When Candra Rogers, an assistant principal in Corsicana, Texas, came to work on Thursday, August 15, the day began as any other. But, simply in the act of doing her job as an educator, it was a day that changed her life.
“During lunch, I heard our behavioral teacher call on the radio to administrators for assistance,” Rogers, who works at Collins Intermediate School, told reporters nearly two weeks later. An “irate” student had thrown furniture across the room, including at Rogers. “He threw a wooden hanger at me, but I couldn’t stop it fast enough. The hanger hit me in my right eye and knocked it out of the socket.”
Rogers stood alongside her family in a Corsicana ISD office, her right eye swollen shut. Doctors told her she may be permanently blind in that eye. The blame, she said, falls in the hands of the Texas government, for not adequately funding public schools and protecting teachers.
“What happened to me should never happen to another educator,” Rogers said.
“I’m feeling for her as a fellow educator,” Texas state Representative James Talarico, D-Austin, said after this reporter shared Rogers’ comments with him. Talarico sits on the Texas House Public Education committee and is one of Democrats’ leading voices on public education. “No educator should be worried about their safety at school. No child should be worried about the safety of their school.”
“No teacher in Texas should be at risk,” Texas state Senator Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, said, regarding Rogers. Creighton chairs the Senate Education Committee. “I carried a best-in-class in the nation ‘teacher bill of rights’ last session that education- and teacher-related organizations and public advocacy as lobbyists worked very hard to kill.”
For the last few years, a bloc of Republican lawmakers, with Governor Greg Abbott largely leading the charge, has pushed for allocating taxpayer money for private schools, a policy called “school choice” by supporters and “school vouchers” by critics.
Public education supporters, including Rogers, have scrutinized such a policy, particularly in the face of policy decisions that mean public school’s per-student basic allotment funding has not increased since before the pandemic and its ensuing inflation.
“The decision to continue funding Texas public schools at 2019 levels in 2024 is a choice and the collateral damage of Governor Abbott’s choices,” Rogers said.
The fight in the legislature
The afternoon following the November election, Governor Greg Abbott proclaimed victory for the school choice battle, in a pre-planned press conference.
“Counting what I call only ‘true, hardcore school choice proponents,’ there are 79 votes in favor in the Texas House,” Abbott said, standing outside of Kingdom Life Academy in Tyler. “It takes 76 votes to get it passed.”
How he got there is a virtually unchartered path: Abbott endorsed primary challengers to members of his own party, in an effort to oust anti-voucher Republicans and replace them with ones in support of school choice.
Take Glenn Rogers (no relation to Candra Rogers), a Republican in the Texas House of Representatives from Graford, about 100 miles west of Dallas. In an interview, he described his policy views as “all the things that you would consider a conservative to be.”
“The only time I’ve voted against some of the other Republicans is on the issue of vouchers,” Rep. Rogers said. “It doesn’t matter to me who’s going to come after me. I’m going to vote for my district.”
That view, he said, ultimately cost him his seat in the Texas House of Representatives, which he held on to for two sessions. After Rep. Rogers effectively voted against a school vouchers-like policy, allocating taxpayer dollars toward private education, Abbott publicly supported Mike Olcott, a Republican who says he’s in favor of “education freedom,” to replace Rep. Rogers. Olcott, along with ten other Republicans endorsed by Governor Abbott, will join the Texas legislature in January.
Abbott was not alone in that endeavor, though. Two other prominent voices significantly influenced the makeup of the incoming 89th legislature: Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, two billionaires who’ve donated significant funds to crucial races, pushing Texas closer to school choice than ever.
“It all goes back to these two billionaire mega-donors, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who are spending their fortunes transforming our state into an authoritarian theocracy,” Representative Talarico said.
The two hail from West Texas: Dunn is from Midland and Wilks from Cisco. Dunn made his name from an oil company that was reportedly sold for $12 billion last year, according to the Texas Tribune. Wilks is a pastor at the Assembly of Yahweh church in Cisco. They’ve put their money into different groups over the years, including Defend Texas Liberty, a PAC that became the center of a controversy when its then-leader Jonathan Stickland met with white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
That news came at the start of a firestorm special session, focused almost entirely on school choice, bringing a spotlight to Defend Texas Liberty and Dunn and Wilks’ influence over the discussion.
“I spoke with Tim Dunn, a principal funder of Defend Texas Liberty PAC, and he has told me unequivocally that it was a serious blunder for PAC President Jonathan Stickland to meet with white supremacist Nick Fuentes,” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who presides over the Texas Senate and has named school choice as his top priority in 2025, said in a statement at the time. “I accept Mr. Dunn at his word. I know him to be a man of integrity and an avid staunch supporter of Israel.”
In 2022, Defund Texas Liberty endorsed a primary challenger against Greg Abbott in the gubernatorial race. Their pick, Don Huffines, leaned more conservative than Abbott, including as a significant supporter of a school choice program. Abbott ultimately won his race, returning to the Governor’s seat for a third term, and he has since upped his rhetoric in favor of school choice.
In the 2024 election, Wilks and Dunn invested in 29 different races; of those, 18 went on to win their elections and will join the Texas legislature in 2025.
“The only thing that was holding on to our democracy was the Texas House,” Rep. Rogers said. “And we lost a lot of that this election.”
Vouchers in 2025?
There is arguably no doubt that the battle over school vouchers is going to be in the Texas House in 2025, rather than the Senate. As such, Governor Abbott, and other advocates like Dunn and Wilks, focused their attention on the House.
Abbott’s count of 79 votes could be accurate, though it’s a narrow path to victory; just four defectors could spell trouble for the legislation, where 76 votes are necessary.
“One of the big factors in the attempt to pass some kind of school choice or voucher bill in 2023 was its connections with other kinds of legislation that were geared towards, for lack of a better term, log rolling and trying to get votes by packaging it in the context of other education measures that people did, in fact, want,” James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, said. “So, you know, I have no reason to doubt their vote count on the whole, but how precise it can be is limited by where we are right now, and not only what we know, but what we don’t know about what the legislation might actually look like and the context of it.”
“I believe that school choice will pass,” Senator Creighton said in an interview. “I think the true narrative is, rather than holding public education funds hostage, we’re standing strong for all students in Texas.”
Creighton said he would file school choice legislation in 2025 that is largely similar to the policies he filed last session. Those bills established an education savings account program, a sort of state-managed bank account where families could access public dollars to spend on their child’s private schooling. He also told this reporter he does not want school choice attached to public education policies; in other words, he called for separating them, so that public school funding is not directly contingent on a vouchers plan.
Some Republican holdouts on school choice have moved toward conceding the fight. In a panel on education policy at the Texas Tribune Festival in September, Representative Ken King, R-Canadian, one of the most prominent anti-voucher Republicans who is returning for the next legislative session, said he felt school choice was sure to pass, and that public school proponents should work on cutting the best deal possible.
“I am not a conspiracy theorist at all, but this has been a concerted effort for the voucher program for years,” King said. “You make public schools look as bad as possible, the argument gets made for vouchers. And that happened.”
Texas Democrats, meanwhile, have said they will continue to advocate against school vouchers.
“I will never support a voucher,” Representative Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin, who also sits on the House Public Education committee, said. “I don’t know that our public schools would survive a universal voucher, which is the ultimate goal of the proponents.”
Can Texas schools be saved?
When lawmakers returned to the Capitol in January 2023, it was their first chance to approve meaningful school safety reform, or, as Democrats wanted, gun control policy, since the 2022 Uvalde massacre, when an 18-year-old used a semiautomatic firearm to shoot and kill 19 children and two teachers.
The families of the victims of the Uvalde shooting frequently visited the Texas Capitol throughout the 88th session, calling for gun control policy.
“At the end of every day, I’m just a mom who wants my daughter back, and a mom who doesn’t want another mom to know my pain,” Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was one of those killed, said in a press conference at the Capitol in May 2023.
Democrats set their hope in a measure that would have raised the age to purchase certain semiautomatic weapons from 18 to 21, a policy that supporters said would have prevented the Uvalde shooting. Though the bill did advance further than expected with some bipartisan support, it failed in the Texas House when it was not taken up for floor debate by a key deadline.
State leaders put their focus on House Bill 3, a priority bill that supporters said would change the face of school safety in Texas. Among other things, the bill required every school campus to keep a peace officer on site and offered every campus $15,000 to implement those requirements. That legislation passed with sweeping bipartisan support.
Since then, however, educators and school safety advocates have said that the legislation does not go far enough to protect schools. John Scott, the director of the Texas Education Agency’s Office of School Safety, recently testified before a House committee that less than half of all schools are fully compliant with HB 3, though a number of them have good cause exemptions, which were carved out within the legislation. That could range from a lack of funding to retain a peace officer, to the retention of a security personnel who does not officially qualify as a “peace officer.”
Asked by Representative Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa, if the $15,000 allocated to every school to implement the requirements should have been “closer to $100,000,” Scott replied, “Yes sir, it’s probably closer to 100 than it is to 15 [thousand dollars].”
Rewriting Texas Education
The following is an excerpt from a town hall discussion on education policy in both the past session and the upcoming session. Answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
MICHAEL ADKISON, CBS Austin Reporter: How significant is the conversation going to be around school choice as we head into the next legislative session?
ANDY HOGUE, communications director, Travis County GOP: I think it’s going to be the main issue. We saw what Governor Abbott did last session, it became the determinant of whether or not you got funding for your schools. So I don’t think he’s going to back off. As a matter of fact, I see more conservative Republicans, more school choice advocates ready to fight, and Governor Abbott doubling down on their previous messages.
POOJA SETHI, chair, Travis County Democrats: It’s going to be really significant. It’s going to be one of the top issues that are there, but as we’ve seen just from the last session, it’s died again and again. And rural Republicans and urban-rural Republicans voted against it, and a lot of them, and Democrats have voted. It’s a bipartisan issue, and it died last session. Hopefully, they stand their ground and stand up for public schools and public school kids.
MICHAEL ADKISON: At the end of the day, these are public taxpayer dollars that are going towards private education—and I feel like the whole idea behind private education was to have as little state involvement as possible, so kind of explain to me how you have those two truths at the same time?
LAURA COLANGELO, executive director, Texas Private Schools Association: If you look at the bill from last session, we’re talking about maybe 40,000 students statewide who would be able to participate in a school choice program. There are a couple of items that we would have to see in the bill in order to support it from the TPSA standpoint, which we can talk about when we get granular. Basically, this is a way for those families who do need another option to have another option and expand the way that we do education in Texas to serve the needs of every child in the state.
MICHAEL ADKISON: I think the public school advocates would say it is an ‘either/or’: you cannot have a fully funded public education system and a school choice system. Do you disagree with that?
LAURA COLANGELO: I think you can, it’s a ‘both and’ situation. I think that’s what we’re about to discuss and hopefully pass in 2025.
KEN ZARIFIS, president, Education Austin: Absolutely not. I think the same thing has been bantered about throughout the country… Public is public, private is private. Public schools were made for the collective, that’s our strength. When you start dealing with individuals, you get away from that larger strength, and it hurts kids.
MICHAEL ADKISON: Last month, the Texas State Board of Education gave approval to a public school curriculum that both critics and supporters have noted is heavily influenced by Christian teachings. Public school districts are also incentivized to adopt those curricula and could earn $60 per student in their districts—an incentive some schools may think is too good to resist… Is that something you guys would consider?
DR. NATALIE NICHOLS, Senior Chief of Schools and Innovation, Round Rock ISD: I would say yes, but let me give some more information, because, as always, there are so many pieces of information that are missing. So I think many people would agree, number one, that the foundation of our country is religious freedom… But the conversation was that this would be included in the curriculum, and then all other religions would be excluded. So the conversation is more so about the exclusion, and what it says about us, the fact that we specifically did not want any other religion to be included… If the whole idea of being a Christian means I am inclusive, I show you how I love you and what that means, then this really kind of like smacks you in the face. It’s the exact opposite of what we’re supposed to be teaching. It’s almost hypocritical, and our kids are very smart, they call us on it. They watch all of this information and they make judgments about the adults in the building, the fact that we would do this. What does it say then?
BRIAN GUENTHER, president, San Marcos Academy: San Marcos Academy is a Baptist institution, and has been a part of the Baptist General Convention of Texas since its inception, in 1907… As a private institution and a Baptist institution, we have the opportunity to teach scripture. But here’s the difference, going from a public classroom into a private classroom, is we get to aim that from a doctrinal perspective. That’s where ‘indoctrination,’ if you will, comes from. We get to teach from doctrinal leanings, our understanding and interpretation of that text is taught at San Marcos Academy. That’s the opportunity that we get to do in our location and that’s what it looks like in our classrooms.
The Texas legislature will convene for its 89th legislative session on January 14, 2024.