Grading Texas

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

To no one’s surprise, Gov. Greg Abbott and the pro-voucher crowd are spreading lies in their multimillion-dollar campaign to unseat Republican members of the Texas House who joined with Democrats to kill Abbott’s voucher initiative last fall.

Their assault in Republican primary races around the state include TV ads and similar attacks falsely accusing the anti-voucher lawmakers of killing a bill that would have increased public school funding and paid for teacher pay raises. They didn’t kill that bill. They simply voted to successfully remove a voucher program from it.

The person who really killed the bill was Abbott. After the voucher provision was removed, the remaining provisions in the bill never came to a vote because the governor had made it clear he wouldn’t approve the much-needed funding for public schools, educators and students without getting his way on vouchers for private schools.

You can call the ad, sponsored by a pro-voucher group called the Family Empowerment Coalition, misleading, as some media outlets are doing, but, really, it’s a lie.

Moreover, a leader of the Family Empowerment Coalition has been quoted as saying voucher advocates were trying to pass a limited voucher program “that would have served 1 percent of kids, all poor.”

This statement also ignores the truth.

The voucher proposal that died would not have been limited to low-income children, and the vouchers that would have offered $8,000 per year per student would not have come close to covering annual tuition payments and fees required by many of the states’ private schools. “Poor kids” and their families would not have been able to pay the difference, but many middle- and upper-income families would have jumped at the chance to receive a state subsidy for private school expenses they could already afford.

The governor’s campaign to unseat voucher opponents is not about “poor kids.” It’s about making super-wealthy campaign donors and school privatization advocates happy.

The so-called “limited” voucher program, had it been enacted, would have cost Texas taxpayers more than $2 billion a year within a few years, the Legislative Budget Board calculated. And that cost would have kept rising with billions of tax dollars going to private schools each year while public schools remained under-funded and in danger of shutting their doors.

The anti-voucher Republican lawmakers and their Democratic colleagues voted to protect their local public schools from predators, and that’s the truth.

Clay Robison

If anyone ever tells you that Gov. Abbott cares a whit about the school children of Texas, try not to laugh. Or cry. Or question their intelligence.

Just consider them uninformed, misinformed or simply in a state of denial.

It’s bad enough that Abbott is now campaigning against a group of Texas House members from his own party for trying to protect their public schools, something their constituents sent them to Austin to do. In a fit of political pique, the governor also intentionally left public school districts woefully underfunded, and the problem will worsen.

As you probably know, the House members targeted by the governor voted during a special session in November against the governor’s private school voucher priority. Had this plan passed, it would eventually have sent billions of Texas tax dollars each year to unregulated private schools, endangering the continued existence of our under-funded public education system and the futures of the children it serves.

After voting successfully with the House majority for an amendment that removed the voucher language from a broader public education bill, these legislators were prepared to vote for other provisions in the bill, including increased funding for public schools and teacher pay raises.

But the bill’s sponsor pulled the rest of the bill down and let it die as the last special session of 2023 came to an end.

Abbott had made it clear he was holding public schools hostage to his voucher priority, and when vouchers failed, so did much-need additional funding for public schools as well.

Now, some of Abbott’s pro-voucher allies – who may be receiving funding from the governor’s political account — are falsely telling Republican primary voters that the lawmakers who voted against vouchers also voted against public school funding. That is a lie.

Because of Abbott’s failure to support more funding for public education – even when the state had a record, $33 billion budget surplus – many school districts are now operating on deficit budgets that school boards adopted last summer in anticipation of more state funding, which didn’t come. Some districts also have dipped into reserve funds to pay for much-needed pay raises for teachers and support staff.

Although districts also are still struggling with learning-loss fallout from the pandemic, the state’s basic allotment of $6,160 per student hasn’t been increased since 2019, and school finance experts believed an increase of at least $1,000 was necessary last year to keep up with inflation alone. But the governor said no – not without vouchers.

The Legislature did enact some additional school funding for security measures, but it wasn’t enough to cover all the new state requirements.

With the next regular session of the Legislature not scheduled until next January and no special sessions anticipated this year, many school districts will have to adopt even-tighter budgets this summer for the 2024-25 school year. This will require additional difficult cuts, including jobs, affecting classrooms and other school programs.

Abbott hasn’t said much, if anything, about school budgets since the Legislature left Austin. But addressing the voucher fight, he said, “I am in it to win it.”

Greg Abbott is a disaster for public education.

Clay Robison

Jeff Yass, the wealthiest person in Pennsylvania and Gov. Greg Abbott’s $6 million man, has a passion for private school vouchers. That reportedly is the main reason he has spent millions of dollars in political contributions to candidates and officeholders, both in his home state and beyond, including the seven-figure donation that Abbott’s camp is calling the largest in Texas history.

He obviously expects Abbott to use the $6 million to boost the governor’s campaign to unseat pro-public education House members who voted against vouchers last year.

The co-founder of an investment firm whose personal wealth has been reported as $29 billion, Yass says he wants taxpayers to help send kids to private schools because public schools are “failing.” We have heard that line before from numerous voucher advocates, including the governor. It deliberately and unfairly deflects blame to educators. The people who work hard in public schools every school day and often after school aren’t neglecting their jobs or “failing” their students.

The Texas public education system is not failing. But schools have problems, and the ultimate blame for those belongs to, among others, the man on whom Yass just wasted – I hope – $6 million. The blame belongs to Abbott, his legislative allies and the like-minded policymakers who preceded them. Because of their neglect and misplaced priorities, Texas public schools are woefully under-funded, and untold thousands of school children are not ready to learn when they get to class – if they get there — because they are under-nourished, homeless or sick. More than 60 percent of our public school students are from low-income families, and the state leadership refuses to provide the quantity and quality of public support services these kids need.

Texas spends more than $4,000 less per-student than the national average, and average teacher pay is more than $7,700 less than the national average. Last year, Abbott and the Legislature had a record $33 billion budget surplus, presenting a great opportunity to play some catch-up. But when he didn’t get vouchers, Abbott peevishly refused to spend more on public schools. Now, more school districts are struggling with their budgets, which means it has become even more difficult for them to provide enough certified teachers and resources for students. Educators haven’t failed in their jobs. The governor has.

For years, Texas has also had the disgraceful distinction of being the national leader among the states in the percentage of residents without health insurance. Many of those people are children, many of school age, more of whom could be served by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). But Texas is one of only 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid eligibility for poor people, even though the federal government under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, would pay for most of the costs.

Texas also has some of the strictest income requirements for public health care in the country and makes it difficult – through red tape and excessive paperwork requirements — for people who are eligible for Medicaid to enroll in the program and stay enrolled. Last year alone, Texas dropped about one million children from Medicaid after the federal government removed Medicaid coverage protections imposed during the COVID pandemic.

Texas also has the second-highest rate of food insecurity in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and again children are doing a lot of the suffering. The free meals at school help, but they aren’t enough. The USDA now has a summer program offering monthly stipends for food assistance for children when schools are closed, but Texas has refused to participate.

And Texas’ care system for foster children, a long-running federal lawsuit has revealed, has endangered the health, safety and lives of thousands of vulnerable kids over the years and still needs improving.

Diverting billions of tax dollars to unregulated private schools would worsen the plight of public schools and further weaken these important public assistance programs.

If Abbott’s billionaire benefactor from Pennsylvania really wants to make a positive difference for education in Texas, he will pick a school district with serious budgetary problems – there are many — and issue it a $6 million check to use as its leaders see fit.

The district could use that check to give $3,000 bonuses to 2,000 teachers. Or it could buy supplies for 7,092 classrooms. This is based on the average $846 annual out-of-pocket expense for supplies most recently reported by TSTA members.

If the district used the $6 million to purchase summer meals for students at the $40 monthly stipend set by USDA, it could feed 150,000 children.

Contributing $6 million – or any amount — to Greg Abbott is a waste for the school kids of Texas.

Clay Robison