The Campaign to Sabotage Texas’s Public Schools
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politi...hools/#comments
What seems like an outbreak of local skirmishes is part of a decades-long push to privatize the education system.
By Mimi Swartz
March 2023


Joanna Day has never been a fan of horror movies, which is why she didn’t yet realize she was starring in one in real life. If you had to pick a turning point in her story, the part when everyone in the audience feels their jaws and shoulders tighten because they know—unlike the oblivious, trusting protagonist—that really bad things are about to happen, it would be when a member of the Hays County Sheriff’s Office showed up at Day’s home, in Dripping Springs.

It was a hot evening in August 2020, with the sun just about ready to give up on the day. The family was collected around the dinner table, which, thanks to its second-floor location, felt like it was in a tree house nestled in the branches of some comforting old live oaks. Day loved this house, with its rooms laid out every which way on three floors, the abundant windows filling the place with light. It was filled too with family: husband Eric, three towheaded children, two dogs, and all the accompanying detritus—kid toys, dog toys, books, and clothes dropped willy-nilly but in a good way, a happy way. Day’s indomitable optimism showed in the print hung in the stairwell with the famous Methodist maxim (“Do all the good you can by all the means you can”) and in the words on a multicolored abstract sculpture in the front yard (“Kindness can change the world one heart at a time”).

Tonight, as on most nights, plates clattered, silverware clinked, and the high-pitched voices of the kids—two boys and a girl, all under twelve—rose and fell as each competed to describe the best part of their day. “We only talk about the peak, not the pit,” is the way Day, 47 years old, describes this ritual. Focusing on the good calms the kids and fosters a positive outlook.

On this evening, though, the doorbell rang while someone was just about to get to their good part. Everyone went silent. The house sits high atop a hill on several brambly acres, a ten- to fifteen-minute drive from the middle of town. No one ever just showed up at the door, except the occasional Amazon driver, and he just tossed the packages and raced off.

The kids looked at their mom expectantly. Day pushed back from the table and trotted down the twisting flight of wooden stairs to the front door. When she opened it, a uniformed officer was holding her Lab mix, Heath, by the collar. Heath was panting proudly. How kind that he found our dog and brought him home, began Day’s internal dialogue. I have no idea how he got out.

But when Day focused on the officer’s words, she realized he wasn’t talking about the dog at all. He was young and blond and, she thought, unaccountably anxious. “We got a call about a domestic disturbance,” he said.

Now Day was confused. She didn’t know of any disturbance, except that with three kids, every day brought at least one. But rowdy children weren’t what the officer was talking about. Whoever had made the report, he said, “heard people threatening to kill each other.”

Day is a small, pale, brown-haired woman with a delicate, underplayed prettiness and a melodious voice. These characteristics can make her seem harmless, like someone who is maybe too nice for her own good. But before she became a full-time mom in Texas, Day was a public defender and an adjunct law professor at Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C. She’d also taught in one of the city’s underserved public schools and lived a block away from an open-air drug market. Day had lingering fears about a stray bullet piercing the walls of her house. After she gave birth to her first child, in 2009, those dangers figured into her and Eric’s decision to move to Austin. Later, in 2015, they moved twenty miles southwest, to Dripping Springs, where ostensibly the biggest threats were fire ants and rattlesnakes.

But in the past few months, Day’s sunny life had grown dark. There had been phone calls with no one on the other end and Facebook posts in which her name was attached to lie after lie. Once friendly faces shunned her in the grocery store. And just the other day, someone had told her about a local troll doxing her on a neighborhood website, posting her home address. Now this officer was suggesting the danger was coming from inside her house?

After witnessing the quizzical faces of three clearly safe kids, the officer retreated. That’s when Day started fuming. She had no proof that the dinnertime disruption was related to previous threats, but logic suggested it was. Someone was trying to rattle her, and the reason seemed clear. Day had unknowingly made one big mistake after moving to town. In 2019 she had run successfully for the Dripping Springs Independent School District’s board, a job that not long ago had been about as controversial as cafeteria lady.

But that was then.

The scenes have become weirdly familiar all across Texas. Just a few years ago, furious, placard-waving parents protested pandemic-induced school closings and mask mandates. Now that anger has been redirected toward school library books that deal with issues of race and gender and toward the supposed teaching of critical race theory, a college-level framework for examining systemic racism that is not actually taught in Texas public schools.

A school superintendent in Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth, told a group of librarians that if they aren’t conservatives, they’d “better hide it.” In the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, northwest of Houston, three trusted incumbent school board members lost their elections, largely over their support for a resolution condemning racism. Other long-serving school board members throughout Texas have suddenly found themselves having to defend teachers who have been labeled, without a shred of evidence, as pedophiles or “groomers.” A Grapevine high school imposed new rules that led to a student walkout, with students calling the rules transphobic. Texas recently took the national lead in book banning (a frequent target is The Bluest Eye, by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison), and some school librarians who tried to hold the line against unwarranted censorship became targets of death threats.

Taken individually, any of these incidents may seem like a grassroots skirmish. But they are, more often than not, part of a well-organized and well-funded campaign executed by out-of-town political operatives and funded by billionaires in Texas and elsewhere. “In various parts of Texas right now, there are meetings taking place in small and large communities led by individuals who are literally providing tutorials—here’s what you say, here’s what you do,” said H. D. Chambers, the recently retired superintendent of Alief ISD, in southwest Harris County. “This divisiveness has been created that is basically telling parents they can’t trust public schools. It’s a systematic erosion of the confidence that people have in their schools.”

The motivations for these attacks are myriad and sometimes opaque, but many opponents of public education share a common goal: privatizing public schools, in the same way activists have pushed, with varying results, for privatization of public utilities and the prison system. Proponents of school privatization now speak of public schools as “dropout factories” and insist that “school choice” should be available to all. They profess a deep faith in vouchers, which would allow parents to send their children not just to the public schools of their choice but to religious and other private schools, at taxpayers’ expense.

But if privatizing public education is today cloaked in talk of expanded liberty, entrepreneurial competition, and improved schools for those who need them most, its history tells a different story. In 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, a group of segregationist legislators in Texas, with support from retiring governor Allan Shivers, began concocting work-arounds for parents appalled by the prospect of racial integration of public schools. One idea: state-subsidized tuition at private schools. That never came to pass, but it was Texas’s first flirtation with vouchers.-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Insane.

@Sparrow
@Mrdoherty
@Yereffinbrother
@pco5aa
@mimi2020

Inside the Secret Plan to Bring Private School Vouchers to Texas
Political operatives descended on the Hill Country town of Wimberley with a scheme to send taxpayer dollars to private schools. Now they’re shopping the same blueprint elsewhere.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politi...chers-to-texas/
By Forrest Wilder
October 18, 2022


The proposal landed on Greg Bonewald’s desk like a pipe bomb. Bonewald, a soft-spoken career educator, had served as a teacher, coach, and principal in the fast-growing Hill Country town of Wimberley for fifteen years. In 2014, he took a bigger job as an assistant superintendent in Victoria, about two hours to the southeast. But he maintained an affection for Wimberley, and when its school board sought to bring him back as superintendent this year, he was thrilled. His honeymoon would be short.

In a document obtained by Texas Monthly, stamped “Confidential” and dated May 3—the day after Bonewald was named the sole finalist for the job—a Republican political operative and a politically connected charter-school executive laid out an explosive proposal for “Wimberly [sic] ISD.” (Out-of-towners frequently misspell “Wimberley,” much to the annoyance of locals.) Apparently, the plan had been in the works for months and had been vetted by the outgoing superintendent. But Bonewald said no one had bothered to mention it to him.

One of the authors of the plan was Aaron Harris, a Fort Worth–based GOP consultant who has made a name for himself by stoking—with scant evidence—fears of widespread voter fraud. In June, he cofounded a nonprofit called Texans for Education Rights Institute, along with Monty Bennett, a wealthy Dallas hotelier who dabbles in what he regards as education reform. The other author was Kalese Whitehurst, an executive with the charter school chain Responsive Education Solutions, based in Lewisville, a half hour north of Dallas.

Their confidential proposal went like this: Wimberley would partner with Harris and Bennett’s Texans for Education Rights Institute to create a charter school tentatively dubbed the Texas Achievement Campus. But “campus” was a misnomer, because there would be none. The school would exist only on paper. Texans for Education Rights would then work with ResponsiveEd, Whitehurst’s group, to place K–12 students from around the state into private schools of their choice at “no cost to their families.”

The scheme was complex but it pursued a simple goal: turning taxpayer dollars intended for public education into funds for private schools. The kids would be counted as Wimberley ISD students enrolled at the Achievement Campus, thus drawing significant money to the district. (In Texas, public schools receive funding based in large part on how many students attend school each day.) But the tax dollars their “attendance” brought to the district would be redirected to private institutions across the state.

The plan was backed not only by an out-of-town Republican operative and a charter-school chain with links to Governor Greg Abbott, but by a Wimberley-based right-wing provocateur who bills himself as a “systemic disruption consultant.” Texas education commissioner Mike Morath—an Abbott appointee—also seemed to support the deal.

Its proponents have called the scheme pioneering and innovative. Though the effort ultimately failed in Wimberley, one of its backers says he is shopping the plan around to other districts. Critics have raised all manner of alarms.

“I’m not accusing anyone of laundering money, by the legal definition, but there sure are a lot of hands touching a lot of money in this,” said H.D. Chambers, the superintendent of Alief ISD, a district in the Houston area that serves 47,000 students. He also pointed to another, more sweeping, concern: “It’s a Trojan horse for vouchers.”

The most transformative of a set of policies often described by proponents as “school choice,” vouchers allow students to attend private schools using taxpayer dollars. For more than sixty years, school-choice enthusiasts have tried, and failed, to create a voucher program in Texas. Texas’s first dalliance with vouchers came in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools. Following that ruling, segregationist legislators studied ways to keep Hispanic and Black kids from attending schools with non-Hispanic white students. (One unsuccessful idea was for the state to subsidize tuition at private schools for parents who didn’t want their child to attend an integrated school.)

In recent years, voucher proponents have flipped their rhetoric. School choice, they now argue, is a way to empower poor and minority families to get their kids out of underperforming public schools and into charters and private schools that are presumed to deliver better education. But their arguments and lobbying efforts have encountered deep resistance from voters. Teachers and administrators generally view vouchers as a thinly veiled privatization scheme and a threat to public education. They cite considerable evidence showing that vouchers, far from empowering poor families, drain money from struggling public schools while subsidizing wealthy parents who can already afford to pay private school tuition. Poor parents, meanwhile, still cannot send their kids to private schools because tuition often far exceeds the voucher subsidy.

As a result, vouchers have remained deeply controversial in Texas, and for decades an anti-voucher coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans—in whose districts the public schools are often the only game in town—has proved durable.

But the politics of public schools shifted sharply during the pandemic. The backlash against compulsory masking, the moral panic over textbooks and classroom teaching about issues of race and gender, and the palpable anger in some quarters toward teachers—all of that has animated the skeptics and enemies of public education. In January, Abbott announced a parental “bill of rights” at a charter school run by ResponsiveEd. The proposal was light on details and mostly seemed to be a repackaging of existing law—more of a nod to conservatives than a big policy shift. But then in May, the governor made waves by giving full-throated support for a voucher program.

Many school-choice activists now see the 2023 legislative session as their best chance yet to pass a voucher program. (The corporate-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation called it “do or die” in a fund-raising letter that also pledged to “free 5.5 million Texas public school students from being a captive audience to both Marxist and sexual indoctrination.”) But these activists still face strong headwinds. “Even though the governor and the lieutenant governor want vouchers badly, there’s a serious concern that a deal is not going to pass the Legislature,” Chambers told me. He pointed to the proposal that landed on Bonewald’s desk in Wimberley. “There are people doing things like this to try to circumvent the will of the Legislature by creating their own voucher system.”-- excerpt, rest at link above --