Say Goodnight, Vouchers
March 30th, 2007 at 9:25 am
It’s curtains for the prospect of school vouchers in the House budget bill, after the overwhelming passage of an amendment that bans the use of tax money to help pay private school tuition.
On Thursday morning, the spectre of a voucher-funding amendment loomed large over the budget debate, while downstairs in the Capitol extension a Senate bill was heard in committee that would create a $300 million voucher plan in the innocuous guise of a “pilot program.” Instead, that evening the House voted 129-8 in favor of Crosbyton Democratic Rep. Joe Heflin’s voucher ban.
Today’s press (including the Dallas Morning News, with a story devoted to vouchers, and the Austin American-Statesman, which gave it one sentence) paired the voucher ban with an amendment cutting a new teacher incentive pay program. Both are seen as signs of a bipartisan coalition of the Legislature’s rank-and-file rising up against the wishes of Craddick, Dewhurst, Perry and the rest of the Capitol’s once-dominant ruling class.
Whatever pressure legislators felt from a few in the Republican leadership, they were much more concerned with the interests of the educators and parents, who keep them in office.
Rep. Rene Oliveira (D—Brownsville) made the stakes clear by reminding members that cutting incentive money and adding an across-the-board pay raise would be “your only chance this session to vote for a pay raise for your teachers back home.”
There isn’t much finality to either decision, but both make a strong statement about where the House’s loyalties lie. In the Senate, meanwhile, a few voucher bills are still in the committee process, including SB 1000, the autism voucher bill by Sen. Florence Shapiro, chair of the Education Committee, that Senators might find especially tough to resist.
For an issue so rich in euphemisms — you’re never really for vouchers, but you might rally for “school choice” — the House amendment was remarkable for its crystal clear language. The amendment is a prohibition on vouchers in no uncertain terms, without exceptions for at-risk groups like autistic children or drop-outs — groups singled out in some pro-voucher bills filed this session.
Tellingly, when it was clear what was going down last night, House Budget Chairman Rep. Warren Chisum accepted Heflin’s anti-voucher amendment in the hopes it would be added to the budget on a voice vote, thus muting the statement. Rep. Pete Gallego said that he opposed the amendment, even though he didn’t, to force an on-the-record roll call vote.
This has been a battle that keeps coming back up, fueled by a string of celebrity voucher advocates and rallies, but the chances of a voucher program ever making into the final budget sure looks doubtful now that House members have spoken so clearly.
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:47 pm
I am very pleased to hear that our elected representatives have finally realized that their constituents overwhelmingly support public education. It is, more than anything else humankind has devised, the greatest political, economic, and social equalizer.
Prior to public education, only the wealthy, the clergy, and those who were politically privileged received a formal education. The masses had to work hard for a living and were unable to justify the expenditure of economic or human resources toward a formal education for themselves or for their children. Thus, they were left to fend for themselves and to suffer the abuses of the highly-placed few who used the power of knowledge to vanquish the uneducated majority.
Perhaps, that is why the wealthy and the religious conservatives and those who serve them have pushed so hard to weaken our system of public education. If they are successful in their unyielding attempts to dismantle public education, then they will eventually, within a very few generations, regain total control of the rest of humanity. That frightens me greatly, and it should frighten everyone else.
If we don’t become actively involved in stopping the attack on public education by the ultra-conservative, religious right-wing zealots and their wealthy benefactors, then we may be headed for a few centuries of political, economic, and social decline that rival the Dark Ages.
But, hey, who am I to carry on about this? Perhaps, I should remain mute and ignore the subject and see how things turn out. After all, a wise man once said that, “Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”