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.

Better All Three Ways

This past Saturday was our senatorial district convention, which was postponed from March because of Covid-19. There was a good turnout. And it was kind of thrilling to have an actual get-together in person after so many months of isolation.

There we are at the Senatorial District 7 Convention
photo from Mark Ramsey's Facebook page

Much of my day was spent in the resolutions committee, working on the platform. Our SD7 is bigger than most, and more conservative, and hopefully more influential. So we put out our version of the entire platform. We’re required to use the previous platform as a starting point, so we used underlines and strikeouts to show changes we were making. Surprisingly, at the end of the day, after our chair presented some of what we’d done, both in the temporary committee and in Saturday’s permanent committee, no one wanted floor debate; the committee as a whole accepted it as we did it. I’ve never seen that happen before.

The SD7 Resolutions Committee at work; that's me second from right
at the table. Photo from Pauline Ramsey's Facebook page

Our chair, Mark Ramsey, gave me a lot of credit for the editing I did (and still had left to do after the convention to clean it up); I don’t know where else grammarians actually get applause. It was a privilege for me.

Before we got to that, I did hear a few of the speeches. And a highlight was my Congressman Dan Crenshaw. He has an easy way of speaking, putting profound truths in a conversational, understandable way. When I’m looking for ways of wording things that connect with people, I turn to him.

His ten-minute talk, without notes, talked about the contrast between what the other party offers and what we conservatives offer. And these came under three categories: political, economic, and social. Where have I seen that before? [Hint: SphericalModel.com]

So I’ll share portions of his talk to show ways of presenting, in a brief and conversational way, soem of the things that I talk about here all the time.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, the quick photo I took
before using my phone to record his talk

The Political Sphere

Dan started out talking about what “liberalism” used to mean:

You know, liberalism used to stand for a couple of different things, like free speech, like the right to peacefully assemble, equality of opportunity. These are actually liberal foundations. But the Democrat Party has completely left those. They’ve completely trampled over their good-natured liberals—whom I still disagree with on many issues. But at least they’re actually liberal. At least they actually stood for the foundations of a liberal democracy. At least they actually stood for what our founding stood for.

That has been completely trampled over as of late. And I don’t mean that figuratively. We can see it quite literally being trampled over.

I’m old enough to be his mother (he’s the same age as son Political Sphere), so I remember when “liberal” meant something different. In a personal journal I described myself as a liberal—when I was 18, before college, but I was voting conservative Republican. To me it meant freedom-loving and open-minded, rather than any political philosophy. I attached a note in that journal some years later to mark the change in meaning.

Dan talked a bit about what is happening in Seattle. And he talked about a bad movie he saw recently in which the government response to chaos was to send out some sort of mind-control signal to stop people from committing crime. Just fiction. Still, he asked himself,

Is this like the liberal utopia that they want? Where there’s so much anarchy that it takes complete centralized government control to persuade human nature, to affect human behavior?

He points out that they think they—the leftists, which I call southern hemisphere tyrannists—can change human nature. It can’t be done. Over thousands of years, we’ve developed institutions, like the church, to help guide people toward better behavior than their unbridled nature would lead them to do. As he says,

You can’t rely on haphazard government intervention based upon principles that were thought of just five minutes ago. And they change, constantly. You never know what the next attack is by the left. They’re determined to create a sense of crisis in order to justify their revolution.

They seem to like the romantic notion of revolution. It’s a “youthful exuberance,” trying to do something important, to effect change. But, he says, what we’re seeing is “an attack on America at its core”:

It’s one thing to say that we have improvements to make. We will always have improvements to make, and we should lock our arms together and to speak out for the improvements that we need to make, and live up to our founding ideals.

But it is quite another to say that those ideals are evil to the core, when in reality they are not. When in reality they are based in truth. When in reality the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written by men who learned these ideals and took them from the best ideas that mankind ever had—from Jerusalem, to Rome, to Athens, to London. And conservatism stands for these great ideals. Conservatism stands for a republic, a functioning political system that actually works. Not mob democracy.

He goes on,

Democrats actually want mob democracy. They’re not hiding the ball on this. When you want to get rid of the Electoral College, when you want to remove states’ rights, when you want the federal government to have centralized control over the society and the economy—  They also say they don’t like that small states have two senators. That’s a federalist system that they want to undo.

They want 51% of the population to tell the other 49% what to do, because they believe they can change human nature. They believe they can control your thoughts and your feelings. And they believe that preferences across a vast country don’t matter. This is what they believe.

How does our side compare?

Our political system allows us to live together peacefully. It’s a republic, with checks and balances and states’ rights, and a federalist system. And that matters. Our founders thought very hard about this. Because they were students of history, and they saw what worked and what didn’t. They saw what was stable and what wasn’t.

We stand for stability. They stand for chaos.

The Political, Economic, and Social Spheres side by side

The Economic Sphere

So, that’s the political sphere. Then he turns to economics:

We also stand for a better economic system. Our founders understood this too. Most rational people understand this, that property rights matter. You can’t just confiscate somebody’s property. And one of the primary roles of government is defending that, through law and order, through law enforcement. They want to upend that too, defund the police. Our economic system, our economic way of looking at things, the free market is superior to socialism in every way.

He considers that there’s a spectrum of socialism, from full-on communism, to the socialism-light of some mainstream Democrats. But he offers an example of what these “light” socialists mean to do:

If you’re a company above a billion dollars in revenue per year, then your board has to be certified by the federal government. That’s pretty dang close to a government takeover of an institution, of an industry. Fundamentally, they want to tax more and more and redistribute that wealth. It’s collective ownership of wealth and prosperity. Those are the words they use. Then they call it democracy.

And here’s the important point I wish we could get across:

Fundamentally, it doesn’t work. That’s the thing. It doesn’t work. There’s no cases. No cases at all. About 25 countries have tried socialism. They’ve all failed—in blood, and slavery, and mass death and starvation—because it doesn’t work. The economic system has completely been discredited.

We have to maintain personal property rights: “The ability to keep your money, because you earn it. The ability to freely exchange with others.” He turns to what we’ve seen in reaction to the pandemic. It’s a problem when “foolish politicians,” mostly on the left, but not totally, but these policy makers

make a mistake by thinking that we could force you to engage in safe behavior. That didn’t make sense. It’s been discredited now. But the reality is, it was never government’s role to force your business to close—while Walmart stayed open.

Here’s what we need:

We need leaders that actually think through their civics education and understand what the proper role of government is—how do you enforce guidelines?

Maybe coercion is the wrong way to deal with law-abiding citizens.

The Social Sphere

Already you can see that there’s an interrelationship between the political, economic, and social spheres. But finally he covers the social sphere, or culture:

Conservatism is superior along a third line, and that’s our cultural perspective. Conservatives are the only ones that stand for cultural narratives that actually keep a society functioning. What do I mean by those? Well, first of all, we’re in a church. So we stand for moral truth. We understand that our laws are actually derived from the Ten Commandments. There are things that are true and cannot be argued with. You have to have a starting point. You have to have an anchor in morality. You can’t just decide what you want it to be.

We’re also the only ones who defend things like personal responsibility and accountability for your actions.

We’re the only ones who actually defend ordered liberty, the freedom for you to choose to make mistakes and to succeed, and then to be rewarded as such.

This is important. The fact that we even have to defend a simple ideal like a meritocracy is crazy. But we do. We’re the only ones that stand up for it.

He ends with this point about our neighbors who are Democrats—who are mostly decent people and not radical America-hating revolutionaries.

Here’s the infuriating part: your liberal neighbors absolutely teach these same principles to their kids. You know why? Because they actually love their kids, and they want their kids to succeed. You teach your kids these basic principles because you love them.

Maybe it’s time we actually used the same principles for the American people—because we actually love the American people, just like we would love our kids.

Indeed. If everyone who knows enough to want their children to succeed, so they teach them how to be decent and productive human beings who can live in peace among their neighbors—if every one of these people voted for conservatives rather than socialists, I believe we’d see an overwhelming majority choosing the good. People struggle to come here from all over the world because of the good we have here.

People who love America, and love one another, want freedom, prosperity, and civilization; they don’t want what the other side offers: tyranny, poverty, and savagery. It ought to be an easy choice, if we can just get them to hear messages like Rep. Dan Crenshaw offers in his everyday life.