Abbott voucher plan lets Texans pick their poison
There’s a political paradox at the heart of Greg Abbott’s current push for school vouchers.
The Texas governor made his school-choice case during a Monday event on the South Side at Picapica Plaza. He reiterated that case two days later during an interview with Lubbock radio host Chad Hasty.
As part of Abbott’s proposed Parental Bill of Rights, he wants to divert our tax revenues from public schools to private education.
We all know that this reliably Republican state has been doing some political shapeshifting over the past few election cycles. Big cities and suburban areas are increasingly gravitating to Democrats, while the GOP maintains a firm grip on rural areas.
The paradox behind Abbott’s voucher plan is that the rural communities where his party’s support is concentrated generally are the regions that most value public education. They are blue-collar communities, and many of them don’t have private-school options available to them.
Abbott seemed to acknowledge this reality when Hasty asked him about the voucher plan.
“One argument in the rural regions against this is they don’t have as many options to send students to, and hence it kind of is irrelevant to the rural regions,” Abbott said.
“But what that means is it doesn’t change anything at all in the rural regions of the state of Texas. So there’s neither an upside nor a downside for the public schools in rural Texas.
They lose absolutely nothing.”
Think about this for a second. The governor wants you, the parent, to have all the power. Unless you live in a rural community, in which case, you should just forget the whole thing. It’s “irrelevant” to you.
State Rep. Diego Bernal, D-san Antonio, mocked the governor’s position with a tweet pointing out that Republicans often accuse Democrats of being “urban elitists,” but Abbott’s parental-empowerment proposal is geared to serve big-city private schools.
Abbott offered another revealing nugget during the Hasty interview, when he talked about private-school admissions policies.
“If a parent wants to take their child to private school X and private school X doesn’t want any part of it, that child will probably not be admitted into that school,” Abbott said.
In other words, when Abbott advocates for “school choice,” what he really means is that it’s the school’s choice. Under Abbott’s plan, private schools will have the choice to receive tax money siphoned away from public schools, but they also have the prerogative of excluding any students they don’t feel
like admitting.
Keep that in mind every time you hear U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz or Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick refer to school choice as “the civil rights issue of the 21st century.”
The big lie at the heart of all this is Abbott’s contention that he wants to fully fund public education, but he simply intends to let education dollars follow the student.
“Every school will continue to be fully funded on a perstudent allocation, based upon the number of students who go to that particular school,” Abbott said.
For one thing, you can’t “continue” to fully fund Texas public schools if you’re not already doing it. This state consistently ranks in the bottom third of states when it comes to publicschool funding.
And while it may be true that under a voucher program public schools would continue to receive the same per-student allotments they currently get, that doesn’t take into account the fact that major portions of school budgets — teacher payrolls, utilities, etc. — are baked in and will remain the same, even as the funding stream decreases.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of parental choice. I just don’t define it the same way as our state’s political leaders.
If you want to send your kids to a religious school, a secular private school or school them at home, you’re entitled to that choice. I just don’t believe it’s a choice that should be paid for by the taxpayers of Texas.
Of course, the reason for Abbott’s new election-year vehemence on vouchers is that it ties into his party’s current culture-war theme: that public schools are disregarding the concerns of parents.
Last year, GOP lawmakers made a big show of banning the teaching of critical race theory, even though they couldn’t point to a single K-12 school where it was being taught.
At Picapica, Abbott got a huge round of applause when he promised to “protect our students from obscene content” and “pornographic material.”
By “pornographic material,” he apparently meant any library book that acknowledges the reality of same-sex attraction.
That’s where the limits of parental choice come into play.
If you’re homophobic, you have the parental choice to pressure your school into throwing out any library book that makes you uncomfortable.
But if you’re the parent of a gay child, Greg Abbott doesn’t have a Parental Bill of Rights for you.