voucher fans love the idea of school choice; they just don't want to actually pay for it. If these folks were serious about school choice via vouchers, we would have calls for oversight and accountability. It would make a choice system that much more attractive for parents to know that all the available options have been vetted and screened and will be held to some standards, just like shopping in a grocery store where you can rest easy in near-certainty that whatever you pick, it's not going to actually poison your family. And yet not only do voucher fans not call for oversight and accountability, but they actively block it with language that hammers home that nobody can tell vendors what to do or how to do it.

Voucherphiles like to call their system child-centered, but in fact it is vendor-centered, with "protections" for the service providers written into the law, and protections for the students non-existent. Parents are left to navigate an unregulated system of asymmetrical information that favors the businesses-- not the families. 

 If we were really talking about school choice, we would be talking about these ideas. Choice advocates would be demanding we talk about them. But we're not. 

 Vouchers are not about choice. They're about saying, "I'll give you a couple grand to sign away your rights to a free and appropriate public education." 

They're about using that deal to get one step closer to Milton Friedman's dream of education being a cost shouldered by parents, not society. In other words, not just privatizing the delivery of education, but also privatizing the responsibility for it. 

 It's about not having to pay taxes to educate Those People's Children. If at the same time we can use some taxpayer dollars (collected from Other People) to also further some "Kingdon Gains" and fund some private religious schools (just the Right Ones), that's a win-win. 

 I'll end with my usual caveat--there are undoubtedly some folks out there who sincerely believe that vouchers are a good way to a pursue real school choice. Believe it or not, I myself can imagine what a true functional and beneficial school choice system would look like. And it wouldn't look anything like what has been ramming its way through state legislatures in the past few years. 

 Posted by Peter Greene at Wednesday, January 25, 2023 Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest

This is harmful policy. There is no permanent, independent funding stream for vouchers. It all comes out of the same taxes that fund public schools. Yes, our taxes. The public's dollars.

Under the guise of "freedom" and "choice," this means that my hard-earned tax dollars get diverted away from funding my neighborhood public school and directly into the pockets of wealthy families who were already sending their kids to private schools.

Members of the Texas legislature should not allow themselves to get arm-twisted into supporting this privatization agenda and focus instead on increasing funding for public schools instead.

-Angela Valenzuela

#TxLege #TxEd

@TexasAFT

At parental rights event, Gov. Greg Abbott sheds light on how he’d implement “school choice” policy

For the first time, Abbott makes it clear which policy he supports. Bills that would allow parents to get state money to send their kids to schools outside of the state’s public education system have been floated previously, but top lawmakers believe the policies will pass this session.

BY BRIAN LOPEZ JAN. 31, 20238 PM CENTRAL

Gov. Greg Abbott speaks at a “Parent Empowerment Night” hosted by the Parent Empowerment Coalition at Annapolis Christian Academy in Corpus Christi on Jan. 31. Blaine YoungCre Blaine Young for The Texas Tribune

For the first time since making parental rights a priority early last year, Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday voiced his most explicit support yet for a “school choice” policy, saying that Texas needs to create an education savings account program.

“That will give all parents the ability to choose the best education option for their child,” Abbott said during a Parent Empowerment Night event in Corpus Christi. “The bottom line is this: This is really about freedom.”

Abbott’s comment comes as the Texas Legislature prepares to take on public education issues; the top lawmakers have signaled that enacting a “school choice” program is at the top of the list. Abbott has voiced his support for expanding such a policy but never has been this clear on what sort of program he would support.

“School choice” is a term used to describe programs that give parents state money to send their kids to schools outside of the state’s public education system. The most common model is school vouchers, which are state-sponsored scholarships for private schools. This term has also become shorthand for opponents when talking about measures that would take taxpayer money from public schools.

Texas already practices school choice, as parents can choose to send their children to free charter schools or transfer schools within or outside of their district.

Texas has tried to pass school choice legislation in the past but has failed as rural lawmakers have stood in the way. In rural communities, both school officials and lawmakers fear that something like an education savings account would take money away from their schools as Texas funds schools based on attendance.

“No one knows what is better for a child’s education than their parents,” Abbott said. “Parents deserve the freedom to choose the education that is best for their child.”

Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, filed Senate Bill 176, which could become the most expansive piece of school choice legislation in the state if it were to pass. It would create an education savings account program that would allow parents to use state funds to pay for their children’s private school, online schooling or private tutors.

Under Middleton’s legislation, families that opt out of the state’s public education system would receive the average amount of money it costs Texas public schools to educate a child, which is currently about $10,000 a year. The money would roll over on a year-to-year basis and could be used to help families pay for higher education, according to the bill. The funds for the program could come from both taxpayer money and donations.

Education savings accounts were pitched to lawmakers back in 2017, but the proposal didn’t get much traction.

For some Republicans, this session is seen as an opportunity to get school choice legislation across the finish line as they believe they will have enough backing from parents displeased with public schools over pandemic response mandates and about how race and history are taught in the classroom.

Abbott says parental rights are a priority this session, but state law already ensures that parents have rights. The “Parental Rights and Responsibilities” section of the state education code gives parents a wide range of access and veto powers when it comes to their children. They can remove their child temporarily from a class or activity that conflicts with their religious beliefs. They have the right to review all instructional materials, and the law guarantees them access to their student’s records and to a school principal or administrator. Also, school boards must establish a way to consider complaints from parents.

During the event, Abbott leaned on parental frustration as the reason that education savings accounts are needed. He said some parents were angry over masks being required, some over their kids having to learn virtually and some were upset over the kind of “sex content” being taught in schools.

“We must reform curriculum, get kids back to the basics of learning and we must empower parents to be more involved in the education of their children,” Abbott said.