The Short Answer Is Fear

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working through resolutions from the precincts in our senatorial district and creating amendments and additions intended for the state platform. I headed the Education subcommittee in my SD, so much of my attention was there.

Rep. Tom Oliverson dropped in to speak at our SD7 Convention
on Saturday, a couple of days after announcing his intention to
seek the House Speaker position. (Wish I had better photos, but my precinct was
seated far back and to the side. And I forgot to get photos of any committee work.)

Our very large SD does things as a mini version of the state platform committee. And since rule changes from last biennium, we had open meetings. We also took testimony. It turns out, Education is where much of the testimony was aimed.

Two years ago there was a huge push for more parental rights and controls, and included in the many rights of parents is school choice. That became a governor’s priority, but it nevertheless did not get through the legislature, even during four special sessions (add-on month-long sessions for specific purposes).

Why is there pushback, especially among Republicans, against school choice? The short answer is fear.

At the state Republican convention two years ago, we were in permanent committee, taking the last hour or two of testimony before final deliberations. All of the testimony time for the Education section taken up by anti-school choice delegates. (I wrote about this here.) It gave the impression that there was a huge sentiment in that direction from across the state. But that was an illusion. Those people were organized to get their names on the list to testify. But there were literally hundreds of precincts around the state that had submitted resolutions in favor of school choice. The anti-choice people almost caused the plank to be taken out, but it was rescued by the Education subcommittee chair at the last moment, describing the overwhelming testimony for school choice.

So, moving ahead two years, we got the same organized group of vocal anti-school choice people (I don’t know if they’re the same individuals, just the same sentiments) taking nearly all the testimony time. This was in our temporary subcommittee, and again during our permanent committee at the senatorial district convention last Saturday. We gave them far beyond their allotted time. I wanted to fully understand their arguments. There’s actually a fair amount we agree on.

We want options to be available to all. They say there already are options, which they want to keep: those options are public school, charter school, private school, or homeschool. I personally do not think that is anywhere near enough choice—and most people don’t even have those choices available to them. I’ll get back to this.

What these opponents fear is that, if you have money follow the child anywhere away from public or charter schools (charter schools are a public school entity; it’s complicated), then you allow government influence into wherever that money goes.

Our platform already says that the money must follow the child with no strings attached. These opponents say you can’t have the money follow the child without strings. And, they claim, this is a back door to government getting control within private schools—namely, church/parochial schools, but also homeschools—where they have no oversight now. Any time the federal government gives money, they attach strings.

Our platform already states that we want to abolish the federal Department of Education. We do not intend for any money following the child to come from a federal funding source.

When we asked the testifiers, what about families who are trapped in public schools that are failing their children—people who are paying taxes for that education they’re not getting—who can’t afford to also pay tuition elsewhere, there were two responses: that isn’t paying double (um, yes it is), and who is deciding the schools are failing—that’s a government entity trying to get more control (um, no; in my case it was me observing and experiencing the failure to meet my children’s specific needs, so I as the parent decided to call that a failure, and I pulled them out).

In other words, they do not care about parents whose children are trapped in schools that do not meet their needs. They will insist that those parents continue to pay taxes with no promised benefit. Tough luck.

These people write books and give presentations (there’s one nearby this week). They will go through the history of education—as I have done (here’s a sample I wrote and presented in 2019, and a part 2 on related info here)—and show the growth of indoctrination over time—again, as I have done. And then they conclude that, because we haven’t yet stopped the indoctrination, we never will, so the only solution is to keep the status quo in order to protect homeschools and private schools.

And that is where we diverge. We haven’t yet stopped the indoctrination—but, while some of us have had that mission for a long time, most parents just woke up in 2020, when the schools utterly failed their kids. This army of newly awakened parents spoke up. In 2022, the call for parental rights and school choice were loud enough to be deafening. We’ve been successfully flipping our school boards to conservative majorities. And so far, since that awakening, we’ve only had one legislative try—and there’s a lot of opposition to overcome there. But we already have the state senate on our side, and we have turnover this year in the House (ousted in the Primary a number of rino-Republicans who had voted with Speaker Phelan to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton without presenting evidence; Speaker Phelan is on the verge of being ousted in a runoff, and Rep. Tom Oliverson, from here in our area, is stepping up to take on the speaker role, and he's on our side).

And the parents are continuing to call for their rights—including their right to choose concerning their child’s education.

Instead of doomsaying, maybe we ought to open our minds to more possibilities. We know that whenever the free market solves problems, it does it with higher quality and lower price than a government monopoly. So let’s see if we can inject some actual free market into the school system. And let’s do it by cutting strings to indoctrination sources—like the federal government, the teachers’ unions, the nonprofits offering “help.”

In our platform, the first Education plank already called for choice. We clarified what we mean—a lot more choice than what kind of classroom the child sits in. Who know what the state committee will do with it, but here’s our SD’s version of the plank with our amendments. Black is wording from the 2022 platform. Red indicates our additions. Green with strikethroughs is what we deleted:

101.  School Choice: Texas families shall be empowered to choose from public, private, charter, or homeschool options, or any combination thereof, including private tutors, lessons, therapies, online courses, technical schools, apprenticeships, certification programs, etc., for their children’s education, and the funding shall follow the student without strings attached, meaning accountability is measured by the parents, in place of any state or federal oversight. We also support tax credits and exemptions for education and choice within the public school system. Public Schools from which funding is removed when the funding follows the student elsewhere shall be prohibited from being replaced by funding with revenue collected from taxpayers or from state or local governments.

We deleted that green line, because the idea of putting choice within the public school system is now expressed in the “or any combination thereof” idea, so it became superfluous and confusing.

The last red sentence was an amendment during floor debate (when we present our platform to the body at the SD convention). The person who suggested it was dealing with that free-market idea. If an entity isn’t providing value, they should suffer the consequences, rather than be subsidized in their failures. I didn’t think the sentence was necessary, and I was concerned it might detract from the good we did earlier in the plank. But I agree with his idea. If they don’t provide the quality, the students leave, and the schools, who get paid according to attendance, lose money. So they are incentivized to improve.

There’s always concern about whether the schools have enough money, and there was another legislative change that made it so there could be quite a shortfall this year. But, as I have mentioned a time or two (or ten), in our district maybe we could empty out that brand new multi-level office building for administrative staff—who do not work in schools! No school district ought to have so many admins. So, let go of any non-essentials (I don’t know, maybe all but a dozen), and if that doesn’t cover the shortfall, then rent out the building as office space.

The mission is not about preserving the public school system; it is about providing the education every individual child needs—without indoctrination, sexualization, data mining, or any of the other things parents are rightly alarmed about.

(This photo is from a source no longer available; I previously used it here.)
We live not far from the bus barn, where lines of school buses come out onto
the street at certain times of the day. Back during homeschooling years,
my kids thought it was funny to hum the Darth Vader march from Star Wars
when we saw these.

But how can you have both freedom and accountability? You leave the accountability to the parents. You don’t need a huge bureaucracy to hover over the parents and examine their decisions. Think about how a health savings account works; you choose how to spend the money, but it can only be spent on healthcare. It’s up to you what out-of-pocket healthcare expenses you use that money on. Or, think of a GI bill, which can be used for higher education. The government doesn’t tell the veteran what to study, or where to study. It can even be used at a religious school, even to become a minister or chaplain. The only stipulation is that it be used for higher education. That’s the kind of choice we’re looking for in school choice.

Can it be done successfully? It can. Will it? I don’t know. But I’m not willing to keep children trapped in the status quo because a small but vocal minority has made it their life mission to prevent school choice—because of their fears.