Rural Independence and Strong Support for Public Education is needed in Austin

The bullish push for ESAs in Texas will be a losing proposition for rural Texans and for the Texas GOP

Thanks to Gov Abbott's insistence, legislators are now back in Austin for their fourth special session. The Texas House passed border security proposals earlier last week and considered education bills, their final task, on Friday.

HB 1, a larger education bill containing an education savings account (ESA) proposal, cleared a House committee last week. Choice advocates announced, “it’s happening”, but during Friday’s debate, a group of 21 rather brave Republican legislators, primarily those who represent rural communities, successfully passed an amendment 84 to 63 to remove the ESA proposal from the bill.

HB 1 also contained teacher pay raises and an increase in funding for schools, but since the Governor has said he will veto a bill that does not give him the ESA proposals he wants, the author of the bill asked that the bill be sent back to committee so that they can work on it some more.

The Governor has been pushing “school choice” proposals since the beginning of the first regular session last January. He has been telling legislators they will stay in Austin until they deliver.

School Choice has been a part of education reform discussions for many years. President Bush pushed for choice options for students when he was Governor of Texas as a part of a larger accountability system for Texas education, and some form of a voucher program has been filed in almost every legislative session since.

Republicans have controlled the Texas legislature for more than 25 years, but not since Bush was governor have we had GOP leaders who campaigned or governed on true education reform. For too long, we have been tinkering around the edges of improving our education system. We now face teacher shortages and funding challenges, and following COVID, we are also seeing achievement gaps among students.

Conservative leaders are now pushing a solution in the form of education savings accounts, a voucher-type program that allows state taxpayer dollars (to follow an individual child to a non-public school setting with no accountability to pay for their education expenses.

Voucher-style bills have historically met resistance from rural Republicans, who have consistently opposed them because they fear these programs threaten the funding and focus the state would allocate to the public school system. They believe ESAs are a losing proposition for rural Texans and public education overall.

This philosophy puts our rural Republican legislators at odds with the current GOP leadership, who largely answer to urban and suburban voters who are not happy with their schools and have turned to Austin for help because they feel like they can’t change things locally.

In rural Texas, public schools are the heartbeat of our towns. The District is a major employer, a center of innovation, and a part of our community identity. The schools drive economic development by supporting our small, local businesses and educating and training students to give back to our community.

This is important. Rural legislators know that the long-term viability of their especially rural communities is tied to a strong public school system, and it takes a group of state leaders who are committed to that goal.

A close review of the bills under consideration reveals that these proposals will mainly serve education vendors, marginal private schools, and families who are already using school choice options to the detriment of the public school system as a whole.

The ESA proposal found in HB 1 only serves an elite, entitled group of students who live mostly in cities where private schools are located and those families who have access to resources to connect them to choice options. Under the current proposals, “universal” choice will only be available to about 60,000 students — there are 5 million plus students in Texas public schools — at a cost of nearly half a billion dollars to the taxpayers. Most rural students and students whose families can’t access the information on this program will be out of luck.

ESA proposals as a stand-alone is not the answer to bettering public schools. They will not serve all students. They will not be accessible to most students. They do not empower teachers. They do not move Texas education for all forward. And they do not fix anything in our public school system.

And while the GOP leadership’s push for “school choice” may be well-intentioned by some and good politics by others, the proposals on the table are simply not the right answer for the problems facing schools in Texas.

Billionaires and threatening rural legislators

The push for school choice legislation has been ramped up in recent years nationally and in the state of Texas because of the out-of-this-world amounts of money that have been pumped into organizations, candidates, and marketing efforts by West Texas billionaires, wealthy Texas businessmen, and out-of-state choice entities.

There has been a nationwide marketing campaign underway to convince parents and conservative voters that public schools are “woke” and they are trying to indoctrinate our children, and surprise, surprise, school choice is being touted as the answer to this problem.

In this coalition, some believe that the public school system must be replaced with private schools, and those who believe that public schools don’t serve students well.

The most concerning aspect of the push by the Governor and school choice proponents is that they have chosen to threaten legislators in their own party who oppose them. GOP legislators who are choosing to represent the desires of their districts and who vote against voucher proposals are being told they will face GOP primary challenges by the Governor and his associates if they don’t vote his way.

Rural independence is not allowed under this current regime. A political environment that punishes legislators who do not lock step 100% has become the culture, and this does not serve the party or the state of Texas very well. Long gone are the days when our leaders put Texas first, and we have since forgotten Reagan’s 11th commandment, “Thou shall not speak ill of another Republican.”

Texas is a large and diverse state, and there is a large values gap between urban/suburban Texans and rural parts of the state. The problems of the woke cities and suburban school districts are not the same problems faced by rural districts. Smaller rural districts face problems, too, but we exercise our right to address those issues at home and through a long-lost conservative tenet of local control.

Rural legislators should continue to stand strong, and we must continue to support them. Public education needs more advocates in Austin and more leaders committed to improving efficiency and accountability in our schools to ensure the best educational opportunities for all students in Texas.