Grading Texas

Clay Robison’s report card on education and the Texas political arena

Gov. Greg Abbott made it clear two years ago that the Legislature must pass a universal voucher program, one that gives taxpayer-funded subsidies to millionaires – as well as people of lesser means -- for their children’s private school tuition and related expenses.

So far, he has given no indication that he has changed his mind as the Legislature convenes another session, with vouchers again at the top of the governor’s education priorities list. And political donations from super-wealthy school privatization advocates were instrumental in the governor’s successful campaign to unseat anti-voucher legislators in last year’s Republican primaries.

Nevertheless, there is still talk among voucher advocates of giving priority to students from low-income families. But what would that realistically mean for many of those families?

A few years ago, Arizona enacted a universal voucher program like the one Abbott is advocating for Texas, and soon it blew a multimillion-dollar hole in the state budget. It also is being used at a faster rate by wealthy families than by low-income parents in the Phoenix area, the most populous part of the state, according to an analysis by the ProPublica news site.

This is because many low-income families, even with vouchers, can’t afford tuition and the transportation expenses to send their children to private schools, most of which are outside their neighborhoods and, unlike public schools, don’t have to provide bus service. Meanwhile, wealthy families with children already in private schools are eager to scoop up the welfare payments.

ProPublica’s analysis of Arizona Department of Education data for Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, revealed that “the poorer the ZIP code, the less often vouchers are being used. The richer, the more.”

The story noted: “In one West Phoenix ZIP code where the median household income is $46,700 a year, for example, ProPublica estimates that only a single voucher is being used per 100 school-age children. There are about 12,000 kids in this ZIP code, with only 150 receiving vouchers. Conversely, in a Paradise Valley ZIP code with a median household income of $173,000, there are an estimated 28 vouchers being used per 100 school-age children.”

If you think something similar wouldn’t happen in Texas, think again, even if a Texas voucher program tried to give precedence to low-income families.

The voucher allowance proposed in the bill killed by the Texas House in 2023 was $10,500 per child. That is close but still short of the average tuition -- $10,906 for elementary schools and $12,442 for high schools – now charged by private schools in Texas, according to the Private School Review. But many of the more popular private schools charge $20,000, $30,000 or more a year.

As in Arizona, most are not in low-income neighborhoods, and most don’t provide transportation, which adds to a family’s costs. There also are many low-income kids but few private schools in rural Texas.

Some voucher advocates also want to give priority to students with disabilities, but this is even more unrealistic. Public schools must provide special education. Private schools are not required to do so, and most don’t. The private schools that provide those services charge tuition much higher than a voucher payment would cover. Tax money diverted to vouchers, meanwhile, would worsen funding problems for special education programs in public schools.

Had it passed, the final voucher bill offered in 2023 would have cost Texas taxpayers – and public schools -- $2.3 billion by 2028, the Legislative Budget Board forecast in a fiscal note. Much of that spending would have amounted to “welfare for the wealthy,” Democratic voucher opponent Rep. James Talarico said at the time.

He was right.

In a state with school vouchers for all, low-income families aren’t choosing to use them

Clay Robison

Donald Trump won’t move back into the White House for several more weeks yet, but Gov. Greg Abbott and Trump’s other leading supporters in state government already are chomping at the bit to assist the president-elect – and share some of the dubious limelight – in carrying out Trump’s long-promised plans for “mass deportations” of immigrants.

In the process, they aren’t above spreading Trump’s often-repeated, hate-tinged lie that many, if not most, immigrants are dangerous criminals whose forced departure will make America safer again.

A few days before Thanksgiving, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham was down in Starr County on the southern border, where she already had offered the incoming administration use of about 1,400 acres of newly acquired state property to use as a site for migrant detention centers.

In a letter to Trump, subsequently reported by the news media, Buckingham said her agency was “fully prepared” to enter into an agreement with the federal government for the property to be used for the “processing, detention and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.”

Baloney.

Buckingham cited the death of a 12-year-old girl from Houston, who police say was killed by two men who were in the country illegally. A murder is a tragedy regardless of who commits it. But murders – as well as other crimes -- in the United States are much more likely to be committed by a U.S. citizen, not by an undocumented immigrant, the National Institute of Justice concluded in a study published in September.

The study, based partly on arrest records in Texas, found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.

Looking at Texas alone, the Cato Institute reported that undocumented immigrants make up about 7.1 percent of the state’s population but accounted for only 5 percent of all homicide convictions in 2022.

Trump may give priority, at least at first, to deporting convicted criminals. But if, as he has promised, the forced removal continues, most of the deportees will not be violent criminals but people guilty only of seeking a better life in the United States than they or their parents had in the countries from which they came.

They will include construction workers and other laborers who have been helping to fuel our economy – often taking jobs most U.S. citizens won’t touch -- after escaping poverty, strife and/or danger in their home countries. They also will include students in our public schools whose families came to the United States – often on difficult, dangerous journeys -- to build a better future for their children.

And if Trump succeeds in ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as he has threatened, the deportees will include thousands of schoolteachers, health care workers and other professionals, as well as successful businesspeople, most of whom have made significant contributions to the only country they have ever called home.

In other words, they will be people like the rest of us, trying to take care of their children and other loved ones, plan their futures and peacefully live their everyday lives – until they became Donald Trump’s targets.

Clay Robison

Between 2010 and 2022, according to a recent article in the Fort Worth Report, 530 companies moved to or expanded in North Texas, but only 8 percent of those picked Fort Worth. Mayor Mattie Parker and a large group of local civic leaders are alarmed the city isn’t doing a better job of economic development and are blaming the city’s largest school district, Fort Worth ISD.

A couple of months ago, the mayor took the unusual step of attending a school board meeting in which she publicly chastised the board for the district’s lackluster performance, as measured by the state’s STAAR-driven accountability system.

She cited statistics showing Fort Worth ISD badly trailing other major school districts in test scores and ranking 22nd out of 24 districts that serve more than 20,000 students with similar demographic characteristics. Since the mayor’s visit, the school superintendent has resigned under pressure, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in an editorial, has suggested that some school board members maybe should do the same.

Parker and more than 40 business and other civic leaders, including several other locally elected officials, urged the school board to adopt several priorities to turn the district around, including “clear and ambitious goals focused on student achievement” and “high quality instruction across every classroom.”

But whatever local issues must be addressed, the district’s problems didn’t begin, and they won’t end with the school board. If the mayor and her group are serious about improving public education in Fort Worth ISD, they also will publicly contact Gov. Greg Abbott and his legislative allies and demand they quit under-funding public schools. They will demand that Abbott and his allies significantly increase state funding for public schools during next year’s legislative session and drop their plans to enact a voucher program that would soon transfer billions of tax dollars to private schools.

If they don’t, the mayor’s education plea will fall short. Like Abbott, Mayor Parker is a Republican, although she holds what technically is a nonpartisan office. I haven’t been able to find a record of her endorsing private school vouchers, but she hasn’t disavowed them either.

Asked about her position on vouchers in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram two years ago, she replied that her “priority is to make sure that every student in every ZIP code has access to a high-quality education, regardless of what type of school you choose for your children.”

Sounds like she was open to vouchers but afraid to say so.

Some, perhaps most, of Parker’s fellow letter-signers are Republicans who also may support vouchers. But you can’t support vouchers and demand marked improvements in underfunded public schools without being hypocritical.

Texas public schools are underfunded, and many are operating with deficit budgets because the Legislature failed to increase public school funding last year, even with a record $33 billion state budget surplus. That’s because Abbott vowed to kill any additional funding without a voucher plan, which was killed in the House.

Lawmakers haven’t increased the basic per-student allotment for public schools since 2019, letting inflation erode school districts’ spending power. Texas now spends more than $5,000 less than the national average in average daily attendance. Deficits like that make it extremely difficult for school districts to hire and retain all the teachers and provide the other classroom resources necessary to provide the “high quality instruction across every classroom” that the Fort Worth education “reformers” are demanding. Diverting tax dollars to private schools would make it even more difficult.

Clay Robison

Immoral is a very judgmental word, often used to describe the behavior of people who display little regard for societal norms of fairness or decency. It also is used to describe unsavory business practices that prey on the poor or extreme political decisions, such as terrorist acts or military invasions that impose death and physical, financial and emotional suffering on large numbers of innocent people.

The word, however, is normally not used to describe a tax, at least not since the Boston Tea Party. Many other words – sometimes foul and often in anger – are uttered every day against taxes, but one witness – economist Vance Ginn -- called the property tax “fundamentally immoral” in a recent hearing before the state Senate’s Finance Committee.

Ginn is the former chief economist at the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation. His and TPPF’s ultimate goal is to eliminate the property tax, a goal they are not likely to reach. But they will continue trying to chip away at it, endangering a critical funding source for local governments, especially school districts.

There is nothing immoral per se about property taxes or any other tax because the revenue they raise helps pay for the facilities and services the public needs – schools; highways; clean water and sanitation facilities; police and fire protection; and national defense, to name a few. But there are serious problems with how the tax load is distributed in Texas, where the wealthier you are, the better the tax deal you get, while the poorest Texans pay the biggest share of their income in taxes. This is called a regressive tax system, and it is immoral.

In a recent study of tax systems in all 50 states, the non-profit, non-partisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) concluded that Texas – with its heavy dependence on property and sales taxes and absence of a state income tax – has the seventh most regressive tax system in the country.

The study determined that Texas households in the lowest 20 percent of income – those with incomes less than $21,700 per year – pay almost three times (12.8 percent) the proportion of their income in sales, property and other Texas taxes than households in the top 1 percent of income – people with incomes of more than $744,800 a year – who pay only 4.6 percent in state and local taxes.

Households in the middle 60 percent of income ($21,700 to $134,200) pay an average of 9.5 percent.

Many of the lowest income earners in Texas are immigrants (they don’t get a free ride on taxes), and many are renters who help their landlords pay their property taxes but don’t benefit from the homestead exemption tax breaks their landlords receive. And the lowest-paid Texans don’t get the business tax breaks that some of the wealthiest Texans get for their companies.

After analyzing the ITEP report, Dick Lavine, senior fiscal analyst for Every Texan, noted that the state comptroller also produces a study of tax incidence, showing by business sector and family income who pays Texas taxes and who doesn’t. He said the two studies differ in some specifics but reach the same conclusion: “Texas public services are supported by an unfair tax system that takes the most from those who can afford it the least.”

I repeat. That is what’s immoral about Texas taxes.

Clay Robison