How to get school choice reform? Keep fighting.
Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Republican, worked with families and school choice activists to pass school-choice legislation.
SB1 would have given parents who want to take their kids from public to private schools $8,000 a year for tuition, textbooks, and other expenses: taxpayer money that parents would have been able to spend as they saw fit instead of being forced to let public schools get it regardless of performance.
The educrats and their allies were opposed. “Public dollars belong in public schools. Period,” was the comprehensive argument of the Texas Democratic
With his own party constituting a majority of lawmakers in each legislative chamber, it seemed that Governor Abbott and families could have won anyway. The state senate did pass school-choice legislation. As it turned out, though, too many Republican lawmaker in the house were on the anti-choice team.
Which Republicans? The ones that Abbott and other friends of school choice targeted in this year’s primaries. They spent millions of dollars backing challengers who support school choice. And the governor appeared at campaign events to criticize incumbent Republicans who oppose it.
The net result? Of the current 21 anti-school-choice GOP representatives, only six to ten will be returning to the legislature in 2025. (The exact number won’t be known until runoffs on May 28.)
The elections may thus bring enough of a change in the state legislature to let school choice happen for parents and their students in Texas.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “School Choice Reform at Last”
Right answer (eventually) for Texas, it’s children, schools and the Republican party. Educational subsidies are for the education of ALL students which is best achieved when their parents have true choice.
Sorry and respectfully, Paul, I think you don’t grasp what is really happening in the Texas and in the Texas GOP. This isn’t about “vouchers” or education at all. It’s about the Governor, Lt. Governor and our crooked AG, Ken Paxton, hiding behind “school choice” in order to lord over rural Republicans and to unseat anyone who chalenges them and the rights of Texans to electoral competition–within the the GOP and now in the general election.
What kind of states and nations have one party, huh?
It’s only a matter of time before the Texas GOP is rendered a mere image of itself and a major interference into the prevailing cultural/political statement of Texans. The words “independent” and Texan are redundant, and I don’t mean secessionist. We are tired of corruption, cronyism and lack of electoral competition that, for the moment, has crowned Gov. Abbott, King Greg.
This article by Rep. Glenn Rogers, who was taken out in the GOP primary, borrows a quote borrowed from the very independent Davey Crockett. This is where the state is really headed, thanks to the power-mad yo-yos who work for billionnaire bully who opposed representative government. His name is Tim Dunn and his “Christian Nationalism” is, thankfully called out by Rogers: https://www.weatherforddemocrat.com/opinion/rogers-ill-wear-no-mans-collar/article_62c2c326-dbd9-11ee-bffc-bf52e1a4654c.html
Best wishes, Linda Curtis, Independent Texans PAC, the poorest little pac in Texas, not a political whorehouse
Rogers is insistent that school vouchers are inappropriate, but I don’t find him making the case. You insist that his loss wasn’t really about school vouchers, but I don’t find you making the case.
Is the governor supposed to be the servant of the legislators, rather than of the people of Texas? If so, then why do the citizens elect the governor directly, as opposed to the legislators?
As Dave Hodges has been saying, “Toss them all” in the primaries.
See? It can work.