The 89th Texas Legislative Session: Issues & Insights

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 2 Transcript

Morgan Smith: Welcome to a very special live recording of the Intersect Ed podcast, where the stories of public education policy and practice meet. I’m your host, Morgan Smith. Today, the morning of January 30th, we are just a few blocks from the Capitol, where the 2025 legislative session is already underway. I’m joined by four guests who are going to give us their thoughts on what we should expect over the next four months and beyond. Let’s meet them now.

Jaden Edison: Jaden Edison, the public education reporter with the Texas Tribune.

Scott Braddock: I’m Scott Braddock, editor at Quorum Report.com.

Ed McKinley: This is Edward McKinley, and I’m an Austin Bureau reporter for the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News.

Bob Popinski: This is Bob Popinski. I’m the Senior Director of Policy at Raise Your Hand Texas.

Morgan Smith: Before we get into our conversation, I’d like to share that the views expressed by today’s guests are their own, and their appearance on the Intersect Ed podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent.

So we’re a few weeks into the legislative session as we sit here a block away from the Capitol, and we’re going to spend most of our time up here talking about the reason we’re all here, which is education policy. But starting out, I was hoping that Ed, maybe you could give us an overview of what has happened so far, kind of big picture look.

Ed McKinley: Yeah, I mean, I think the big story so far is definitely the election of the speaker over in the House. I mean, the Senate moved its version of a voucher bill already this session {SB 2}. I think everyone’s kind of expecting that to move really quickly, but the House in my mind is kind of where the action is because it’s going to be, it’s the bigger hurdle to clear. So the election of Dustin Burrows as speaker, I think really spoke a lot to where the chamber is, and there’s a lot of outside forces that are kind of pushing and pulling at the House to try to mold it into a different shape. And it felt like a little bit of a statement of stubbornness from the powers that be that are still there that, hey, we’re going to keep on keeping on the way we have been.

Morgan Smith: Yeah. Well, and Scott, I wanted to turn to you on this because this isn’t your first rodeo. You’ve been observing these political players for a long time. Of course, we have Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Abbott are familiar figures. We have a new speaker. The fate of a lot of legislation gets tied up in how well those three get along. What are you expecting for this session?

Scott Braddock: I’m going to tell you something. It’s a story that’s not about me, but it’ll sound that way at first. Okay. So the Lieutenant Governor who I call the “little governor”- that’s loving, by the way- he has called me the biggest liar in Texas media, and I was the first journalist he banned from the floor of the Texas Senate. He banned all the journalists after that. So I was just the trendsetter, but I’m telling you that to tell you this, that two days before the speaker vote was going to happen, the Lieutenant Governor’s office had reached out to me of all people, almost begging that I would publish some information in the Quorum Report that the Lieutenant Governor thought would be damaging to Dustin Burrows. He was really on the war path and he was publicly doing it. He was tweeting out all the time, that the other candidate in the race, David Cook, was the correct choice because he had been endorsed by the Republican caucus.

They kind of got a lot of the Republican House members wrapped around an axle about that, but he was so all in against Burrows, that that sets the tone in many ways for how the session will go. These guys will be at loggerheads right now. I was told that in this tracks with some of the public comments in the meantime from the Lieutenant Governor, I was told that they did have a meeting the two of them this week that was said to be cordial and potentially productive. We’ll see how well these guys work together after Patrick so aggressively campaigned against his, Burrow’s predecessor Dade Phelan, and then against Burrows. Now that he’s in the speaker’s office, I can already see on some other issues where they’re going to not agree. That’s clear from the base budgets that they laid out, and we can get into some of that if you want.

Ed McKinley: And just to add on to that a little bit, the other part of the equation there is Governor Abbott, who is I think, a bit of a mystery. In 2023, the House was working for a really long time to hash out a version of a voucher bill that could clear that chamber. And when Chairman Buckley at the end of that session said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a bill. I think this is the shape of it. I think this is what it’s going to look like.’ The governor was like, well, that’s not going to work for me. And it kind of torpedoed the whole thing and it led to the specials. So, a lot of this is going to depend on what the governor wants out of an education package with a bunch of different reforms or out of a voucher bill, but we haven’t heard from him yet. Even when he endorsed in the race for Speaker, when he quasi endorsed Cook, he didn’t actually use his name. I don’t think you have to be a political expert to know that if a politician endorses another politician without using their name, it’s not exactly the strongest endorsement. So I think a lot of people are waiting to see what he says at the State of the State, what the tone looks like, and I think that’s going to have a huge impact in how this plays out.

Scott Braddock: Just to add one thing to that, to my knowledge, the governor has yet to say Burrow’s name as Speaker, that he hasn’t congratulated him for winning the race for Speaker and hasn’t said anything like he’s looking forward to working with him and to the point that Ed was making about the two chambers working together. The thing that they first got at loggerheads about two years ago was property tax reform. And in the base budgets that were laid out by the House and Senate this past week, they don’t agree about that. The Lieutenant Governor wants to go to $140,000 on the homestead exemption, which costs a lot of money and the house wants to keep it at $100,000. And again, the Governor didn’t, I’ll just say he didn’t lead on that issue as far as the details in the last legislative session. It wasn’t until we got into special sessions last time around that the Governor then said that he wanted the legislature to pass the idea that was first pushed by somebody who lost the Governor’s race, Don Huffines, which is to try to use all of our budget surplus to buy down property taxes, to do tax compression. And you might’ve noticed that that didn’t happen. So they’ve got a lot of work to do on those issues. 

Bob Popinski: Well, I think the one thing that they do agree on is they want more property tax relief and they both have about $3 billion dollars in their base budget. But the big number, the big takeaway from what we’ve seen in these proposed budgets is $51 billion in tax relief since 2019. That is a huge amount. Texas ranks 46 in the nation or $4,400 below the national average. To get us back up to the national average, we would need about $42 billion or so. So $51 billion, it shows you that if the legislature really wants to move a program over a short period of time, they can. That is a big number and it’s going to continue to grow over time.

Morgan Smith: And speaking of last session, we know that there is a huge amount of unfinished business when it comes to education policy, and I was wondering, Jaden, if you could kind of give us your thoughts on what you see. We’ve already mentioned vouchers and funding, but what you see are going to be the big topics when it comes to education policy this session?

Jaden Edison: Yeah, it’s been really interesting to see how things in the Senate have kind of picked up where they left off. I think Senator Brandon Creighton, it was really interesting in the public hearing on Tuesday earlier this week. He was very adamant about making clear that, hey, the ball is basically in the House’s court. And so that’s basically what I think is really interesting. Obviously, the State of the State will be interesting on Sunday if Governor Abbott declares vouchers an emergency item because we’ve heard Lieutenant Governor Patrick say this week that they’ll pass it as soon as next week. And so that’ll be interesting. But aside from that, one thing I found notable just yesterday, I think Lieutenant Governor Patrick released his kind of top 20 or so priorities and whatnot. And what was absent from that was a priority of public education funding, which I found really notable. And there were things like a 10 commandment bill and something about prayer, a bible in schools, that were in the top 10 to 15. And the absence of public education spending was notable. And so it’d be interesting to see. Now I say that to say money is where your mouth is, right? And then the budget proposal so far they have proposed somewhere around $5 billion, if I’m correct. As it pertains to additional funding for public education, but obviously things will go as far as vouchers do, right? And so we’ll see where those things end up. But aside from that, there are some really core issues I think in public education that are really interesting. One thing, top of mind for me, and we’ve talked about this a little bit behind the scenes, is special education funding. That was one thing that got held up in the voucher battle last time around. And basically, the way special education is funded in the state now, it is largely based on the setting and not the intensity of the services. And so basically you could have two kids in the same classroom, one who maybe needs more hands-on services and more direct attention, but that kid and another kid who maybe requires less, they get funded the same. And so I think those are some challenges as we talk about the state of special education in the state. We know particularly Texas doesn’t have the greatest track record as it pertains to special education services with a lot of the attention they received in the last what decade or so. And so that’ll be interesting. And then more recently we heard Governor Greg Abbott, which I think people have talked about it, but it is interesting in that he talked about wanting to extend the diversity, equity and inclusion ban from higher education to K – 12 public schools. So how that actually manifests would be interesting. Senator Creighton also, I think, co-signed that, and it sounds like it might be somewhat of a priority, so that’ll be interesting. And then lastly, I think some other things too. And there are so many things, as you know, with public education that are interesting, but particularly when we talk about teacher pay and teacher preparation, those are two things to me that are absolutely fascinating. I did a trip to Hutto ISD, this was maybe in the last couple of months and whatnot, and it was really interesting to hear from educators. It wasn’t- when they talked about being their best selves in the classroom, it wasn’t so much about funding as it was feeling like they were supported and prepared. And so to me, it’ll be really interesting to see how the House and Senate prioritize them this session given the lack of significant or meaningful increases last session. So there’s a lot to kind of play out, but I think vouchers is kind of leading the way right now and we’ll see where things fall into the conversation.

Ed McKinley: And just to tie in those two conversations about the kind of broader political dynamics with the specific policies, it’s easy to forget when we think about 2023, and when there was the big vote on the House floor that led to all these people getting primaried, that vote wasn’t actually an up-down vote on whether vouchers were going to pass the House. It was about whether vouchers were going to be considered in the same bill as all of the other education reforms. So based on what I’ve been hearing from conversations with staff and lawmakers and stuff this year, everyone seems to have an appetite to handle them separately in separate bills this year. But I think the question remains how much practically are they separate in terms of the political dynamics and the negotiations that are taking place? So is there a world where a voucher bill doesn’t pass but schools still get extra funds or there are still special ed funding reforms or there are still all these other policies that move forward? I don’t know. That’s going to depend on a lot of things. I’m going to be curious to see if both of those things are emergency items in the State of the State or if just one of them is because, I mean, a lot of those policies, if you just had an up-down vote on it on the special ed reforms for instance, that was a bipartisan commission, they recommended all these changes. I think every lawmaker is hearing from their districts, ‘Hey, the pace of special ed evaluations is really, really high. We don’t get funding for those expenses. This is a huge drag on our budgets at the moment.’ I think that would probably pass pretty overwhelmingly if they just put it up. But is it going to get the opportunity to do that?

Jaden Edison: I would say the politics are really interesting in this scenario because can you actually go another session without public education spending being a priority? Politically speaking, when you’re talking from the standpoint of Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Patrick, it was notable, I think this was sometime in the last month or so where Lieutenant Governor Patrick was talking to a ton of rural educators and whatnot and basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m your friend. We passed this in the Senate.’

Scott Braddock: I was there. They didn’t quite buy that. 

Jaden Edison: So again, that to me was notable, right? Because that’s a recognition that hey, what didn’t happen in 2023 was essential to a lot of people and had a significant impact.

Scott Braddock: I think it’s important to remember where this idea came from, that the two things needed to be linked together, vouchers and school funding. Remember, in the middle of the regular session in 2023, it was almost like a Hail Mary by the Senate at the end of the regular session to put them all in the same bill. Remember it was House Bill 100, all that stuff’s up here somewhere. And in that bill, previous to that, it had just been the public ed spending and funding bill, and suddenly the vouchers are in there. Of course, Ken King lit that on fire on the floor of the House. It’s not going to work. But I thought it was especially telling about the thoughts of Lieutenant Governor Patrick and the Governor at that point where Patrick, I think realized at that moment, when it didn’t work, that that’s a bad idea politically, that’s not going to work. And so for the rest of the legislative sessions, all those special sessions, the Senate then kept them separate. And that was the House that put them together. And even though it was a Hail Mary and a mistake by the Senate, Governor Abbott embraced it as his legislative strategy going forward to put them in the same bill. And it just didn’t work out. And I do think that it’s important for those folks who work in public education and advocates for public education to understand that they don’t need to keep fighting that same fight and getting sort of baited into arguing about whether the public education lobby somehow killed $6 billion for public ed. One of the defeated Republicans in his primary told me it was probably six, seven months ago, he said, Scott, they got to stop arguing about that bill. That was never going to be the law. That bill, to your point, that was a farce. The Senate was never going to pass anything like that. And it was Lieutenant Governor Patrick who told CBS Texas in Dallas-Fort Worth. After all of that fell apart, he did an interview where he was asked, would it have been okay in your mind to pass the raises for teachers and the extra money for schools? Would it be okay to do that without the vouchers? And he said, yes, absolutely. And so the entire education community needs to hold him to that. And I think there’s one other thing, is there’s real recognition by Chairman Creighton and some other very conservative Republicans that they can’t go another two years. To your point, they can’t go another two years without funding public ed. Think about this. Tom Oliverson who ran for Speaker on a platform, didn’t work out, but he ran for Speaker on a platform of eliminating power sharing with Democrats. Same guy, put his name, his signature on a letter with Democrats in the Houston area to try to get more public ed funding for the Cy-Fair school district. So even among those folks, there’s real recognition they can’t keep doing this because they’re going to look at a bunch of unemployment in their districts and schools closing and things like that and they can’t have it.

Morgan Smith: I’m going to pause there and really look at that issue of school funding. And Bob, I thought maybe you could give us, what are the numbers right now that lawmakers have to work with? What are school districts faced with, and what can we hope for in the upcoming session?

Bob Popinski: Coming into this school year, a vast majority of school districts have had to adopt deficit budgets, right? They are struggling to give teachers pay increases to keep programs, to even keep campuses open. So if you look back to even what the legislative budget board has in their fiscal size up since 2019, there’s been about 20% inflation. So that amounts to about $9.8 billion a year less purchasing power than school districts had just five years ago. So in Texas, we have a biannual budget, so you have to kind of multiply that by two. So we’re about $20 billion short of where we need to be for just school districts to be even.

And so when you look at that and you see what the House proposed and what the Senate proposed we’re well short of that $20 billion, what the House has in their budget proposal, and it’s the initial proposal is $4.8 billion right now, but that’s a two-year number, so you have to divide by two. And so we have a long way to go to kind of just even keep up with inflation. Now, we don’t know what the funding formulas are going to be or how that’s going to flow on the House side. We hope it’s going to be a basic allotment increase, the building block for how we fund our public schools. But on the Senate side, they have about $5.2 billion in there, and most of that is going to go towards teacher pay raises. They have about $4,000 in there for every teacher across the state, and an additional $6,000 for a total of $10,000 for teachers in rural school districts. And so those are the starting points. They have $400 million in there for increased safety and some other program funding in there. But we have a long way to go and we understand that there’s other competing programs in the state, and especially when you’re looking at water or even property taxes, but there is a $24 billion beginning balance and an additional $28 billion in the rainy day fund that we have now capped out. So the funding is available, and as a lot of people like to say, a budget is a moral document. Where are we going to put public education in our budget? Are we going to make it a priority? And what order is it going to be in this legislative system?

Scott Braddock: Well, to that point, the Texas Senate led by Patrick wants to spend more money on film incentives than school safety. So you can see what their priorities are so far.

Ed McKinley: And similar along that line. It’s not just like the total dollar amount, but it seems like over the last 10 years or so, and I’d be curious what you think about this, Bob, but it seems like there’s much more of an appetite to provide funds for specific programs. It’s a much easier sell to a lot of Republican members of the House and Senate to boost the teacher incentive allotment, which is this merit-based pay program for teachers. And it’s kind of in line with this idea of “running the government like a business”, which I think is something that is a value that’s held by TEA and is informed by business practices. But it’s kind of fascinating because it’s led to Democrats becoming the party of, oh, local control. Local governments just let them do it. And it’s like this reversal of historical roles.

Bob Popinski: There’s only a handful of ways school districts can generate more revenue. You can increase your enrollment or your attendance, you can go after a tax rate increase if you have that capacity left, or you can opt into some of these Texas Education Agency programs. It’s the teacher incentive allotment, it’s the extended-year program. It’s now the high-quality instructional materials that the SBOE passed this last summer. And so those are really the only ways you can opt into additional revenue, which means your flexible spending is not there anymore for community-based programs, and teacher increases and staff increases. Remember, we have 380,000 teachers in this state, and only a fraction of them] are in the Teacher Incentive Allotment Program.

Ed McKinley: And as Jaden was mentioning earlier, there’s more of an appetite for things like DEI or legislating how specific subjects are taught or introducing prayer in schools. And the more specific hooks that the state has with school districts with different programs, the easier it is to get them to go along with those sorts of policies.

Jaden Edison: I always find it really astounding. It just seems like, and I’ve talked about this with Bob a little bit, but there just seems to be a complete disconnect with the needs of what public schools and teachers and administrators say they need and what lawmakers think they need. And so to me, I just find that really astounding in that to me, education is an area where it’s really hard operate like a business because you have kids’ lives at the center of that. And so the fact that isn’t more of those stakeholders at the table or working through some of these issues even, regardless of whatever the political differences are on things, to me, just kind of like I said, it is pretty much astounding to me that we continue to, we’re in hearings and we hear lawmakers talk about how public schools have received the most funding they ever have. And then you go to a school district and you see they’re considering eight closures. What happened in, I think in El Paso earlier this year? And so I think there just seems to be a complete disconnect with what the needs are for public schools here in Texas. 

Scott Braddock: Well, and the disconnect is that it’s in the DNA of the state. Our culture is that, and this is my redneck version of Texas Constitution. It basically says it doesn’t matter who your daddy is, everybody gets an equal education. It doesn’t matter if you grow up in Highland Park, one of the richest parts of the state or in East El Paso County where in parts of it they don’t have running water. All those kids are supposed to get a public equitable education. And it’s really a beautiful thing when you look at what’s in that constitution. Here’s what it does not say, that we’ll run a profitable business to educate kids. It doesn’t say that. What it says instead is that, and this is again my redneck version, because it talks about liberty. It says that basically educated people are freer people. And so we do that because, and you know why that’s in the document, it’s in the foundational document of the state in our constitution, because when this was Mexico, the Mexican kids got a free public education and the white kids didn’t. They literally picked up guns over this and fought about it. This was part of the Texas Revolution, was to have a free system of public education in the state. And this is why it has been to the consternation of so many of these groups that have pushed for privatization of schools all over the place. It makes them nuts that Texas is the biggest Republican state to not have a program like this. But they weren’t fighting that culture in those other states when they set those programs up.

Ed McKinley: Those voucher programs, you mean?

Scott Braddock: That’s right. Yeah.

Morgan Smith: Yeah. Well, speaking of vouchers, we have a voucher bill in the Senate.

Scott Braddock: Rock and roll.

Morgan Smith Yeah. Can we go over just what is in that current bill {SB 2} and what you guys expect to happen to it?

Jaden Edison: So basically the parameters, and again, I think Senator Creighton was again very clear that, hey, we passed this bill four times in 2023. He probably said it, I wasn’t keeping count, but he definitely reiterated that several times. But this particular bill Senate Bill 2, so the programs are pretty straightforward, right? $10,000 per year per student for participation in this program if you apply rather to an accredited private school. And then there’s additional funding allocated for students with disabilities. And also there’s a small kind of pot of money too for homeschoolers. And so that’s the general kind of parameters of the bill. But the reason I’m kind of speeding through that part, the part that’s really interesting is, and there’s been a lot of debate about this this week, is the kind of prioritization system if demand for that program exceeds the funding available. The way it is currently set up is that bill would determine, basically it would define a low household income, as 500% of the federal poverty level or below. And so I did the math, really interesting. A household of two, for example, would be somewhere north of $105,000 and would be considered a low-income household. And to me that was pretty notable just in light of when you think about how the Texas Education Agency or even the federal government determines “economically disadvantaged” students, those who are eligible for free or reduced lunch, that’s somewhere around what one 30 to one 85% of the poverty level significantly below that. And so basically, in that prioritization system, you will see really low-income kids and families competing with those who are more well-off. And so I say that to say, that’s going to be really interesting to watch. I think a lot of people, maybe fatigue with the voucher debates and discussion. But I’ve heard public schools shift from this space of like, okay, we know the politics of the moment right now and we understand that perhaps this is inevitable that this is going to happen. And so how do you get the best version of the bill passed if that is a stance that folks are taking? I’ll be really interested to see how the House and the Senate work out some of the- I wonder how the rural Republicans are going to, how are they going to look at the kind of income threshold, understanding that their communities and the importance of making sure that everybody’s adequately served through such a program if they actually support it. And so that’s one of the things I’m looking at. But the bill itself is interesting, but obviously the details and the House is going to be- the Senate can do everything. They can pass the bill as soon as next week if it’s declared an emergency item, but the House is obviously going to be where. Because hit a brick wall in recent years. And so yeah, we’ll see where it goes.

Ed McKinley: I think people have their eyes on how similar universal voucher programs have played out in other states, and there’s a sense of how do we avoid some of the issues that have arisen with that. I mean, for instance, in a lot of other states, there’s been huge majorities of the people in the first years of the program that are using it that are existing private school students. I think if you talk with some of the people who are advocating for vouchers, they’ll say, that’s not a feature, that’s a bug. That’s to help them kind of subsidize it. They deserve access to it like everyone else. But it is sort of incompatible with the rhetoric about why this is necessary to get kids out of failing public schools. So I mean, the specifics like the hyper specifics of how the bill is actually written are going to be really important for determining how that’s going to play out. So I think it’s just very, very early in this. I mean, from the people that I’ve spoken with, there’s not a lot of optimism that if the Senate Bill 2 passed as written currently, that those problems wouldn’t arise in terms of 75% of students being already in private schools.

It’s going to pass the Senate, it’s Senate Bill 2. Senate Bill 1 is the budget which has to pass the Senate for us to have a government. So I think the hyper specifics, and there’s a very interesting kind of tightrope walk happening in the House. I think, and this is the thing that, I mean, frankly, if you talk with a lot of school groups, and I’m sure people listening to this and people in this room are working for a lot of those groups, the sense that I’ve gotten is a bit of a malaise, a bit of, this is going to happen. I don’t know what there is to be done about it. I mean, talking with people within the building, it is difficult to get 76 [votes]. It’s easy to get 76 votes in theory. It’s hard to get 76 votes for words on a page that have specific effects that are going to hit millions of Texas kids. So there’s a balance of people, even people who may have voted for the bill, the procedural motion in 2023 that kind of set all this up, that want to see more accountability. They want to see public information laws, they want to see testing requirements, they want to see this, they want to see that. And it remains to be seen whether that’s going to be something that Abbott wants in a bill or that the groups that are pushing the voucher program in the first place are comfortable with. 

Scott Braddock: I think it’s such an important point. People will say the devil is in the details. I would say it this way, that you can’t count the votes on such a significant piece of legislation without knowing what it looks like. You’ve had over the last year or so, the Governor framing up the discussion as in he’s got enough votes, that’s all you hear. And that turns into journalists and others just asking the question, well, are there enough votes? And then I see people who are well-respected, they might be political analysts who’ve been at this a long time, but they never leave their office in Houston. And they will, sorry, they will, not to name names, but their commentary will be along the lines of, oh yeah, vouchers that’s going to happen. You just need to work out the details, but the details like which kids are eligible and how much money we’re going to spend on it, you’re kind of writing the whole bill. And so when it does go to the House, we start to see proposals there. They’re not, to your point, they’re not going to rubber stamp what the Senate is doing. And the Senate really, I mean the senators have really relegated themselves to almost irrelevant on everything. It is what the Lieutenant Governor wants. It’s Senate Bill 2, they’re going to pass it. And by the way, those who have lobbied the Senate across issues will tell you that unless you have the buy-in from the Lieutenant Governor, there’s really no reason to even talk to the senators. You need to make sure that his office is cool with whatever it is first. And that’s on everything from sports betting where he doesn’t think that people should do it on their phone, which is the only way anybody really does it. Right. And on any issue, if you’re going to try to move something through the Senate, there has to be basically a two-year lobby effort to make Dan Patrick cool with whatever that is. Well, he’s cool with this, but we don’t know what the House is going to do. And it’s interesting, I mean, to the election of the speaker to that point here, you have Dustin Burrows, a conservative for sure, from Lubbock, Texas, where would not benefit from school vouchers, and in fact, it might hurt their public education. It was in Lubbock. It’s interesting that Lubbock, as far as just a region of the state, really punches above their weight for influence. Of the 31 million people who live here, they’ve got a Speaker from there now. And so many of these debates within the Republican party play out in West Texas. It was in Lubbock that Governor Abbott acknowledged on a radio show there that whatever this is a couple of years ago, whatever public or whatever private school voucher program has passed. He went on a radio show there and just assured them, Lubbock ISD is great and it’s not going to affect your schools. And then he said that, guess what? We’re not going to be able to tell people who run private education that they have to take any of these kids. So he’s basically making the case there that we’re going to set up this program, but we can’t guarantee that anybody would’ve actually be able to use it in large numbers. And he went out of his way to say, Dan Patrick said the same thing in Lubbock, that this is where he first floated the idea that rural Texas would be exempt from a voucher program that was a couple of years ago. They understand that the fundamentals of the politics aren’t really that different. And the scorched earth campaign that Abbott went on last year certainly changes the numbers as far as where that vote is going to land. But when you start talking to some of the very conservative freshmen members who were just elected, start talking to them about the details. One of them, for example, I’ll leave out his name, but you can see me afterward, a very conservative legislator just elected. He was starting to look at some of the voucher proposals and he said, “Wait a minute, they would give the voucher to a kid who’s already in private school?” He didn’t know that. And all of a sudden he’s thinking, well, maybe I’m not for that. So they would really want to see the details flushed out a lot more.

Jaden Edison: That’s such an interesting thing to me is because Texas is not reinventing the wheel with its voucher proposal. These programs have been around for decades. I mean, dating back to the modern kind of way, we think about vouchers dating back to the early nineties in Milwaukee, which really was targeted toward low-income students. But there are, there’s decades of data, and more recently what we’ve seen with these universal programs are exactly those kind of traits of you have basically a ton of kids who had already been enrolled in private school. Who  are the beneficiaries of those? I think the news outlet, ProPublica, which is an investigative newsroom, they’ve done some great work looking at, I think it was in Ohio specifically I looked at for private schools. They’re not located closely to the poorest zip codes in that particular state. And you’re talking about having to get a kid from A to B,  transportation standpoint. Those are things that cost money. And so when you dig into the details, I know Texas, and maybe this was a theme at the public hearing over Senate Bill 2 was, well, we weren’t first, but now we can learn from other people’s mistakes and lead the way. But I struggle as someone who tries to really read the history and understand some of these other programs, just how different Texas can be, given that the parameters are largely similar to what we see in other states.

Bob Popinski: It’s not going to be much different. And the fiscal note dropped with SB 2 during the Senate education hearing, and they keep calling this a billion-dollar program. And that’s true maybe for this biennium in the second year it starts, but if you look at what the out costs are by year four, it’s $4.6 billion and that’s a reasonable number. Why is it a reasonable number? We can look to Florida. Florida’s universal program and other voucher programs has a one-year cost of $3.9 billion and 70% of the kids there were enrolled in a private school the year before. The funding is all going to private schools. That’s true in Arizona where the numbers, 80% of kids were enrolled in a private school the year before. So we know where this is going, the receipts are in from other states, and we hope that there’s enough guardrails and that there’s a cap on this budget process that it doesn’t get out of control.

Scott Braddock: I think one of the things to keep in mind as far as the mindset of the legislators is that we have, in a lot of ways, I’ve described them as sort of political trust fund babies, a lot of them who are in office now who didn’t really have to earn it, and there’s always been a surplus. It’s always been a surplus for the entire time that they’ve been in office. There was always a surplus for freshmen and sophomore members of the legislature, and even some who have been there longer than that, [they] don’t remember the last time we had a budget-cutting session. That was all the way back in 2011, and y’all remember the first thing they did was cut $5 billion from public education. Does that number sound familiar? $4 or $5 billion here or there. It can cause a real crisis, and now they’re going to commit them to a $4 billion program going forward. We had a $32 billion or $33 billion surplus last time, $21 billion, something like that, or $24 billion this time around. But at some point, we’re not going to have surpluses anymore. There will come a day when Texas isn’t rich, and the guys who have been around for a long time, they know that. But I do think this is important to keep in mind for the legislators who are currently serving. I think for the House and Senate, there are only about 30 or so who were there for that back during the last budget-cutting session. All of these folks have operated in an environment when it comes to property taxes and the way that they’ve been “reforming” that based on the numbers you were talking about before, they’ve always operated in an environment where there’s plenty of money. If anybody up at the building tells you they don’t have money for whatever it is, they lying. That’s not true. But there will come a day, two years from now, four years from now, I can’t imagine that rounding up all these immigrants and imposing tariffs on our big trading partners that might cause economic problems for Texas. So two and four years from now, we might be facing something very different and in the meantime could be committed to this program. Look, to be fair to those kids who would then be enrolled in it, you can’t just pull it back. I mean you’re committed to it at that point. All that would be in perpetuity. And so will those property tax “investments” or buy-downs in compression if the Lieutenant Governor gets his way. And I do think this is a legacy project on his part. One of the things that makes me think he’s getting ready to retire.

Morgan Smith: Scott, I’m going to stop you right there.

Scott Braddock: Well, $140,000 homestead exemption is definitely a legacy project for him. And his point man in the Senate on tax is Paul Bettencourt. And that also is an ongoing cost moving forward because that has to be done through a Constitutional Amendment. So unless they can get people to vote later to raise their taxes, which I don’t think they’re going to do, the state’s going to be on the hook for that as well.

Morgan Smith: I mean, I could sit up here and talk with you guys all day on this stuff, but we are approaching the end of our time and I did just want, we have so much going on at our state capitol, but there is also a new administration in Washington. So I wanted to kind of wrap up by just hearing your thoughts on how some of the Trump administration policies might affect what’s going on at the Capitol and our Texas public schools

Jaden Edison: And talking to some of the school districts even prior to Inauguration day. It was really interesting because I got the sense in talking to some of the districts, and these are districts located near the southern border. It was almost the sense of we’ve dealt with this before, and we’re dealing with this now with our state officials. And so there didn’t seem to be a ton of “we’re putting X, Y, and Z in place”. It was more of we’re going to rely on the practices that we’ve always relied on and we have a good relationship with border patrol in our community. If someone were to approach us, we would reach out to legal, so on and so forth. Right now, obviously a lot has happened since Inauguration Day itself, right? With the erosion of the sensitive locations policy, which that was more of a memo, that wasn’t necessarily like- didn’t hold the teeth that, Plyler v. Doe, for example, which basically guarantees or promises that immigrant students have a right to a public education here in the country.  But it was still maybe worrisome for some districts. And so it was interesting to kind of follow up with at least one superintendent who was like, yeah, we got guidance now from legal and we’re going to follow all the protocols that they’ve laid out for us. So it’ll be interesting. One quick thing I want to note. When we talk about Plyler v. Doe,, right, this longstanding Supreme Court precedent, I mean, Governor Greg Abbott has gone on the record in saying that he feels like the public education, I mean, excuse me, that the federal government rather should foot the bill for the public education of students from immigrant families. And we’ve seen bills filed that would erode that, basically attempt to align with what the Governor has stated. The reason why I bring that up, you have states like Oklahoma who are really pushing the limit right now, and I say that to say is you have a very friendly Supreme Court that is currently in place. And so that to me is a really interesting area to watch, even as it relates to the school voucher legislation because there was conversation in the hearing the other day about does this apply to students who are undocumented? And Senator Creighton was very careful. He talked a little bit about, Hey, the Supreme Court rule that immigrant students are entitled to a public education, and so that’s where we stand. But he did say that they will file an amendment on the floor to implement a trigger that if the Supreme Court were to overturn Plyler v Doe, then those students will no longer apply for those things. So I said to say,that’s a lot. I know I just said, but there’s a lot brewing as it relates to immigration policy at the federal level and how that aligns with Texas.

Ed McKinley: There’s a huge appetite in the building over there for these landmark Supreme Court cases to have the word Texas in the title, I think. And on the question about the federal education policy, a couple of quick things. I mean, there was a lot of-this came up a lot in the conversations about Project 2025 and what it would mean if the Department of Education were actually eliminated, which would require an act of Congress, and I think is very unlikely. A lot of what they do expenditure-wise is related to institutions of higher education. But for K-12, I think a big thing to watch is a 180-degree inverse of what we saw with the Biden administration and Obama before that, which is sort of using the tools of civil rights and investigative powers that the federal government has to kind of institute new requirements to behave a certain way in school or push certain values like no DEI, critical race theory, things like that. Some of the very same things that were being complained about under the Biden administration, as a random example, I remember Ag Commissioner Sid Miller talking about school lunch funding being tied to LGBTQ policies at schools and how wrong he thought that was. Well, I think now we can probably expect to see completely the opposite where it’s like, you might not be able to access these certain federal programs if you are engaging in these kinds of ideologies or policies. And then just one little interesting note in terms of a Texas tie, Penny Schwinn, who used to be a TEA official, was named the Deputy US Education Secretary, so there will be a person with intimate knowledge of the Texas education world and making some big decisions over there.

Morgan Smith: Well, we’re going to end it right there. I want to thank the four of y’all for being up here. This has been really great.

All Podcast Participants: Appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much.

Morgan Smith: Thank you for listening. To stay informed on critical education issues this session, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across The Lawn Weekly Newsletter at https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/get-involved/. Today’s sound engineer is Brian Diggs. Our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt, and our episode producers are Amelia Folkes, Amanda Phillips, Jay Moreno, Karen Wang, and Joel Goudeau.