Conservative states often take cues from Texas when it comes to education policy, with the Lonestar State serving as the a testing ground for Bible lessons in public schools and restrictions on teaching about race and gender.
But will that change under a new state government largely dominated by Democrats?
Dana Goldstein explored the issue in her piece for The New York Times, “Are the School Culture Wars Over in Texas?”
How influential has Texas been when it comes to conservative education policy?
Texas has been influential for decades. If you go back to when George W. Butch was governor, he started really looking at standards and accountability and school choice in Texas. He brought some of that nationwide with No Child Left Behind, which became a very controversial law, and over the decades, Texas’ influence has only grown.
It has been at the forefront of restricting discussions on gender and race in the classroom. It has been at the forefront of trying to bring more sort of western civilization or classical ideas into the curriculum, and it has, of course, embraced education savings accounts, that voucher-like program that has rolled out this year in Texas, an enormous change for the state. Most of the Republican states across the country have embraced private school choice vouchers over the past decade, and this blue wave really threatens those programs.
How many of those things could Democrats change overnight?
Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has actually been quite cautious to sort of temper expectations around the Texas Education Freedom Accounts, the voucher program. As you know, she campaigned heavily criticizing the program. She talked about it all the time. She featured it in her advertisements and talked about in her public appearances, but when asked, ‘will you repeal it?’ she’s been very careful to say, ‘I don’t think that’s realistic to fully repeal it, and that is because the state senate remains in Republican hands.
Now, people who support the program are still very concerned because, currently, it is written into law in a way that allows it to expand over time. Right now, these vouchers, the $10,000 to pay for homeschooling costs or private school tuition, are targeted toward low-income and some middle class families, but the intention was to reach universality. I think with more democratic control in Texas, they can definitely halt that expansion and kind of freeze it in amber. That is something I think we’ll see in other states as well that have switched from a Republican to a Democratic governor or who have had at least part of their legislature become more democratic.
Another thing they can do is build in more accountability into how these dollars are being spent on private education. They can require schools to file more paperwork. They can require parents receiving the funds to file more paperwork. This is something that supporters of the program don’t like. They see it as empowering to parents to have a lot of freedom and choice and not a lot bureaucracy on how the dollars are spent.
Is bipartisanship necessary if you don’t want your policies to be threatened every single time the political winds blow one way or the other?
I think that a lot of conservatives who really forged ahead with their education agenda in the Trump-era are coming to that conclusion.
Bipartisanship and education reform were, in some ways, born in Texas. I spoke earlier about George W. Bush. His reforms had many centrist democratic supporters, both in Texas and then when he became president and pursued school reform nationwide. President Obama and George W. Bush actually agreed about quite a lot when it came to schools. So, over the past decade, there’s been this sort of erosion of that sense that there was a commitment from both parties to improve traditional public schools, the schools that about 90% of American students go to.
Some folks I’m talking to on the right, with this big loss that they took, are saying, ‘where is there opportunity for partnership with at least some Democrats?’ And I’m hearing a few topics again and again, that members of both parties are saying is something that they can cooperate on is education. That would include more apprenticeships, more workplace education, more sense that teenagers need help finding their place in a challenging job market.
Another area is early literacy, making sure that we’re teaching young children to read in a way that is backed by science. Early childhood education and pre-K historically has been a place for bipartisan cooperation. It’s something that actually Greg Abbott made progress on as well, and I would certainly expect to continue to see that with the Democratic governor.
Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning are the hosts of KERA’s NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Miranda at msuarez@kera.org or Ron at rcorning@kera.org.
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