Texas legislators in 2007 and 2009 delivered huge defeats to backers of voucher schemes that would drain hundreds of millions of dollars from neighborhood public schools to subsidize tuition at private and religious schools. Those defeats came after the state’s voters punished pro-voucher legislators at the polls in 2006. Now Mitt Romney, the likely Republican […]
vouchers
Using Tragedy to Push Voucher Schemes
It looks like anything is fair game for anti-public school fanatics. Peggy Venable, who directs the Texas office of (David and Charles Koch-funded) Americans for Prosperity, put up this odious Twitter post last week after police shot and killed an eighth-grade student in Brownsville: AFP-Texas tweeted the same thing. “School choice,” of course, is code […]
2011 Lege Wrap Up: Vouchers
Tea Party, and religious-right and other anti-government fanatics launched full-scale attacks on public education, religious freedom and women’s health in the regular and special sessions of the Texas Legislature this year. Over the next week, TFN Insider will recap what happened on major TFN issues during the two sessions. Up today: private school vouchers. Voucher […]
A Misleading Case for Private School Vouchers
Late on Monday night, a Texas House committee took testimony on a massive school voucher bill that would siphon billions of tax dollars away from already cash-strapped public schools to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. This legislation was crafted as a proposed amendment (that never made it to the House floor) to […]
TX Voucher Bill in Committee on Monday
On Monday the Government Efficiency and Reform Committee in the Texas House will consider HB 33, which would create a vastly expensive private school voucher scheme at a cost of billions of dollars to neighborhood public schools. The voucher lobby originally wanted to add the so-called “taxpayer savings” grant scheme to a budget bill during […]