Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, announced SB2, his new school choice bill that would allow Texan parents to have publicly funded Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). If the measure passes, parents, students, and teachers in the Lone Star State — and other states that follow suit — will benefit immensely.
ESAs are similar to a school voucher system, but more flexible, equitable, and generally useful. In SB2 the ESA would be a publicly funded savings account of between $2,000 and $10,000 (or $11,500 for students with a disability) that could be applied to alternatives to public education. If parents are unhappy with their child’s neighborhood public school or charter school, they can apply for an ESA and use that money to pay for a private school, a homeschool-private school hybrid, or resources for full-time homeschooling. Along with this, they can also use the funds from the ESA to pay for education-related programs, like after-school tutoring, online courses, or special education services.
As it stands, the only parents in Texas who homeschool or send their kids to private school are the ones affluent enough to afford it. Everyone else is forced to send their children to the neighborhood public school or a charter school. If these schools are awful, they have no choice but to accept it and do what they can on the margins.
A state-funded ESA would allow those parents to finally have the same choice that affluent households enjoy. This would in turn put pressure on all schools — public, charter, and private — to compete for student enrollment and the funding that comes with it. To do this, they would boost the quality of instruction and extracurricular programs, cut back on waste, implement policies aimed at keeping students safe and minimizing distractions, and better respond to parents’ concerns.
No longer would parents have to worry about their children being bullied or indoctrinated, nor would they have to live with the sad fact that their children spend most of their days uselessly vegging on a screen. They would have the leverage to demand more from the school because they would all be able to enroll their children elsewhere.
All this sounds good for the students and their parents, but would it benefit teachers? Speaking as an English teacher of nearly two decades, I believe it would. Even though many educators worry that school choice will bankrupt public schools, resulting in salary cuts and worse teaching conditions, it’s more likely that school leaders would pay teachers more and give them more autonomy to prevent them from leaving. After all, teachers would have more negotiating power because they’re the ones who directly contribute to a school’s success.
Presently, teachers in Texas have no such power. They can strive to work in the best public school with an opening, follow the script they’re given by the district, keep their heads down, and hope for incremental raises each year. If they are ambitious and want to earn a little more money and prestige, they can earn a graduate degree in education and certify to become administrators, counselors, or athletic coordinators.
Or, if they hate the pay or the stifling, anti-meritocratic environment of public schooling, they can leave that world and take a considerable pay cut by working at a private or charter school. But even then, many private schools will compromise standards to cater to donors and keep the school running, and many charter schools experience high turnover and perpetual dysfunction. If both these types of schools simply had more money, most of these issues would probably disappear.
The only people who might be hurt by SB2 are administrators, district bureaucrats, and mediocre teachers, all of whom would suddenly have to justify their existence. In too many cases, these employees are either dead weight or an active nuisance that drives out good teachers and motivated students.
The other possible losers would be those problematic students who are allowed to terrorize classrooms with little consequence. Just as ESAs would give students the choice of where they attend school, it would also give schools a choice in how to deal with them. If school leaders are incentivized to care about their enrollment, they will almost certainly adopt a stricter stance with bullies, class clowns, and burnouts. Rather than enabling their nonsense with some useless restorative justice discipline that indulges troublemakers, they will need to suspend and expel these types to keep the hallways safe and maximize the learning experience.
This should put to rest the fear that ESAs would allow bad kids from bad public schools to enroll in good private schools and ruin them. On the contrary, both schools would be incentivized to deal with these bad students more effectively.
Overall, there seems to be more upside with SB2 than downside. And in all likelihood, the rollout of ESAs will be gradual. It will begin with the neediest households applying for it and the worst schools experiencing a possible exodus. It will take at least a few years for the program to slowly take hold in less obviously afflicted areas. Only when it’s had enough time to work will the educational landscape noticeably change and yield visible fruit.
Of course, we can expect the Democrats and their RINO allies to try to kill SB2, just like they killed HB1 last year. They will claim that it’s extreme and will ultimately hurt teachers and students. Neither is the case, and Texans should work together to get this law passed. And based on President Trump’s recent executive order endorsing school choice and the U.S. Senate’s new bill that would help fund school choice, Texans would even have the administration’s and Congress’s support. The status quo isn’t working, and reform is needed more now than ever.