Using everyone else’s tax dollars to end your kids to private school isn’t a “civil right”
When U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was at the state Capitol recently to promote the school voucher bill, he repeated a lie that other voucher – or “school choice” — advocates, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have used to persuade legislators to give tax dollars to private schools.
“School choice, I believe, is the civil rights issue of the 21st century,” Cruz said.
Not only was the statement a lie, it also was an insult to the millions of Americans who fought, bled and died for basic civil rights during the Jim Crow era — like the right to vote, use public restrooms, eat and sleep where they wanted, sit anywhere on a bus and not be discriminated against in the workplace, housing or public educational opportunities.
The only K-12 educational civil right is the right of all children of school age to attend a public school, and it is the state’s responsibility under the state constitution to adequately and equitably fund those public schools, responsibilities this state’s current leadership continues to fail to do.
There is no “civil right” for Texas families to receive tax dollars to send their children to private schools. The idea that it is a “civil right” is made even more absurd by the fact that the universal voucher plan the Legislature is considering would give taxpayer-paid subsidies to many families who already have children in private schools.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Texas students would remain in public schools that would become even more underfunded.
The “civil rights” claim is made even more offensive by the historic origins of school vouchers.
The first school vouchers were used by southern leaders to avoid complying with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education desegregation order of 1954. For many years after that landmark ruling, some southern communities created and funded voucher-like programs for private segregation academies reserved for white children. Black children either went to poorly funded public schools or dropped out.
By 1969, according to the Center for American Progress, more than 200 private segregation academies had been established across the South. In the 1969-70 and 1970-71 school years alone, tens of thousands of white students were enrolled in these schools before the federal courts ended the segregation programs.
Read more about this report: The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers.
