Abbott: Vouchers today are different
Governor is trying to get Legislature to pass proposal predecessors Bush, Perry couldn’t
George W. Bush couldn’t pass a private school voucher program as governor of Texas, and neither could Rick Perry.
But Gov. Greg Abbott sees an opening that he’s convinced is going to allow him to pull off what neither of those last two Republican Texas governors could get done.
“Not only do I see something, but the reality is, the facts are different today than they were under Bush and Perry,” Abbott said in an exclusive interview with Hearst Newspapers.
That has Abbott using the bully pulpit of the governor’s office to put more pressure on the Legislature on the issue than at any point during his eight years as governor.
On Monday, Abbott was in Corsicana as part of a statewide tour that has already included stops in Temple and Corpus Christi to rally support for the idea. In each location — typically the home territory of a Republican member of the Texas House or Senate who has been against vouchers or lukewarm to them — Abbott’s message is similar, saying he needs help lobbying the Legislature.
“I need you to stand up with me and fight with me all the way to get this done for the kids of the great state of Texas,” Abbott said during his stop in Temple before hundreds of parents and students at a private school.
Temple is in the district of state Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, who is the chair of the House Public Education Committee and has voted against voucher programs in the past. In Corsicana, Abbott was in Navarro County, which is represented by Republican Rep. Cody Harris of Palestine, who also
has voted against school voucher legislation in the past.
Abbott is planning another stop in Conroe on Tuesday.
But for all his traveling, Abbott only had to look out his office Monday to see what he is up against.
Thousand of members of the Texas PTA held a bipartisan rally outside his office on the South Lawn of the Texas Capitol to demand, among other things, that the Legislature oppose private school voucher programs.
“School vouchers hurt Texas public schools because they direct funding away from an already critically underfunded system,” the Texas PTA states on its website.
Among those showing their support for the Texas PTA was state Sen. José Menéndez, a San Antonio Democrat who said he’s seen this issue come up time and time again in the Legislature. Menéndez predicted that Abbott will fail to get the measure through, like Bush and Perry did.
“I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” Menéndez said.
He said Abbott does not fully appreciate the role public schools play in much of Texas as community centers and employers.
Also at Monday’s event, state Rep. Ken King, a Republican from the Texas Panhandle, said he’s an “unequivocal no” on school vouchers. He told the crowd it would be one thing if the state were fully funding all public schools and taking care of their needs, but that isn’t happening.
Abbott, a Duncanville High School graduate, continually has said during his tour that he fully supports public schools. He also has claimed publicly that school funding is at an alltime high in Texas, though that is not true when the numbers are adjusted for inflation.
“Public schools play a vital role in the state of Texas,” Abbott said during his speech last month in Corpus Christi. “I attended public schools my entire life growing up in the great state of Texas.”
But Abbott says he’s convinced virtual learning programs early in the COVID-19 pandemic exposed issues in public schools that have created momentum for private school choice options, such as vouchers. During his speech in Temple, he noted parents were upset with mask mandates and what they heard from some teachers.
“Parents are angry about woke agendas being pushed on their children in schools,” Abbott told the crowd to applause at a private school in Temple.
There is also national momentum on the issue in that Iowa, Utah and Arizona (all states that had been resistant to school vouchers) adopted programs similar to the one Abbott is touting in Texas.
Abbott said he wants the Legislature to expand eligibility for “education savings accounts” which could allow parents to use state funding for private school tuition, similar to a program just signed into law in Iowa. Texas already has an education savings account program that awards grants to families of special needs students for tutoring or therapy. Abbott said he wants to expand it to provide parents with more alternatives to local school districts.
Bush and Perry show how hard the issue can be in Texas.
Early in his tenure as governor, Perry pushed legislation unsuccessfully to give economically disadvantaged students in Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and Fort Worth tuition to go to private schools. Even toward the end of his final term, Perry was still calling for some kind of tuition program to help get students out of failing schools. It never went everywhere.
Before Perry, Bush made vouchers a priority issue, telling the Legislature in 1999 that “the time has come to try a pilot voucher program.”
It wasn’t.
More recently, Abbott called for school choice with a private school component in 2017. The Texas Senate passed a plan, but it didn’t get off the ground in the House. Since then, there’s been almost no progress from provoucher advocates until Abbott’s more aggressive push this year.