If Gov. Greg Abbott has his way, legislators called back for the third special session of the calendar year will pass a school voucher bill that gives families $8,000 a year to fund their children’s attendance at Christian schools and other non-public schools in Texas.
The Senate has already approved such a bill, and Abbott made it clear Thursday that without passage of his voucher bill, he will not consider teacher pay raises or additional school funding, even in a year when legislators have a $32.7 billion budget surplus. Teachers were the only state employees who have not won pay increases.
“I want to make sure we provide a carrot to make sure this legislation gets passed,” Abbott said at a Thursday event organized by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an ultra-right think tank closely associated with his push for vouchers. “Once (education savings accounts) are passed, I will put on the legislative agenda full funding for public education, including teacher pay raises for teachers across the state.”
Few public school leaders and teachers are likely to regard Abbott’s quid pro quo as a “carrot.”
Post-pandemic, many of the state’s 1,087 public school districts in the state are facing critical financial and operating challenges that include a severe exodus of teachers who left the profession discouraged by low pay, stressful work conditions and increasing political interference in how and what they teach in the classroom.
The Texas Legislature passed a budget this past May after allocating much of the record $32.7 billion surplus, none of which was used to increase teacher pay or per-capita student spending. Texas ranks in the lowest quartiles of states for public school funding.
Not all of the surplus has been earmarked, and Abbott and his Republican supporters led by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are urging legislators to reverse their rejection earlier this year of a school voucher bill. Rural Republicans in the House, already under attack from Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton for their impeachment votes, traditionally have joined with House Democrats to defeat voucher initiatives.
This time they will vote with targets on their backs, as Abbott and Paxton take aim at Republicans who do not fall in line. The House has already approved a bill raising teacher pay and school funding. How it responds now to Abbott’s line in the sand will keep all eyes on the Texas Capitol this week.
More than vouchers are at play here.
There is no separating Abbott’s voucher initiative with hard-line Republican cultural warriors who oppose gay marriage, LGBTQ empowerment or legitimacy, and anything else they consider to be “woke-ism,” to use Abbott’s phrasing at one Christian school appearance earlier this year. That visit to a Denton Christian school was part of Abbott’s early year “Parent Empowerment” tour, put together with help from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an extremely conservative think tank. On that tour, Abbott held a series of rallies exclusively at Christian schools around the state. He made no stops at nonsectarian private schools, Catholic schools, Jewish schools, Muslim schools or Sikh schools.
Abbott’s voucher bill is all about energizing his right-wing Christian base on those culture issues at the same time he ignores church-state separation embodied in our democracy. After all, Christian schools are free to ignore the law on gay rights, for example, and indoctrinate students with traditional Christian stances on marriage, sexuality and gender.
Even with public dollars flowing to such schools under a voucher bill, the schools would remain free of any state accountability measures. It’s hard to envision a voucher bill as “school choice” when the schools benefiting from the legislation would not be held to the same performance standards applied to public schools.
Abbott avoids unscripted encounters with the mainstream media like the plague, so it is unclear why he is not more responsive to the needs of hundreds of public school districts in Texas struggling to avoid deficit budgets and stem the flight of teachers leaving the profession. Even a record budget surplus did not lead Abbott to call for even minimally improved investment in the state’s 5.5 million K-12 students.
I was disheartened to read comments by state Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins (D-San Antonio), who is associated with the Gervin Academy on San Antonio’s East Side, seemingly accepting the inevitability of a successful voucher bill while speaking on a Texas Tribune Festival panel in Austin. Other Democrats remain united in opposition to Abbott’s voucher plan, focusing instead on passing a bill that gives teachers a pay raise and school districts additional financial support.
San Antonio state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, is leading the effort in the House to stop any voucher legislation that Patrick and the Senate send to the House.
“The House has spoken on vouchers already on two occasions [this year],” Martinez Fischer said in an interview with the San Antonio Report’s Andrea Drusch in September. “It’s never been a soft count. What we’re dealing with is executive obstinance. We’re dealing with a governor who’s not happy with that, and will continue to push this uphill.”
I can’t recall a more dysfunctional time in the governance of our state, and that is saying a lot.
The special session that opened Oct. 9 will play out against a backdrop of recriminations and payback after Paxton’s show trial in the Senate ending with his return to office. Patrick, the allegedly objective trial judge, erupted after the verdict, condemning House Speaker Dade Phelan and House Republicans who joined with Democrats to vote for impeachment.
The outcome is anybody’s guess at this date, but one certainty is that Texas public school children will continue to suffer the consequences of this serial campaign to divert public funds to Christian and sectarian schools.
