Governor Greg Abbott is on the verge of passing his highly divisive school voucher bill, which is expected to significantly impact K-12 education in Texas.
Dr. Stephanie Boyce recently highlighted in her article that “cash is still king.” The school voucher bill aims to increase the Educational Savings Accounts (ESA) budget to $1 billion, doubling the previous limit of $500 million. The state senate passed the bill on January 28.
Related: A Pivotal Year in Education… What to watch in 2025
Greg Abbott Promises…
Governor Abbott continues to insist that public school funding won’t be affected by this new funding. However, this is the same governor who refused to fully fund Texas public schools in 2023, resulting in multimillion-dollar deficits for several districts despite the state’s multibillion-dollar surplus.
The impact on Texas public schools was severe. Some districts were forced to close schools. CBS Texas reported that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) saw a record-setting 50,000 teachers quit in 2023, accounting for 13% of the state’s teachers. This exodus has left schools with no choice but to employ non-credentialed educators, making it even more challenging to meet rapidly changing academic standards that appear to be more motivated by political whims than providing Texas children with the highest quality education.
Moreover, these political whims have had the tragic effect of increasing inequities in public education. However, every story has a beginning. As we enter the 89th Legislature, Texas Republicans are busy railing against DEI (as if someone else was responsible for poorly qualified teachers) in what has become a three-decade pattern of Republicans enacting laws that don’t address actual issues only to later loudly proclaim that others must be to blame for the failure of its execution.
Expect more of this trend with the school voucher bill, which will only exacerbate the inequities. Here are just a few of the steps taken by the Texas Legislature in recent years that have resulted in the production of potentially troublesome instructional materials.
Critical Race Theory
Before the school voucher debate, Texas Republicans in the 87th Legislature were enraged about Critical Race Theory (CRT). Even though CRT was not part of the curriculum in Texas K-12 public schools, the Legislature enacted not one but three bills to address this non-issue. In addition to banning the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, House Bill 2497 created the 1836 Project, which purported to provide “patriotic education” but was criticized for potentially censoring certain historical perspectives.
Meanwhile, Governor Greg Abbott didn’t believe that House Bill 3979 did enough to abolish this non-existent CRT. So, he convened a costly special session that produced Senate Bill 3. This bill was even more restrictive about how teachers should address “controversial issues.” And in true Texas Lege fashion, nobody bothered to define what constitutes a controversial issue. However, the bill provided funding to develop civics training for teachers and administrators to ensure that they taught students about race, racism, sex, and sexism “objectively and in a manner free from political bias.”
This is from a legislature that defined CRT as anything about racism taught or even discussed in public secondary schools as opposed to the idea that racism is embedded in legal systems and not limited to individuals, a discipline taught at the university level.
Who’s Grooming Now?
In 2023, the 88th Legislature convened. While public schools struggled financially and teachers were fleeing the profession, Texas Republicans were instead obsessed with so-called “grooming” in K -12 public schools. That obsession resulted in Senate Bill 8. Buried deep in the 56-page bill was a mechanism to allow education service providers the ability to develop instructional materials without the imposition of requirements that may be “contrary to or limit the religious or institutional values or practices of the education service provider.”
That bill, along with House Bill 1605, set the stage for Bluebonnet Learning, a state-developed instructional material initiative by the TEA to provide high-quality educational resources that align with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards.
The Bluebonnet Plan
These updated standards now require Texas kindergarten students to learn, as their first lesson in Unit 6, Colonial and Native Americans, that “Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue.” The flipbook accompanying this section is 89 pages long. Yet not a single Black or Hispanic American is featured. There are, however, multiple pages featuring this white cartoon child.
Unit 10 for Texas kindergarteners is entitled “Our Great Country.” This unit’s 105-page flipbook found space for four images of Black Americans and one image of a Hispanic child reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which must be taught with the “under God” phrase intact.
The teacher guide in this section directs instructors to teach schoolchildren “work words” like “liberties” with prompts like “The Founding Fathers made sure . . . that people’s liberties would be protected.” Prompt 4 directs teachers to tell schoolchildren: “You have several liberties as an American. One is the freedom to practice the religion you believe in. Another is the freedom to talk about your beliefs.”
Unless, of course, schoolchildren believe that the Founding Fathers weren’t too concerned about protecting the liberties of Black people. There doesn’t appear to be any accommodation in the curriculum to express that particular belief. These are just two examples of what majority-white Texas Republican lawmakers deemed to be unbiased instructional materials in a state where nearly 74% of the 5.5 million Texas K-12 public school students are nonwhite.
To Bible or Not to Bible
Let’s now move to the “Bible-infused instruction” for K -12 public school students, now part of the state’s foundational curriculum for the upcoming 2025-2026 school year. Public school teachers are now mandated to include “religious literature, including the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and New Testament, and its impact on history and literature” as part of an enrichment curriculum.
But what about students of different faiths? According to the Bluebonnet Program and Implementation Guide for grades K-5, students will “encounter content that would be recognized by those who practice Islam, Buddhism, and other faiths.” So, why must Texas K-12 students learn about the Christian Bible?
The concern is that without such lessons, Texas children will be woefully unprepared to understand the meaning of Biblical phrases like “my cup runneth over.” In a state where 77% of the population practices the Christian faith.
Once again, the state is needlessly increasing inequities within the school system. And, ironically, undermining Republican school voucher plans. It hasn’t occurred to them that some parents will likely be less motivated to spend money sending their children to religious private schools if that instruction will now be mandatory in public schools.
Cash Is Still King
Finally, let us conclude with the point Dr. Boyce made. Despite the state’s insistence that adopting the curriculum is optional, districts that choose to implement the Bluebonnet program will receive extra funding of up to $60 per student. For a city like Dallas, where the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) currently serves just over 141,000 students, the refusal to implement the curriculum would result in a loss of $8.4 million. That’s a lot of money for cash-strapped districts to leave on the table.
Worst of all, none of these new laws address the persistent problems currently impacting Texas’s public school children. From staggeringly low scores on standardized tests to 113 school districts (so far) adopting a four-day a week schedule, there appears to be nothing in the pipeline to address the issues of student inequities.
But thank Greg we did something about that wretched, nonexistent CRT!
