How to Control the Electorate 101
It begins when lawmakers use public money for private education
At 2:00 a.m. on Thursday, the Texas House passed a piece of legislation 30 years in the making, a bill your reporter hoped never to see become law.
The bill is about “school choice,” an innocuous-sounding but destructive program that reallocates money earmarked for public education and gives it to families to pay for private and parochial school tuition.
Governor Greg Abbott has made it his mission to push school choice through the Texas legislature. After several years and many false starts, he has succeeded. In 2024, Abbott targeted 15 anti-voucher House Republican incumbents during their primary races. Jeff Yass, a hedge fund billionaire from Pennsylvania, provided $12 million to “primary” those incumbents.
During the vote last night, Republicans fended off a number of amendments, including one that would have required an income cap to access the money. And another that would have put school choice on the ballot in November. The bill earmarks $1 billion for school vouchers, allocating $10,000 per student. Now, that billion dollars will not be available to improve Texas public schools.
“The money that would go to this program would have gone to our public schools, would have given our teachers a bigger pay raise, would have kept more schools open, would have made more classrooms smaller,” Representative Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat, said after the vote.
Abbott, like most school choice advocates, believes children should be able to go to a school that “aligns with their values.” Since when did American public schools not align with American values? Since MAGA took over the Republican Party.
My Steady friends, we are witnessing a full-scale assault on the American education system, from the White House to state Republican parties across the country.
Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during the first Trump administration, said the proverbial quiet part out loud in an opinion piece in the New York Post. She wrote that school choice is meant to “liberate kids from race indoctrination.” DeVos claimed that parents were “tired of government-run, union-controlled schools imposing their theories of what’s best for them.”
Public education is not about indoctrination. It is about helping children develop the necessary skills to become functioning members of society. If there were a playbook for how to be an authoritarian leader, one of the first rules would be that you don’t want an educated electorate or functioning members of society. Trump’s efforts to shutter the Department of Education and push all educational decisions “back to the states” aligns with that mandate.
It is not just primary and secondary education the far right is trying to control. Look at what Trump is doing to the Ivy League, of which he is a product, by the way. He has threatened to cut billions of dollars in funding and revoke Harvard University’s nonprofit status because the school won’t comply with his demands to eradicate diversity programs and audit students’ political views, among other things.
The idea of school choice can be traced back to the late 1800s, but the movement didn’t gain traction until Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman published an essay in 1955 positing that the government could provide parents with money to spend on “approved” educational services. The idea percolated for several decades, and then in 1980, Friedman appeared on the PBS series “Free to Choose” to expound on the supposed benefits of school vouchers.
Friedman believed that school choice would benefit low-income children from under-performing schools and introduce competition into education. In its purest incarnation maybe that could happen, but school choice has been leveraged by many a state legislature to become a handout to wealthy families.
Over the following decades, the idea of school choice gained momentum, finding receptive parents frustrated with their public schools, especially during the pandemic. The U.S. has seen a sizable post-COVID expansion of school choice plans.
Today, 33 states offer some kind of school choice option. Those 33 states educate 40% of the school-age population. Twelve of the states allow participation regardless of financial need, meaning wealthy families and others have access to taxpayer funds to pay for their children to go to private school.
A study by Princeton University found that private and parochial schools in Iowa raised their tuition rates to take advantage of the state’s education subsidies.
During the 2023-24 school year, 569,000 students participated in school choice programs, out of the 8.6 million school-aged children in the United States. That may not sound like a lot, but the number is growing rapidly. EdChoice, a nonprofit that promotes school choice, estimates that more than a million children are now part of school choice programs.
The 33 state programs vary greatly in tracking student achievement, participation requirements, per-pupil funding, and helping parents navigate their options. It is therefore challenging to determine if the programs are achieving better outcomes for students.
The Economist looked at several randomized trials measuring the academic achievement of students utilizing vouchers to pay for private school. It found that the programs did not produce better results because the best private schools were still financially out of reach and highly competitive.
At its core, school choice is a reverse Robin Hood scheme with virtually no accountability that takes money away from the millions of students who stay in public education.
This reporter is a proud product of public education and believes that an educated citizenry is essential for a democracy such as ours to survive and prosper. Great public education lifts everyone up. But that’s not the goal here. Trump and Republicans want complete control. Who will suffer? The public at large, especially the poor. Billions will be taken away from public schools that desperately need every dollar.
The wrecking of America’s public school system is underway. Will we allow this to continue?
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Dan
I taught for several years in a Catholic high school - many of the teachers were not state certified (which didn't necessarily mean they were bad teachers, but...) and we took in students that really needed special education services which we did not have! That was mid career...the rest of my time was proudly spent in public schools, where students were treated as the individuals they were and given the services they needed. Vouchers do NOT do that!
Dan rather is a gem treasure of true decency