Greg Abbott doesn’t get it.
To be clear, the governor gets it, literally, when it’s in the form of a $6 million campaign donation from the richest man in Pennsylvania. Jeff Yass, billionaire co-founder of a Philadelphia-based investment firm, is an anti-public school zealot who believes in using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private-school costs. His Christmas gift to Abbott last month is “the largest single donation in Texas history,” our $6 million man in the governor’s office crowed.
What Abbott doesn’t get — or refuses to acknowledge — is any sense of the needs and preferences of his fellow Texans. With financial backing from a trio of West Texas oil billionaires, Tim Dunn of Midland and the Wilks brothers of Cisco — all three Christian nationalists — he’s tried to muscle school choice through a regular session of the Legislature and two special sessions. He’s been swatted down each time by an unlikely coalition of House Democrats and, most recently, 21 mostly rural House Republicans. Abbott’s opponents on the issue are lawmakers who recognize how damaging tax-subsidized private-school funding would be to public schools, to students and to their families.
Abbott will now add his newly acquired $6 million to a $32 million campaign war chest he’s amassed. Although the three-term governor is not up for reelection this year, he’s using a portion of the money to bankroll vengeance against lawmakers in his own party who heeded the call of conscience and responded to the concerns of their local school districts.
As Abbott and his billionaire buddies seek to, in essence, privatize public education, Texas schools are languishing, mainly because their budget requirements got entangled with our governor’s Captain Ahab-style obsession. Facing higher operating costs, the need for teacher pay raises and enhanced school-safety mandates, public school folks watched their elected representatives fritter away their time in Austin last year trying to appease Abbott while failing to pass a multibillion dollar omnibus school funding package.
“They’re holding hostage all of the funding that is vital to the backbone of the economy that is Texas — and that’s public education,” Superintendent Eric Wright of the Hays Consolidated Independent School District told the Austin American-Statesman recently. School administrators in Klein, Alvin and elsewhere have told the Chronicle how they’re having to maneuver to meet basic needs.
Even though some school districts already are operating at a deficit, the governor vows to thwart desperately needed funding until he gets what he wants on school choice. “I am in it to win it,” he likes to say.
Meanwhile, Texas youngsters from impoverished families are likely to go hungry when school lets out this summer, because Abbott is one of 15 Republican governors who rejected a new food assistance program. (Would you have expected otherwise from a governor who continues to oppose Medicaid expansion, despite the benefits expansion would bring to uninsured Texans and struggling rural hospitals?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer program offers a monthly stipend of $40 per eligible child for food assistance when the child is not in school. In a state with the second-highest rate of food insecurity in the U.S., according to USDA figures, an estimated 2.9 million Texas kids could have benefited.
Abbott said no thanks, and state officials said they didn’t have the resources to implement the program, despite the fact that nearly 1 in 6 Texas households struggles to get enough to eat. More than 1.7 million families — approximately 4.6 million Texans — are at risk for hunger.
“Behind these sobering statistics are our neighbors struggling to put food on the table, pay rent and keep the lights on,” said Celia Cole, CEO of Feeding Texas, the state association of food banks. “These staggering numbers reflect the growing need food banks are seeing in communities across our state. The end of pandemic-era relief efforts, inflation and the high cost of food is making it harder for Texans to afford basic necessities.”
Back to Yass, who’s not struggling to put food on the table. The Pennsylvania mega donor is worth an estimated $30 billion. His firm, Susquehanna International Group, was an early investor in TikTok. An avid poker player, he got his start as an investor when he and some of his college pals years ago came up with a sophisticated computer scheme to bet on horse and greyhound races.
He has spent more than $100 million on political campaigns in recent years, mainly supporting candidates who falsely claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen, who oppose abortion and who rail against teaching critical race theory in the classroom, in addition to backing school choice.
Our governor is proud to be a Yass man, although if he thinks the billionaire’s investment will be enough to swing the school choice issue in Texas, he might consider his new benefactor’s recent record. Last November, Yass invested huge sums in six races — local and statewide races across Pennsylvania, as well as races in Kentucky and Virginia. The results suggest he might want to stick to dogs and ponies. Every one of his candidates lost.
Meanwhile, here in Texas, it’s the students and teachers who are losing. While Abbott counts his winnings at the political poker table, Texas schools are starving. The governor doesn’t get it. Or maybe he does.
Houston Chronicle
