By Dr. Steve Brown
We’ve been hearing a lot about vouchers here in Odessa lately. Political operatives from Austin have been traveling the rural circuit trying to gin up support for creating a new taxpayer-funded entitlement in the form of education savings accounts or ESAs.
In their pitch, they say the state needs to empower parents to make the best choices for their children by allowing them to take public tax dollars and use them for “educational expenses.” But vouchers and ESAs do the exact opposite.
The irony is that ESAs take power away from parents and put it in the hands of private schools, because under voucher plans it’s the private schools that get to choose which students to enroll, which services to provide, and what kind of instruction to offer.
Texas lawmakers and the State Board of Education have spent the past three decades establishing what Texas public schools should teach and how they should do it. They devised school academic and financial accountability systems to ensure that parents, taxpayers, and legislators have access to information on how schools are performing and how they’re spending tax dollars.
ESAs, in an ironic twist, would allow public money to flow to private schools that have no accountability to parents, taxpayers, or legislators and that are not required to post information about their budgets and how they would spend our tax dollars. Why should the state liberally spend hundreds of millions of dollars of our money on a school accountability system that some are now willing to ignore for private schools receiving state funds?
Legislators are currently in Austin having robust debates about the need to empower parents to view school curricula and instructional materials, but private schools aren’t required to post their curricula or instructional materials like public schools. And there is no publicly elected school board for parents to petition for change or vie for a seat to spur that change.
To be clear, Texas parents already have many options. They can send their kids to public schools, charter and magnet schools, virtual schools, homeschools, or private schools. But it’s not up to Texas taxpayers to fund a system of private schools or to pay someone in Austin to create an avenue to fund a school that is not consistent with the values of the people of Texas. We should focus on investing in our constitutionally mandated system of free public schools that empower parents to be truly engaged in their children’s education.
Steve Brown is a Trustee on the Ector County Independent School District and a longtime educator.
