Texas State Capitol - Education Savings Account (ESA)

Bills: SB 2354, SB 176, SB 8

1. Public testimony for education (only in-person) – Wednesday, March 22, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. in Room E1.028 at the Texas State Capitol in Austin. Plan for 3 minutes of testimony. It’s customary to give copies of your testimony to each of the 13 committee members.

2. Call your Texas State Senator. Because their staff logs the number of telephone calls and the message, calling is very effective. Find the name of your state senator and the telephone number at this link. https://www.texastribune.org/directory/#txsenate

PURPOSE: School choice bills should not contain government restrictions if they really are to provide education freedom for parents to educate their children as they wish. This is a socialist and a U.N. goal to control private and home schools.

ALL of thse bills are the “the nose of the camel in the tent of education.”

(For further information on SB 176, check out my article that appeared in World Net Daily: “School Choice Schemes Play into U.N. Goals for Control”) 

School choice is now the hot topic and Republican lawmakers are jumping on that bandwagon, if only because they fear they won’t be re-elected otherwise. Yet they seem to be more concerned about the appearance of passing a school choice bill – just any bill that provides a few schillings for public school exit – and less concerned about what the bill actually accomplishes or doesn’t accomplish.

In Texas, there are at least 15 school choice bills -- “parent empowerment”-- that have been filed and all contain restrictions that will expand government reach to private schools, private tutors, curriculum, instructional materials, education service organizations, and more.

In a nutshell, here is what the bills include:

• Only public school students are eligible for any of the funding. No current private school students are eligible.
• If a Texas private school accepts a student using ESA funds, that school MUST become accredited – government control will be expanded. Currently private schools in Texas are not required to be accredited. There is NO proof that accreditation makes a school a better education provider. Hillsdale is not accredited and neither are excellent private schools in Texas.
• Private tutors must be licensed and certified – government control. There is NO proof that certification makes one a better teacher.  All public school teachers are certified and most have attended left wing teacher colleges for certification coursework. Yet the student academic achievement level is at the bottom.  What does make a difference is whether the teacher has a deep knowledge of the subject matter.
• Vendors and education service companies must be government pre-approved. This includes online curriculum providers and companies selling instructional materials including textbooks. The government will decide what resources that private, home, and Christian school parents can access if they want to use government money. Government will continue to dictate what children will be reading and learning.

Don’t let Texas Republican lawmakers tell you that using school choice funds is “voluntary.” That is not the point. ALL of thse bills are the “the nose of the camel in the tent of education” that will bring state, and eventually federal control, over ALL education choices. One by one, private schools will become accredited. All private tutors eventually will have to become certified and licensed. There are many excellent tutors who will walk away rather than put up with the government nonsense of certification and licensing. Why should a vendor have to be certified to show that their materials are worthy?

It appears that Republican lawmakers – even conservatives – don’t understand or are ignoring the conseqeuences of their bills. For example, in the last session, parents were demanding that schools get rid of Social and Emotional Learning. So what did Texas lawmakers do? They passed SB123 that integrated SEL into the education code and required the Texas State Board of Education to integrate it into the curriculum standards.

Because of two bills by federal lawmakers in 1959 and 1965, we have massive federal government overreach in education. Although lawmakers were warned that these were “the nose of the camel in the tent,” they ignored sage advice about the consequences and listened to the socialists who wanted control over education. From the bill in 1965 came No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Act and much more.

Stay tuned for my Haynes Report Podcast on school choice that will address this in greater detail. 

(BTW, Texas actually had school choice in the late 1800s without government restrictions.)