Gov. Greg Abbott’s voucher plan would defund Texas’ public schools to aid wealthy elites

BY KEVIN SANCHEZ

Editor’s Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

As for the 10,000 ‘private’ schools that England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve nothing except suppression. They are simply commercial undertakings, and their educational level is actually lower than that of elementary schools. It is all too obvious that our talk of ‘democracy’ is nonsense while it is a mere accident of birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the education they deserve.” — George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” 1941

Unless he starts calling multiple legislative sessions, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has until June 18 to sign a school voucher bill into law — and he’s clearly hellbent on doing so.

But one need not be a data scientist like Matt Worthington, who sits on the Del Valle ISD Board of Trustees, to stumble upon an inconvenient detail Worthington recently published in an Express-News op-ed, which is that there are no private schools in a majority of Texas counties.

So, where exactly does Abbott’s much-touted “school choice” come in?

According to the research firm General Academics, the average cost for attending a private school last year was almost $24,000. Yet the proposed bills in the Lege would funnel a measly $8,000 to parents to pay for tuition.

Indeed, the Texas Education Agency’s deputy commissioner recently let the jaguar out of the trick-bag when he admitted during a taped phone conversation that voucher programs in other states showed that “yes, traditional public school districts are getting less money.” That, in turn, would necessitate the firing of teachers.

That official was later reprimanded for stating facts.

That two right-wing activists broke the story is not only a delicious irony but something that signals the strange bed-fellowship between Democrats and rural, religious Republicans on this issue.

The ever-tireless Mothers Against Greg Abbott took out billboards declaring that education savings accounts “will turn off your Friday lights,” referring to affluent private teams dominating scholastic championships in voucher-beset states like Florida. Once you start messing with high school football, the fists of Texans across the political spectrum clench in unison.

Talk of diverting funding from public schools could not arrive at a worse time, what with a raft of recent school closures and teacher vacancies.

“A state-backed program that for decades has helped districts keep their credit scores high has reached its debt limit ... resulting in more than $6.87 billion in unguaranteed bonds,” the Texas Tribune documented in February.

And there’s more. “Since the end of pandemic-era federal waivers that offered free lunch to 50 million kids nationwide, school meal programs face rising food costs, staffing shortages, supply chain issues and a growing pile of unpaid debt,” Brandon Rodriquez reported in the Current’s previous cover story.

Though the Texas GOP prides itself on cutting red tape, it still forces financially struggling families to fill out a bunch of paperwork — meal application forms, income verification, Social Security numbers — just to keep their kids well-fed enough to learn.

In this year’s State of the State address, Abbott touted Texas as “number one for National Blue Ribbon Schools.” He neglected to mention our state ranks 44th in the nation in per-pupil education spending.

This broaches a fundamental disagreement over the ideal of what equal access to education means. For many on the right, equality simply means meritocracy or “equality of opportunity.” In other words, everybody begins at the same starting line, and to the winner go the spoils.

Moderates and liberals alike are content to criticize the real-world implementation of that philosophy by noting, given inherited wealth and various kinds of unearned privilege, some runners start meters ahead of the rest. Status has an uncanny way of getting recycled into merit. This argues for intervening to reset the starting line — or what’s annoyingly called “equity.”

There is, however, a more damning criticism of meritocracy dating back to at least Abraham Lincoln’s speech at the Wisconsin State Fair, and in popular parlance, it’s called “the American Dream.” In any classroom, there are a few A students and a few F students, but most of us land somewhere in the middle.

What about the person who works hard all their life and can’t afford to retire with dignity? What about the kid who earned a college degree and is now carrying around boulders of debt? What about those in the middle of the pack who are trying their best? If not a mansion, much less a yacht, don’t they at least deserve their own version of the white picket fence?

Funnily enough, the word “meritocracy” was coined in the 1950s by a British sociologist who intended to describe a Gattaca-like dystopia where the majority is ruled by unaccountable experts. In everyday terms, when one hires a plumber, one doesn’t need the Albert Einstein of plumbing, one just needs someone willing to get their hands dirty and knows which end of a pipe is which. Competence and grit, in lieu of excellence and spotless credentials, often enough get the job done. At its core, “equality of opportunity” both whitewashes and devolves into smug elitism.

All this to say, the Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses and Bill Gateses of the universe are going to be fine whether they attend private schools or drop out, whether taxes on the top bracket are 5% or 50%, whether they chose to remain on our humble planet or shuttle off to gentrify Mars.

But not everything in life needs to be a competitive sport, much less a rat race. Rather than coddling the strongest and fastest, we need to build and maintain public institutions — schools included — that not only provide a safety net for those who fall behind but do right by the workaday joggers.

That’s the American Dream. Not billionaires buying elections, manipulating the democratic conversation and duping gullible conservatives into privatizing essential services that we the people rely on.

The news is not all bleak in that regard. Two weeks ago, after a three-day strike that shut down the country’s second-largest school system, the Service Employees International Union, Local 99, reached a deal with the Los Angeles Unified School District on pay raises for its bus drivers, custodians and other support staff. That $22.52 an hour is a far cry from what the minimum wage would be had it kept up with worker productivity over the past half century. But we can dream.

Albert Einstein was a socialist, by the way, and generally a poor student.