S chool-choice advocates are celebrating election wins in Texas. It now looks as if next year, Texas will move from being a state with no private educational-choice programs to having universal school choice. Under universal school choice, every family will be eligible to receive state dollars for homeschool expenses or private-school tuition that would otherwise have gone to the public-school district where they live. Right now, Texas has no tax-credit or educational-savings-account programs at all; the only kind of school choice Texas has is among public schools, including public charter schools.
Most “red” states have been quickly adopting private-school-choice programs, given the visible problems that public schools have had since the pandemic, from staying closed for too long to pushing “woke” material in the classroom. But school choice was a difficult sell in the Texas legislature, and it remains so in several other Republican-controlled southern states.
News stories have noted that moderate rural Republicans have tended to oppose school choice in states like Texas and Tennessee. Their stated reason — that there isn’t enough choice among schools in rural areas — doesn’t make much sense. If no private schools are available to compete with public schools in rural areas, then rural parents wouldn’t be in any worse a position under school choice than they are now. Plus, school choice might encourage some new educational options to emerge. If students flow from public to private schools, public schools would lose some state funding, but on a per-student basis, they would be at least as well funded as before — and usually better given how these programs are typically structured.
To find out the real reason for rural, southern Republican legislators’ ambivalence on school choice, we have to look at history. Ultimately, it’s about money and political relationships.
The story begins in the 1920s. Americans were moving to the cities, even in the South, and their industrial base allowed them to fund eight-month school years, while children in rural areas were often going to school for six months or less. Many rural areas lacked high schools. To catch up, a lot of rural districts, often with state encouragement, took on debt.
With the coming of the Great Depression, that debt became unsustainable at the same time that property-tax collections dropped, as homes and farms were abandoned or auctioned for back taxes. The situation created new political momentum for state control of school financing.
North Carolina went the furthest, adopting full state financing of public education in 1933, funded by a new sales tax. The opposition in the legislature came from the cities, but they were overwhelmed by rural legislators.
North Carolina wasn’t the only state to centralize school funding. Nationally, the state share of education funding doubled from 17 percent to 33 percent of the total between 1930 and 1944. But the increase was a lot bigger in the South, the most rural part of the country at that time. School districts in the 17 southern states drew an average of 52 percent of their funding from state sources in 1944.
Southern centralization wasn’t just a result of rural political pressure. Local government has always been weaker in the South than in the Northeast and Midwest. Dartmouth economist Bill Fischel says it’s partly a result of race, because white southerners worried about the possibility of majority-black control of local governments.
The 1970s began the heyday of school-finance lawsuits and “equalization” programs. States everywhere began to centralize budgets and redistribute resources from property-rich to property-poor districts. In Texas, the 1989 case Edgewood I.S.D. v. Kirby ultimately resulted in a massive redistributive scheme called “Robin Hood” that provided extra resources to property-poor districts and districts that raised their own taxes.
While Edgewood was a low-income district, many “property-poor” districts were — and are — not. Rural districts tend to be property-poor because they lack a large commercial and industrial base, while high-poverty urban districts are often considered “property-rich” because they have industry, and they are penalized by these equalization schemes.
Thus, rural school districts in the South have for decades pushed for more state funding for public schools, especially through equalization programs. That push has made them natural allies of teachers’ unions and superintendents, who favor higher education spending and oppose school choice. Collaboration between public-school officials and rural legislators on matters of school finance has made them allies on fighting school choice as well.
For example, the local school district reportedly accounts for half of all employment in New Boston, Texas, population about 4,600, which is represented by a key anti-school-choice legislator. How would that be sustainable if they had to pay for all that spending out of local property taxes? It wouldn’t be. The school-finance formula is what makes their economy so dependent on school spending, but it also makes their legislator dependent on the political demands of school officials, including opposing school choice.
Sometimes it is school officials themselves who become legislators. For example, in 2005, a former superintendent and rural moderate Republican led the charge to defeat a Texas pilot school-choice program, defying House leadership. (He’s still there.)
The ties between public-school officialdom and moderate rural Republicans in the South are often deep and difficult to disentangle. They’re especially strong when rural districts depend heavily on state funding from equalization programs.
School choice won’t hurt rural areas. Even if their public schools lose funding, they’ll at worst come out even because they’ll have fewer students to educate. Meanwhile, parents will enjoy a higher-quality education that they have chosen.
On the other hand, school choice does hurt the long-standing political alliance between rural municipalities, unions, and superintendents based on school-finance fights. To break that alliance in the long term, it will be necessary to reform school finance. Change formulas so that they help impoverished kids and families and don’t discourage rural areas from developing a commercial-property base (in many states, including Texas, the finance formula offers a perverse incentive to stay “property-poor”). Ultimately, it’s not healthy for economies to depend so heavily on school subsidies. In the short term, exposing that alliance is often enough to turn off Republican primary voters. It appears to have worked in Texas; now states like Tennessee and Alabama should take note.