Testimony, Texas, and Trump’s Department of Education Order
Hi folks,
I’m taking a minute here after stops in Texas, South Carolina, and D.C. to regroup before a busy April of more public speaking. For those of you attending the Network for Public Education conference later this week, Diane Ravitch and I will be opening the event together with a special fireside chat on Friday evening. After that, I along with several members of the ELC team will be in a variety of panels throughout the weekend. Stop by and say hello!
What I want to do with this newsletter is make a quick comment on Trump’s Department of Education executive order, flag Jessica Levin’s testimony to a House subcommittee and a new resource on the federal voucher tax credit scheme, and wrap up with a comment on my testimony to the Texas Legislature on March 11.
Quick Word on Trump’s Department of Education Order
The big education news in the last couple weeks has been Trump’s signing of his executive order to gut the U.S. Department of Education. I’ve said a lot about this in other spaces, including:
My appearance on Fox News Live Now;
My appearance on my local news station, WILX;
And my column in The Conversation, syndicated elsewhere, too, explaining what Trump’s order does and doesn’t do.
You can even check out my Instagram feed, where I’m posting a lot of quick commentary on news events like this.
What you’ll find in any or all of those is this: to me, it’s important not to get too lost in the language of departments, agencies, EOs, Titles, and the like. These are all really important, but that’s what we have lawyers like the good people at ELC to do. For the rest of us, I strongly believe we need to be talking about how these activities harm local communities in terms of funding. Services. People.
Already the layoffs, the rhetoric, and the confusion are creating real threats and harms to supports and services that families depend on—and I think we need to talk about that all of the time moving forward.
Jessica Levin’s Testimony and New ECCA Resources
Next up, I want to give a shout out to ELC’s Jessica Levin, who did her own testimony before the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education in Washington. I didn’t get a chance to watch that live because I was in the committee hearing down in Texas, but I know that Jessica did a great job standing up for the facts on school voucher schemes and for the need for more public school funding. You can watch the entire hearing here.
Speaking of Congress, I also want to take a second to remind folks that the latest effort to pass a federal school voucher scheme—the so-called “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA)—is still a threat. There’s a great new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that walks through the details of this bill, which doubles as a tax shelter for some of the wealthiest Americans. What’s great about this report is it lays out how the tax credit version of vouchers works—basically, wealthy donors divert what they owe in federal (or state) taxes into a middleman organization that then distributes vouchers.
But it also lets you see how much some of the billionaires behind the voucher political push—Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, and even Elon Musk—could personally benefit from the latest scheme. Worth a look.
I’ll also flag a recent piece of my own in Michigan’s biggest paper, the Detroit Free Press. In that piece, I walk through how the ECCA bill would force vouchers into states that don’t want them—like my home state of Michigan. And I also explain how that scheme would do almost nothing for families in the Michigan 5th and 7th Congressional Districts—the two regions closest to my town. I hope you can use a piece like this to make your own case against these schemes in your communities.
Texas, Texas, Texas
Forgive the cliché metaphor, but Texas really is the Alamo when it comes to efforts to fight vouchers in the states. With vouchers spreading through red states over the past three years, the big holdouts have been Tennessee and Texas, mainly because the DeVos/Koch/Yass strategy of primarying out rural Republican school voucher opponents has taken longer and been more expensive there than in states like Iowa and Arkansas.
But with Tennessee falling earlier this winter—I was there in late January trying to fight back—the voucher lobby really is running out of real estate on their strategy. There just aren’t that many states left with supermajorities of GOP legislators vulnerable to reshaping by right-wing billionaires. That’s actually a big reason why ECCA, the federal voucher scheme, is getting so much effort in D.C. It would give Betsy DeVos and team a wholesale way of avoiding tough legislative fights in blue states.
Which, again, leaves Texas. The March 11 hearing on HB3—the voucher bill introduced in the state’s House of Representatives—was a marathon session that lasted more than 22 hours. I was one of five witnesses invited and scheduled by House Democrats in the minority. The hearing began at 8 a.m.
It took almost five hours for the bill sponsor and committee chair, Rep. Brad Buckley, to lay out his bill. He took questions from Republicans and Democrats alike, and despite a few grandstanding comments from GOP members about failing public schools (under the jurisdiction of their committee, I might add), this was a pretty informative and detailed discussion. I sat in the front row for all of it.
Late in the afternoon, after the first round of three majority witnesses (in favor of the bill) and two invited witnesses in opposition, I gave my testimony alongside Paige Duggins-Clay, the chief legal analyst from the Intercultural Development Research Association, who’s also been a great ally to ELC on these issues and others.
Our opening testimony lasted five minutes each, but then we took questions for another hour.
I took a lot of questions from hostile GOP committee members about my background, what the research on vouchers really says, and specific issues I raised in the bill.
But I don’t mind tough questions. And we’re not going to win or win back any of the things we value—whether that’s new investments in public education or across the policy space on issues like health care, jobs, or retirement security—without talking to the other side.
I didn’t get a single question I couldn’t handle. If you’re reading this you probably already know my message on these billionaire-backed voucher schemes: vouchers threaten public school funding by subsidizing a new sector of kids who were already in private school; vouchers devastate student learning for the few kids who transfer from public school; and vouchers give private schools—not parents—the true choice of which kids to admit and which to leave out.
What all that has in common with the U.S. Department of Education news—and with the larger political moment we’re in—is the dangerous ideology that crucial public investments in kids, families, and communities should be not just deprioritized but considered wasteful, and that those investments should be replaced with a go-it-alone approach that simply won’t work for millions of Americans.
That’s an idea I reject, I think most folks do too, and when you have your principles and you have your facts, tough questions are just one more opportunity to make your case.
Be well.
Josh
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