After Democratic Gov. Ann Richards left office, Texas stood among the top tier of states in education.
At that time, Texas 8th graders ranked 21st in math proficiency and 24th in reading — outperforming California, according to the Nation’s Report Card, the nation’s longest-running evaluation of academic achievement.
However, our 8th graders now rank 34th in math and 44th in reading, and the state is among the bottom 10 in per-pupil funding — $6,000 below the national average.
In short: the Texas GOP inherited classrooms filled with smart kids and turned them into a confederacy of dunces.
The reason comes down to more than lawmakers’ neglect, though. The defunding has been premeditated.
Gov. Greg Abbott actively purged his own party of the rural and moderate members of the Texas Legislature who refused to back his voucher scheme.
The total estimated cost to public schools? A whopping $294 million, according to one recent report. With annual public school funding directly tied to student enrollment, nonpartisan watchdogs Every Texan and Our Schools Our Democracy estimate that for every student who leaves a Texas public school, their district would lose $8,000 in state funding.
“[T]he total estimated loss of $294 million in funding will mean real harm if districts must respond by cutting teachers, reducing student services, limiting extracurricular opportunities, or even closing more schools,” Texas Center for Voucher Transparency Director Dee Carney warned in a recent statement.
Lexi Churchill, who covers Texas vouchers for nonprofit newsroom ProPublica, cautioned during a recent reporters roundtable about the lack of transparency when it comes to private schools accepting charter money.
Numerous failed attempts to pass vouchers offered Texas lawmakers “plenty of time to look at what other states had done,” Churchill said. However, she added, the Lege fell short of “requiring private schools in any way to follow the same types of accountability or transparency. Charter schools that fail three years in a row are automatically shut down under state law. But the state of Texas has none of those powers when it comes to private schools in the voucher program, even though they are receiving taxpayer dollars.”
Fortunately, this month’s blue tsunami swept a few more former teachers into office, and they have promised to teach the government a lesson or two.
Katy Padilla Stout, the Democrat who won the U.S. House seat representing South Texas’ 23rd District, served as an Northside ISD elementary school teacher, and new U.S. Sen. James Talarico taught 6th grade language arts at the West Side’s Jeremiah Rhodes Middle School.
Meanwhile, Democrat Gina Hinojosa, Texas’ newly elected governor, played second fiddle to no one in making public education central to her campaign.
“The first thing I’m going to do is fire the Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath,” Hinojosa said in September on the Express-News’ Off the Cuff podcast. “We need an educator in that position to put us back on the right track.”
Hinojosa also wants an evaluation of all independent contractors involved in education.
“I know there’s a lot of grift there, because I see those bills pass out of the legislature. They’re just big vendor bills that go to some of Greg Abbott’s donors,” she said. “Take that money and use it to pay our teachers their worth.”
An Oct. 22 Houston Chronicle report bolsters her allegation.
“Texas Comptroller Don Huffines has refused to say how millions of dollars of state funds have been distributed to private schools and vendors through the voucher program” despite repeated public information requests, the paper reported. Although his office turned over a list of some 2,200 approved vendors, it provided “no information about how much money each has received.”
Democratic state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, who beat Huffines in this month’s election, has vowed an audit.
Meanwhile, Eckhardt promised to end corporate getaways and put teachers back in control of classrooms.
“We are just losing teachers. They’ve decided to leave the profession. They’re not paid. They’re not respected,” she said. “We have for the first time more uncertified teachers joining the profession than certified ones.”
The more experienced educators Texas drives away, the greater the bureaucratic tendency to idiot-proof the curriculum and teach to the test.
But state-level candidates aren’t the only ones standing up for public schools.
Democrat Kristian Carranza, who won the Texas House seat for the South Side’s District 118, where she grew up, has pledged to scrap the much-detested STAAR exam and increase the basic per-student allotment.
On the other hand, her opponent in the race, Jorge Borrego, was one of the architects of the state’s voucher program under the auspices of a Koch-funded think tank innocuously named the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
“There’s nothing wrong with private school. If you’re able to afford private school tuition for your child, that’s a blessing, and I truly believe that,” Carranza told Texas Public Radio’s The Source. “But we have to be very honest about this — the majority of children in Texas have never been able to access private schools and never will be.”
Indeed, 98% of kids in District 118 attend public school, while three out of four voucher applicants have never attended a public campus, she added. That means vouchers are essentially gifts to upper-middle-class families who now get a taxpayer-funded subsidy to pay for pricey tuition.
“If you look at my district, it’s very blue-collar,” Carranza said. “If the private school is on the other side of town, these are parents who have to be up and ready at work at 7 a.m. They don’t have the time to drive 40 minutes back and forth.”
Far from promoting “school choice,” Texas has been raided by Robin Hood’s twisted twin who robs from the poor to give to the rich.
As I write this column, Paris is burning. Young people there are protesting teacher and school nurse shortages, overcrowded classrooms without air conditioning and the rising cost of food, rent and basic necessities.
Right-wingers online have made great hay suggesting voters should re-elect law-and-order Republicans to keep a lid on possible riots here at home. Except, under Emmanuel Macron’s presidency, France’s funding for secondary schools and universities has failed to keep pace with inflation, falling by €839 million, Reuters reports.
It’s a relief to see Texas finally elect leaders who have promised to audaciously invest in public institutions before students hit the streets in protest.
Texas politics is a mess. We make it a readable mess.
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