This article was originally published in The Texas Tribune.
Texas Democrats are focusing on education issues in their bid to flip several state House districts this fall as they look to blame GOP lawmakers for teacher shortages and school closures and mobilize their base around defeating the administration. Greg Abbott‘s signature school voucher policy.
That approach was spotlighted last week at the Texas Democratic Convention in El Paso, where party leaders and House candidates repeatedly rejected Abbott’s push to provide taxpayer money for private school education. They also recognized the governor’s recent success in unseating members of his own party who oppose school vouchers, calling it a reason to focus on Battleground House races this fall.
State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat who is leading House Democrats’ campaign efforts, told delegates at the convention that Abbott’s crusade against voucher opponents in the primaries narrowly tipped the House scales toward passage of vouchers next year.
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“To put it another way, we need to elect about three more Democrats to the Texas House to defeat vouchers and defend our neighborhood’s public schools,” she said.
Democrats and rural Republicans in the House have historically united against measures that would divert state funds to help families pay for private schools. Critics say vouchers would siphon money away from public schools that already face widespread teacher shortages and budget shortfalls — a trend exacerbated by lawmakers’ failure last year to tap the state’s historic $33 billion budget surplus to to boost school funding after efforts had been caught up. in the voucher battle.
Most of the House battleground this election cycle is in the suburbs of Dallas and San Antonio and South Texas, spread across several districts with struggling schools, where Democrats hope public education will resonate in the ballot box.
One of their top targets is Republican state representative. Johannes Lujanwho won his Bexar County district by 4 percentage points in 2022 — overcoming trends atop the ballot that had Democrat Beto O’Rourke holding the district by 2 points over Abbott.
Kristian Carranza, a progressive organizer and Lujan’s Democratic opponent, said as she met voters on block walks: “The No. 1 issue at the door is public education and the fight over the vouchers.” She noted that the district — which covers south San Antonio and the east side of Bexar County — also includes beleaguered districts such as Harlandale ISD, which closed four elementary schools last fall due to a funding shortfall.
“For people, this is a lived reality when we talk about vouchers for private schools,” said Carranza, who opposes the measure. “The way I talk about this is that the financial crisis facing schools is due to massive budget shortfalls, and that is the inevitable result of elected officials like John Lujan who have chosen to toe their party’s line in instead of standing up for their own interests. community.”
Abbott and his pro-voucher allies argue that parents deserve the ability to remove their children from the public education system, which has been attacked by conservatives over its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about how race, history and sex are taught in education. the classroom.
Republicans are already contesting the Democrats’ narrative, accusing House voucher opponents of being responsible for the demise of a bill last fall that would have pumped billions into public schools. The bill died after a coalition of House Democrats and 21 Republicans removed vouchers from the package; The bill’s author subsequently withdrew the entire measure, citing Abbott’s threat to veto education funding that did not include vouchers.
Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said that by putting opposition to vouchers at the forefront of their campaigns, Democrats are “fighting for teachers unions and their selfish agenda, instead of the Texans they claim to represent.”
“When it comes to education, parents matter, and families deserve the opportunity to choose the best educational options for their children,” Mahaleris said in a statement. “If Democrats want to make their opposition to parental empowerment a central theme of their campaign, good luck.”
Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said part of the strategy for Democrats “is to move the public education debate back onto friendlier territory” — toward school finance and away from issues like the curriculum.
In recent years, Blank said, Republicans have mobilized voters “based on the idea that teachers basically couldn’t be trusted and that the curriculum was derailed,” allowing them to go on the offensive in an area typically dominated by Democrats. .
“Traditionally, we think of public education as a Democratic issue, because when we talk about public education, we’re usually talking about spending, and … there’s almost no debate in which Democrats won’t be more willing than Republicans to spend money on public education” , said Blank. “But when we talk about curriculum issues and parental rights, it puts Democrats in a difficult position.”
Under the banner of protecting children in public schools, Texas Republicans have passed laws in recent years aimed at banning sexually explicit books from school libraries and limiting how topics like race and racism can be taught in public schools. Conservatives have expanded the fight beyond the classroom, passing a law restricting sexually explicit performances for minors and proposing a bill targeting drag queen story hours — events typically held in public libraries and bookstores and aim to promote literacy.
In recent days, Republicans, including Abbott and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, have targeted Democrats for hosting drag queen, Brigitte Bandit, at their convention. Bandit gave a speech in which she defended the practice of reading books to children during drag queen story hours and took aim at the Legislature’s measure to ban transgender youth from taking puberty blockers and receiving hormone therapies.
“These are the same Texas Democrats who thought it was a good idea to parade a drag queen on stage to talk about indoctrinating impressionable children,” Mahaleris said, underscoring how Abbott has portrayed the public school system as a hotbed of liberal indoctrination in his efforts for school vouchers.
Carranza isn’t the only Democratic candidate to shape her campaign around public education and vouchers. In Dallas County, Democratic hopeful Averie Bishop is highlighting her background as a substitute teacher in her bid to unseat state Rep. Angie Chen Button, R-Richardson. Bishop also pointed to the firsthand view she got of Texas’s poor state of public schools when she toured the state after winning the 2022 Miss Texas competition.
“I have personally seen how grossly underfunded and undersupported our schools are,” Bishop said at the Democratic Convention. “School vouchers will pass if we don’t turn my chair from red to blue.”
Democrats also see a new opportunity to win the San Antonio-area seat held by state Rep. Steve Allison — a moderate Republican who opposes school vouchers — after Allison was defeated in the March primary by conservative challenger Marc LaHood, a criminal defense attorney which supports vouchers.
State Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, said LaHood has “extreme views” that are out of step with the district.
“Looking at the contrast between Steve Allison and Marc LaHood, and understanding and knowing the independent and educated voters in the [district’s] Alamo Heights area, I have no doubt that our Democratic hopes have just increased tenfold,” said Martinez Fischer, chairman of the Texas House Democratic Caucus.
In its current configuration, the district would have been carried by former President Donald Trump by about 2 percentage points in 2020. Trump would have carried Button’s district by half a point the same year.
LaHood, asked about Martinez Fischer’s comment, said in a statement that “parental choice is not a partisan issue.”
“Parents want and deserve more options when selecting the best educational environment for their individual children,” LaHood said. “The Democrats are in for a rude awakening if they want to make powerless parents their hill to die on. I welcome the conversation and the fight.”
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/13/texas-democrats-house-election-vouchers-public-education/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom that informs and engages Texans about state politics and policy. More information can be found at texastribune.org.
