Want to improve local public schools? Join the fight against vouchers
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.