Texas Legislature’s Voucher Hearings: Nine Hours of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

[TexasTowelie]

By Carol Morgan

There was a lot of money riding on today’s hearings in the Senate’s Education Committee, not to mention the future of 5,151,925 public school students in Texas.

Four bills, three of which were discussed today, represent just how powerful educational corporations have become and how influential they are in Tea Party Republican circles. They donate heavily to conservative campaigns with the full expectation of bending the will of Texas legislators.

SB 4 by Senator Larry Craig, R-Friendswood, and SB 642 by Senator Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, proposed to give tax breaks to corporations that donate to organizations who then provide scholarships to private and religious schools. That money would be diverted from cash-strapped public schools.

SB 276 by Senator Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, and SB 1178 by Senator Don Huffines, R-Dallas, would create so-called “taxpayer savings grants” which would shift a large share of state and federal funding for a public school student over to subsidizing tuition at a private or religious school instead.

These four Senators can dress up these bills with all the lipstick and right wing rhetoric they like, but they’re nothing more than a back door route to vouchers.

Yes, of course, the cheerleaders of this movement call it “school choice”, but it’s not much of a choice for students and parents, when the private schools and charters are allowed to “choose” the students who can attend. Public schools don’t have that luxury.

The hearings lasted a very long nine hours and finally ended with no decision; more kicking the can down the road. The pro-vouchers will retreat, regroup, and reload with a different strategy, but so will those who stand for public education.

The testimony ranged from absurd (the home school father who wants a voucher for himself) to fact-bending to blatant falsehoods. The voucher crowd may have had James Leininger and Phil Gramm (the former Senator who enjoys crashing things like schools and the world economy), but the public school advocates were equally articulate.

Raise Your Hand Texas, a non-profit that advocates for public education, gave this definition of vouchers: Vouchers are government subsidies of private schools, funded by taxpayer money, without the accountability of public schools. Vouchers are not a solution. They are a distraction. RYHT Director, Dr. David Anthony educated the committee on the fact that Texas already has ISD’s that provide school choice and listed the programs in Grand Prairie, Houston, Garland and San Antonio’s Northside.

The group Pastors for Texas Children (whose executive director is Charles Foster Johnson, the former pastor at Lubbock’s Second Baptist Church) was fearless in their defense of public education. This group’s done a remarkable job of trying to keep state and church separated, especially education.

Some of those who testified and the Senators who chose to comment or question, had their facts wrong or they just flat-out lied during the hearing.

Phil Gramm claimed that 40% of Texas students drop out, when the real truth was right on the TEA website: The Texas drop-out rate for 7-12 grade is 1.6%.

Senator Van Taylor, a member of the Senate Education Committee, lied to everyone in the room, claiming that no state who’d implemented vouchers had any regrets.

I’m unware of the sources he used for that bold assertion, but plenty of states regret implementing vouchers. North Carolina is full of remorse over their foray with vouchers. The North Carolina policy watch discovered that their state voucher program was nothing more than a pathway to fraud and abuse.

When vouchers were issued in Arizona, did it help the poor kids in failing schools? Nope. 70% of Arizona’s vouchers went to students who were previously enrolled in private religious schools before the state’s voucher initiative was even passed.

Quality education? Take a look at the crazy curriculum in Louisiana's voucher schools.

Milwaukee recently recognized 25 years of vouchers and officials there claim they see no difference at all in student performance.

[link:http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/carol-morgan/2015-03-27/%3A%20http%3A/www.politico.com/story/2013/10/vouchers-dont-do-much-for-students-97909.html%20%E2%80%A6|U.S. taxpayers are spending $1 billion a year for voucher programs and there’s scant evidence that it's helped.
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Even the private schools DON'T want vouchers. Latest Gallup poll shows that 63% of the public doesn’t want school vouchers either.

It seems the only people who desire vouchers are the educational management corporations and the Tea Party Senators who receive donations from those educational corporations. If you don’t think the two are intimately intertwined, consider this: James Leininger was given hours to testify today and the Texas President for the American Federation of Teachers was granted a generous two minutes.

Some of you may be asking James WHO? San Antonio physician and hospital-bed magnate James Leininger is one of the most generous funders of far-right causes in Texas. He’s donated millions of dollars to state political leaders in support of his efforts to create a publicly funded private school voucher program in Texas.

He’s donated a total of $20,000 to Senator Donna Campbell and he’s Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick’s largest donor, donating close to $200,000. He’s known in political circles as the “Sugar Daddy” of Texas’ Religious Right. He’s invested a lot of money in buying these two pro-voucher politicians and expects to get a return on his money.

It’s take a lot of guts for the Legislature to criticize the very schools that they helped to create by insufficient funding, changing the passing bar on testing year after year, and eliminating teachers. It seems as if the Tea Party Legislators have a willful desire to get Texas schools to fail.

But are Texas schools really failing? George P. Bush claims that a majority of Texas students are “trapped” in failing public education, but Politifact rated his claim as “false”, while Senator Jose Rodriguez offered hard data (not just opinionated rhetoric) that 96% of public schools met accountability standards last year while only 61% of charters did.

If anything, Texas’ failing schools are the metric of child poverty in Texas. It’s common knowledge that the single most important factor in educational success or failure is the socioeconomic level of the student. Texas has repeatedly held a place on the Annie E. Casey’s list of “10 Worst States to be a Child” and there are 1,742,000 (or 25%) children in poverty in Texas. We have 96% of all schools meeting accountability. You do the math to find the ratio.

There are 13 states that employ vouchers; all of them have different requirements and target different student groups. You will see little or no difference in the educational progress of those who use vouchers and those who attend public schools. And here’s more data that shows that public beats private in almost all categories.

Despite all this proof, there are some who will contend that we shouldn’t “throw more money” at public education. Why? Texas students are certainly not going to perform better with less money and public education will suffer greatly if more money is taken away in the form of vouchers. Education will fail.

But that’s Dan Patrick’s ulterior motive for pushing vouchers, isn’t it?

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Carol Morgan is a career/college counselor, a freelance writer, and former Democratic candidate for the Texas House. She is the award-winning author of two books: Of Tapestry, Time and Tears and Liberal in Lubbock. Email Carol at [e-mail] , follow her on Twitter and on Facebook or visit her writer’s blog at www.carolmorgan.org

http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/carol-morgan/2015-03-27/texas-legislature%E2%80%99s-voucher-hearings-nine-hours-good-bad#.VRYqkuHy3SI

Permission granted to post Carol's blog in its entirety.

[DreamGypsy]

1. et tu texas...

...the man with no name supports quality public education for all.