Grading Texas

This is Teacher Appreciation Week, a few days of cheap freebies from fast food joints and other businesses working to increase their customers while giving educators some well-deserved attention.

That’s the commercial version anyway, and it is certainly better than the political version from hypocritical officeholders issuing hollow plaudits with one hand while slapping teachers with the other. Not all politicians fall into that category, but those that do – people like Gov. Greg Abbott and his legislative allies — really stink.

I haven’t seen a Teacher Appreciation Week message from Abbott yet this year. Maybe I missed it, or maybe he figured out it was pointless, but here is last year’s message:

“Texas teachers play a vital role in shaping the Texas of tomorrow. We thank them for all they do as they educate the future of our state – our students.”

That message was issued in May of 2023, in the middle of a year in which the Legislature – in one regular session and four special sessions – failed to use one penny of a record, $33 billion budget surplus to increase funding for teacher pay or public school classrooms.

Why? If you must be reminded, it was because the Legislature also failed to enact Abbott’s real education priority, a voucher plan that soon would have diverted billions of tax dollars from underfunded public schools to private schools. So, Abbott, in a snit fit, kept his vow not to increase public school funding, creating serious budgetary problems for many districts and, in some cases, putting educator jobs in jeopardy.

The real purpose of Teacher Appreciation Week is to recognize and thank teachers for their dedication and hard work in educating all students who come their way and, to the best of their ability and resources, preparing those students for successful futures. All students means all students, including those with gender identities whom Abbott has chosen to harass and bully.

Appreciation means more than free donuts, two-for-one chicken wings or half-price hamburger combos, for which many teachers doubtlessly are grateful. Appreciation also means higher pay for teachers and school support staff and more resources for their classrooms, all of which has eroded under Abbott’s watch, while political attacks on educators have grown.

According to the National Education Association’s latest national survey of financial support of public schools and educators, the average teacher pay in Texas is now more than $9,000 less than the national average, and Texas spending per student in average daily attendance is more than $5,000 less.

The teacher pay deficit has increased by about $3,000 since Abbott became governor, and the per-student funding gap by more than $2,000.

Does Abbott appreciate teachers – or public education? What do you think?

Clay Robison

State Education Commissioner Mike Morath was flippant to the point of being disrespectful when, in an appearance before the State Board of Education, he blamed school districts for the rising number of uncertified teachers entering the profession.

Morath claimed that districts had given up on hiring certified teachers and had moved to “hiring people off the street…It’s as if district leaders say, ‘You have a heartbeat. Come o in.’”

Not only is Morath a bad comedian, if that is what he was trying to be, he also is a bad education commissioner. To him, student scores on STAAR tests are the essence of public education, and charter school regulation means giving charter chains as many campuses as they want. And he consults with teachers about as often as a total solar eclipse visits Austin.

According to the Texas Education Agency’s latest report, dated last month, only 34 percent of the latest batch of new Texas teachers are certified. That is not the fault of school districts.

Partly this is the fault of state government – and that includes Commissioner Morath – creating additional, alternative pathways by which would-be teachers can enter the classroom without credentials and little preparation.

A huge share of the blame though belongs to the guy who hired Morath. That would be Gov. Greg Abbott, who probably has driven off more teachers than the pandemic with his political attacks on educators, his endorsement of book bans, his support for private school vouchers and his refusal to increase public school funding, including for higher teacher pay.

Even with a record $33 billion budget surplus, Abbott slammed the door on public schools last year in an effort to win a voucher plan that would have diverted billions of tax dollars to private schools within a few years. Failing that, he then spent millions of dollars spreading lies against pro-public education Texas House members in the recent Republican primary and succeeded in replacing six of them, so far, with pro-voucher candidates with little interest in public education.

Meanwhile, budget-strapped school districts have been left doing their best to replace and retain thousands of good, experienced teachers for what many educators have come to view as a thankless job.

And Morath, the education commissioner, pooh-poohs their efforts.

Texas needs a better education commissioner, a real education commissioner. But we are not going to get one until we get a better governor. Right now, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel in both positions.

Clay Robison

School voucher advocates are already proclaiming victory when the new Texas Legislature meets next year, and with six anti-voucher Republican House members unseated in last week’s primary and four others headed to a runoff, it is clear the fight against vouchers – although not over — has become more difficult.

What is not so clear is whether vouchers had much to do with the election results. It seems more likely many anti-voucher voters were misled by millions of dollars’ worth of lies.

Gov. Greg Abbott and his school privatization allies mounted aggressive campaigns against the Republicans who helped kill last year’s voucher plan, but they didn’t openly make vouchers an issue. Instead, they used attack ads to spread falsehoods accusing targeted lawmakers of being soft on border security and killing a bill that would have increased funding for public schools and raised teacher pay.

The lies worked, even though the targeted Republicans voted for all the border security initiatives that Abbott demanded and would have voted for more funding for public education if Abbott had given them the chance. Instead, the funding bill was lost because the governor made clear he would veto it if he didn’t win a voucher plan for spending millions of dollars on private schools.

Abbott let the budget bill die during last year’s critical final special session after the legislators he attacked had removed vouchers from the measure. As a result of Abbott’s pique, many school districts are cutting budgets and operating with deficits, even though the state had a $33 billion budget surplus.

Abbott vowed to unseat the lawmakers because they voted against vouchers, but he and his allies dared not attack them head-on over vouchers because of long-standing opposition to vouchers among the legislators’ mostly rural constituents.

Voucher advocates claim that the large margin with which a non-binding referendum backing vouchers was approved in last week’s Republican primary is further proof voucher opposition is dwindling among rural Republicans, but it’s all in the wording.

The ballot proposition read: “Texas parents and guardians should have the right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.”

Something more to the point, such as “Do you support taking hundreds of millions of your tax dollars from your public schools and sending them to unregulated private schools?”, would have had a much different response.

Some of Abbott’s voucher targets also were targeted by Attorney General Ken Paxton and his right-wing billionaire supporters for voting for Paxton’s impeachment.

It will be a while before we find out if the pro-voucher celebration is premature. Four of the anti-voucher legislators will be in a runoff in May, and many of the GOP primary victors will face Democratic opposition in November. If the anti-voucher Republicans who voted against their like-minded state representatives in the primary figure out the governor’s game, and if the anti-voucher Republicans who stayed home last week vote against vouchers in November, anti-voucher Democrats may be able to pick off a few pro-voucher Republicans, although Texas’ political maps make that a difficult proposition.

The public school district is at the heart – and is often the biggest employer – in many rural communities, and vouchers could eventually destroy some of the smaller school districts – which are already underfunded — or force consolidation among districts.

Voters in most of those communities are overwhelmingly Republican. But if last week’s results in their party primary aren’t a wake-up call for voters who truly value their public schools, I don’t know what is.

Clay Robison

A Texas newspaper recently published an editorial acknowledging that Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick should “draw most of the fire” for failing to increase public education funding last year, leaving school districts with serious budgetary problems, including deficits and layoffs.

But the editorial said educators also were partly to blame for “refusing to budge over a modest school voucher pilot program.”

The reference, of course, was to the public education community’s unwavering opposition to spending tax dollars on private school vouchers, even though Abbott had vowed not to increase public school funding without them. And he didn’t, despite his constitutional duty to support free public schools.

Despite what the editorial claimed, the governor and other voucher advocates never intended to pass a pilot voucher program. I don’t recall the governor ever mentioning a pilot program. He intended (and still does intend) to pass a permanent voucher program, a program whose drain on tax dollars would continue to grow.

Even if you want to claim that Abbott’s education savings account (or voucher) plan from last year would have been initially “modest,” it wouldn’t have stayed that way.

The Legislative Budget Board estimated the voucher program, had it passed, would have cost taxpayers $461 million in fiscal 2025, ballooning to $2.3 billion by 2028. Many of the voucher recipients would have been kids who had already been attending private schools, including some from upper- or middle-income families receiving taxpayer-paid subsidies for tuition they already could afford.

Last year’s failed voucher program would have given priority to children from low-income families and kids with disabilities, but the program would not have been limited to them because Abbott demanded a wide-open program, a wide-open raid on tax dollars for unregulated private schools. In any event, the $10,500 voucher per year wouldn’t have been enough for many low-income families to pay the full tuition and fees at many private schools. And many private schools don’t accept children with disabilities or other special needs.

Meanwhile, the cost of the program would have continued to grow, until it was costing taxpayers – and public schools – untold billions of dollars a year.

This pattern of increasing voucher expenditures – at the expense of public schools – has been documented in several states with existing voucher programs.

According to a report, linked at the end of this post, by Public Funds Public Schools, seven states with some of the longer records with vouchers have seen substantial increases in state funding for vouchers over the years as funding for public schools has declined.

Public Funds Public Schools is a partnership between the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Examples in the report, released last year, include:

• Florida – This state, like some other states, has multiple voucher programs, and spending on three of the oldest programs increased by 313 percent between 2008-2019, while per-pupil funding for public education was cut by 12 percent.
• Arizona –Increased spending on voucher programs by 270 percent between 2008-2019, while cutting per-pupil spending for public education by 5.7 percent.
• Georgia – Increased spending on vouchers by 883 percent between 2009-2019, while cutting per-pupil spending on public schools by 1.9 percent.
• Indiana – Increased voucher spending by 796 percent between 2012-2019 and cut per-pupil spending on public education by 1.5 percent.
• Public school advocates understand they must kill voucher programs before they have a chance to get a chokehold on the state education budget and kill the public education system. We have seen what already is happening with charter schools.

The charters began rather modestly, but now they are beginning to strangle traditional public schools in Texas. There are hundreds of them with more campuses being approved every year. Many of these charters are not needed and don’t perform any better – often worse – than the neighborhood public schools from which they are now taking $4 billion a year. And that raid on tax dollars continues to grow, while average per-pupil funding for Texas public schools is more than $4,000 a year less than the national average. Read more.

Clay Robison