School Daze, Texas Style 🏫

ah the epitome of free choice pic.twitter.com/r0Kjh0ARik

— George Conway🌻 (@gtconway3d) February 27, 2023

"School choice" does not mean the schools will choose you.

UT-Austin is a public college.  It is also very hard to get into.  You may choose UT, as a graduating high school senior.  That doesn't mean UT will choose you.

They banned Nobel prize-winning books and targeted critical race theory. But what seems like an outbreak of local skirmishes is part of a decades-long push to privatize the Texas education system, @mimiswartz writes.

Read our full March cover story: https://t.co/hoSADu1wiS pic.twitter.com/U0yu2IXC5f

— Texas Monthly (@TexasMonthly) February 16, 2023

It's a fairly good review of the current effort in Texas to provide "vouchers" and "school choice," although it focusses far too much on the travails of one school board member in one atypical (but convenient to Austin, hem-hem) school district. There's not enough attention paid to Dan Patrick and promoters of vouchers, and why they promote them, except to note the effort was pretty much started after Brown v. Board finally got to Texas (where it hit my East Texas small town school district years before it got to "liberal" Austin, because school desegregation was still a court matter when I moved there in the late '70's, and continued to be so for another decade. My East Texas ISD just shut down the black schools and never looked back, although Robert E. Lee High school, the one I attended, was finally torn down (terrible architecture) and replaced with "Tyler Legacy."  The other high school was named for President John Tyler, a noted segregationist and racist who championed Texas' entry into the Union to have another slave state involved.  So, yeah, racism runs deep there.) To answer my own question, why do they promote them?  Follow the money.

Abbott's new plan is to give parents "Education savings accounts" which contain the money they pay to their ISD in property taxes (easily the largest part of any property owners property bill.  My house is taxed by the city, the county, the ISD, and a handful of quasi-government agencies including the Port of Houston.  My school taxes are easily the lion's share of the bill.).  This is particularly attractive to people who imagine that money is what they need to get Jr. into private school and away from all those...deplorables.  They like the term; they just don't like it applied to them.

Unless, however, you have a house worth multiples of millions, the taxes you pay to a school district won't cover the tuition for a good private school in the area at all.  Besides, you have to get your kid there, buy the uniforms, pay for the activities, etc., etc., etc.  "Poor" kids in such schools are social pariahs (I know from the experience with my daughter) and feel their "poverty" as the children age into social awareness and glib discussions of luxury vacations and even luxury toys.  But first, you have to get your kid in.  Having the money is not enough.  Your kid has to be accepted.

The people who imagine moving their kids to the "Harvard" of the local private schools will be quickly disappointed to find out that, like Harvard, private schools don't accept all applicants.  They'll also be disappointed to find out their school taxes don't pay the tuition.  So what's the point?

The point is to give a tax break to the parents who already send their kids to private schools, and who live on the most expensive real estate in the school district.  Not so they can afford the schools; but so they can put some money back in their pockets.  Why should they support public schools they have no interest in, after all?  Why should the rich support the poor?  Are there no workhouses?*

But then can't people take their money to "new" private schools, which will be less costly but provide as good an education?  Been there, done that.  Texas tried this before, with "charter schools."

Some well-managed and well-funded charters lived up to their promises, but many became mired in scandal. This may have been because, as one school historian noted, “the State Board of Education granted charters to just about everyone who applied.” The objections to charter schools are akin to those regarding vouchers: when students leave public schools, the money goes with them, often to institutions of debatable quality. As critics of both vouchers and charters have asserted, this setup often proves more lucrative for the companies that run them than beneficial to the students who enroll.

Yes, unlike private schools, the SBE was not very discriminating, and it was a fiasco so bitter and public the program was ended in the next legislative session and basically never spoken of again.  Dan Patrick & Co. think public memories have faded enough we can try again.  No one really expects the results to be any different.

You have to understand people in Texas have no clue how schools are financed, except when they see their annual tax bill.   Payment of school taxes goes directly to the district, but that money goes to Austin where it is redistributed under "Robin Hood," because Texas has rich and poor school districts and the Texas Supreme Court decided several decades ago the financing system violated the Texas Constitution because rich districts did very well, thank you,  and poor districts, as we say in Texas, sucked hind teat.  Austin has been redistributing funding ever since, taking local dollars away from local districts.  When my district pointed this out to parents and taxpayers about 10 years ago, there were screams of protest that the district was "wasting money" or sending it to Austin rather than using it here.  They didn't understand that had been going on for 3 decades (at that time), or why it was going on at all.  Ignorance is bliss.  And it's perpetual.

Most people in Texas still don't understand school finance.  They just think they're paying too much and getting too little because that's what everybody tells them.  The local school board put four crazies on the board (of the type discussed in the TM article) who vowed to "fix" the "reading scores" which they were convinced were down in the district.  The fact is those scores stayed strong through the pandemic shutdown and rose when students returned to the classroom.  The new board members faced that reality and now don't know what to tell the people who elected them expecting radical change and "improvement."  But they'll make up something.

And the mouth-breathers will believe it, because they prefer to.

*Further complicating the matter, "Robin Hood" works by considering the value of taxable property in a district.  The more valuable the property the "richer" the district, and the more likely it is to be tagged as needing to give up some of that money to the general fund to be sent to other, poorer districts.  But if you both assess the wealth of a district on the basis of its property values and allow the taxes for that property to be removed from the district before distribution to the state, aren't you screwing over the urban districts likely to have residents who want their kid in private school?  Rural districts usually have only public schools, some so small the superintendent is also the high school principal. They won't face that problem, so you screw over the big city districts (Dallas/Fort Worth area; Houston area (there are nearly a dozen ISD's in the Houston SMSA alone), Austin, San Antonio, El Paso) who lose money two, maybe three times, before it's over.  Somehow I don't see the Legislature working out that little wrinkle in one session; much less meeting the concerns of rural districts who can't afford to lose any tax dollars.  Basically, I don't see this happening.  But I'm an optimist.