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.
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| 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.
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| (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.
