Grading Texas

This year’s version of the voucher bill – the big tax giveaway for private schools– will soon hit the Texas House floor, where the fight will be intense. One thing is certain: Voucher advocates will keep lying about their bill right up until a vote is taken.

Their most common lie – and it is utterly absurd — is that the diversion of $1 billion in tax funds to private schools over the next budget cycle will not hurt public schools or harm the educational opportunities for the vast majority of Texas students who will remain in public schools.

Voucher advocates claim falsely that funds spent on vouchers won’t take any money from public schools because the two programs will be funded from different revenue streams. But the truth is that the Legislature, when all is said and done, has only one pot of money to draw from, and that is the state budget. Our underfunded public schools need all the tax dollars that lawmakers spend on K-12 education. Public, not private, schools are state leaders’ responsibility under the state constitution, and our leaders are failing that responsibility.

Gov. Abbott often claims that Texas can adequately fund public schools and maintain a tax-paid voucher system for private schools too. That’s a lie because Abbott and other state leaders aren’t adequately funding public schools now. Texas teachers, on average, are paid more than $9,000 less than their national peers, and Texas spends more than $5,000 less per student than the national average, ranking our state 46th, near the bottom of the barrel, in that important measure of financial commitment to public education.

The state hasn’t raised the basic per student funding allotment in six years. Consequently, scores of public school districts are cutting programs and increasing class sizes to address budget shortfalls. Texas also is suffering from a teacher shortage.

It is obvious that diverting $1 billion to private schools will worsen public schools’ financial plight, and that $1 billion will grow to $3 billion by 2028 and more than $4 billion by 2030 if the voucher bill passes, legislative budget experts predict.

The House school finance bill, which leaders claim will help public schools, is insufficient. It will raise the basic per student allotment by only $395, only about one-third of what school finance experts say is necessary to simply help school districts recover from six years of inflationary erosion of their budgets.

Now, how about the argument that this voucher bill will help children from low-income families? The truth is a $10,000 voucher (the approximate amount most recipients would receive each year) is not going to help most low-income parents pay the higher tuition and fees that many private schools charge. Nor will it help them pay for the transportation costs it will take to get their kids to school. Most private schools aren’t located in low-income neighborhoods and, unlike public schools, don’t provide free bus service.

At Abbott’s insistence, legislators are considering a universal voucher plan, which, if enacted, will end up providing tax subsidies to many upper-income families who already are sending their children to private schools. Meanwhile, most low-income kids will remain in public schools that will increasingly become under-funded. This is what happened with a universal voucher plan enacted in Arizona a few years ago. It also quickly became a budget-buster.

Advocates still call vouchers a “school choice” program. That also is a lie. Texas parents already have the choice to send their children to traditional public schools or charters, which are tuition-free, or to private schools, if they can afford them.

But if they choose private schools, even with a voucher, the choice of admission is not with the parents. It is with the school. Unlike public schools, which accept every school-age child in the district, private schools can pick and choose, and vouchers won’t change that.

Clay Robison

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.

Clay Robison