Texas 3rd Special Session
On October 5 Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that he was bringing the Texas legislature back for the third time. On the agenda are three main issues: to give parents more choice with education for their children, to strengthen laws to combat illegal immigration and to prevent private employers mandating COVID-19 vaccines for their employees. The special session officially began on October 9 and the education bills are proving to be particularly contentious, so lets focus in on the school choice bills that have been introduced, explore some of the most controversial issues and see how legislators have been voting.
The bills
Legislators have not wasted any time in taking advantage of this extra opportunity to introduce bills. To date, 203 bills (and a bunch of resolutions) have been introduced in the new special session. You can see all the bills (and a couple of the more interesting resolutions) in this stakeholder page. But while there has been a flurry of filing, only 12 bills have so far made any progress into committee or further, split fairly evenly between the House and Senate. Of the 12, there are two that relate to education, nine that are about immigration and just one about COVID-19 mandates. Let's take a look at the education bills in more detail.
The "school choice" plan
The drive to give Texan parents more control over their children's education by introducing 'education savings accounts' (ESAs) is at the heart of this special session. In fact, Governor Abbott has already stated that if the legislation does not pass then he will bring forward a fourth special session to tackle it again. This isn't the first time legislators have attempted to introduce such legislation. This stakeholder page shows that there were 14 bills introduced in the regular session in 2023, none of which passed.
There are also three bills in the special session directly related to ESAs, only one of which has made progress. It is SB1, introduced in the Senate by Republicans, which provides for $8,000 per year stipends for students to attend private schools of their parents' choice. The stipend would be available to 60,000 students (roughly 1% of all students in Texas) and would cost half a billion dollars. The $500m will be in addition to existing education funding. Thirty percent of the funding would be prioritised for low income households and a further 20% for children with disabilities.
SB1 is supported by SB2, which provides an additional $5.2bn for the public school system by increasing per student funding by $75 (which amounts to 0.1%), provide bonuses for teachers and doubles funding for school safety. Abbott has also signalled that, if SB1 passes both chambers, he will introduce legislation in the special session to address teacher pay, as an incentive for sceptical lawmakers to support the bills.
Differing viewpoints
The Senate Education Committee heard testimony from supporters and detractors on October 10. Proponents (largely parent groups and private schools) insisted that the 'education savings accounts' will allow parents more choice over the schooling their children receive, with some citing concerns with how gender and race theory are taught in Texan schools. Those opposing the legislation (mainly teachers and public school advocates) dismiss it as a voucher system, and claim that it hurts the public school system. They were concerned that the bill does not require private schools to meet the same accountability requirements as public schools and claim the proposal does not require appropriate tracking of the demographics of the students benefitting from the program. How can you be sure that public funds will not be used to merely subsidise the parents who already choose to send their children to private schools? Equality groups are also concerned that private schools (unless they directly receive public funding) are not subject to Title IX rules preventing discrimination on the basis of sex, gender or sexual orientation. The new education savings accounts provide money to parents, not schools, and so would not serve to bring private schools into the purview of Title IX.
Democrats, vehemently opposed to the proposals, introduced their own bills to address what they perceive as the chronic underfunding of the public school system. Democratic Senator Jose Menendez introduced SB40 which, among other things, raises the per student funding by 23%. The bill, to date, has not made progress through the Senate.
The National Picture
Texas is far from the first state to look at providing this kind of choice with schooling. According to Ed Choice, 13 states currently have some kind of publicly funded, government-authorized savings account to pay for schools costs and other expenses. Most of these are limited in scope, but of note is Arizona which was the first state to introduce them in 2011 and in 2022 expanded its Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program to full universal coverage. Previously, The Arizona Supreme Court had struck down two voucher systems on the grounds that they could be used to fund religious education and were therefore unconstitutional. The ESA program avoided this by providing funds directly to parents and allowing them to choose how to spend the money (while limiting it to schooling related matters). This has been the model adopted by other states wishing to fund more choice.
Bill Progress so Far
Back in Texas, both SB1 and SB2 passed out of committee with the vote splitting along party lines and subsequently crossed over the the House. The votes again split exactly along party lines, with all 19 Republicans in favor and all 12 Democrats opposed.
The bills face a rockier road in the House, however. House Republicans, particularly those representing rural communities, have always been suspicious of anything which risks affecting funding to public schools. Rural communities tend not to have many private schools, and the public schools will often act as community hubs, so representatives will not support measures which risk drawing funding away from them. It is this concern which has prevented earlier iterations of the policy from becoming law. It remains to be seen whether this latest push by Governor Abbott includes enough incentives to win over sufficient Republicans to get the bills over the line. The House consists of 64 Democrats and 86 Republicans, meaning the bills will need at least 76 Republicans to back them (assuming all Democrats remain opposed, which looks likely).
With thanks to the Texas Tribune for this rather excellent article on Education Savings Accounts.
Image: By Nick Youngson, published by Alpha Stock Images
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