My involvement in this story begins here, so some background on me might help you better understand my myriad cognitive biases and adjust accordingly.
I’ve been married to the same woman for 36 years, and we have raised 5 children. I’m CEO of Aquinas Companies LLC, which has three operating businesses: institutional construction management (which my grandfather founded 86 years ago), real estate development, and life science product development. Each business has significant ownership by the management team and Aquinas (which owned the rest) was for many years owned by my family.
A couple of years ago, I restructured the ownership of Aquinas, and from that point forward it has been and will be owned by two public charities. There’s a lot more to say about this topic, but this is not the place to do it so let’s keep it simple: I am CEO of Aquinas but I have no ownership in it or any of its operating businesses.
I’ve also taught MBA students for more than 20 years at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. I’m an engineer by education, an educator by choice, and Catholic by vocation.
Philosophically, I’m a conservative communitarian contrarian. Conservative because I believe we tend to retain what works, even if we don’t know why, so we should err on the side of keeping things the same. Communitarian because I’m deeply skeptical of large-scale institutions and grandiose plans for the perfection of humanity. Contrarian, because critical thinking and intellectual diversity are the best way to avoid the pitfalls of cognitive bias, the dark side of our powerful brains.
In 2023, I had been “retired” from engagement in politics for more than a decade. In 2010, I ran the Citizen Leader Alliance, a non-profit I founded that tried to unite Tea Party and establishment Republicans in Texas to pursue conservative policies at the state level. We were active participants in the 2010 election cycle I described earlier, and the effort that elected 99 Republicans to the House was my first real foray into electoral politics. CLA was not the biggest player in that cycle, but we were in the room, helped where we could, and I think we made an impact on a number of races.
Then in 2012, I formed, funded, and ran the Campaign for Primary Accountability, a federal SuperPAC. We set out to create accountability for the US House of Representatives where none previously existed due to the powerful advantages of incumbency. We did this by engaging in Republican and Democratic Congressional primaries.
CPA was the largest non-partisan SuperPAC in that political cycle. We engaged in 6 Republican and 4 Democratic primaries. We chose safe districts (so we would not impact the legislative balance between the parties) where established incumbents had credible challengers. We would then poll in their districts and if the support for the incumbent was weak, we would run an independent expenditure campaign to level the playing field for the challenger. The purpose of CPA was to try to address a fundamental problem in our electoral system: the lack of competition for House races. Without competition, voters cannot hold elected officials accountable, and without accountability, we cannot maintain a republic.
By the 2014 election, 9 of the 10 incumbents had been beaten. Our intention was not to push a policy agenda, but to provide real choices for voters in districts with entrenched incumbents. Along the way we helped launch the national political careers of folks like Beto O’Rourke and Brad Wenstrup.
I never spoke to any candidate we supported, preferring to avoid even the appearance we were trying to accumulate power or pursue a policy agenda. All we wanted was for the electoral system to work as it should and overcome the enormous barrier to entry that protects incumbents from electoral competition.
This experience, and my exposure to the reality of modern elections, convinced me that there was no way I could fix our dysfunctional political system. We were victims of our success as a nation and a few, now irreversible, decisions (like selecting candidates using primary elections rather than the caucus-and-convention system), and incentives that assure the perpetuation of the current system were far greater than any force I could bring to bear on the problem.
Moreover, my kids were growing up fast, and I had to prioritize between business, teaching, non-profits, and politics. I could not do everything, so politics was given the heave-ho.
I had also long been involved in education reform. I was an early advisor to KIPP, leading the effort to design and fund a program to grow from 2 to 42 schools in Houston (where KIPP was founded). Through that engagement, I was able to help several charter school systems around the country learn how to grow to a sustainable scale.
Then, to help build more leadership capacity for public education, I worked with Houston Endowment and Rice University to create REEP, the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program. While initially focused on developing leaders for the fast-growing charter sector, REEP grew to include aspiring principals from traditional districts with the support of Raise Your Hand Texas. Through REEP, I met and interacted with many talented educators in the public school system.
Around the same time as I helped launch REEP, Colleen Dippel and I founded Families Empowered, which I discussed earlier.
Lastly but most importantly, as a Catholic and product of Catholic education, I felt called to find ways to save inner city Catholic schools. These schools, which were vital institutions in many low-income and immigrant communities, and a cornerstone of Catholic parish life for a century, were closing at a rapid pace due to reduced vocations (in 1960, 95% of Catholic school staff were nuns or priests; today, it’s less than 5%) and competition from charter schools.
A couple of social entrepreneurs, Stephanie Saroki and Scott Hamilton, approached me about joining the board of a new organization they were forming, Seton Education Partners. Seton’s mission is to create economically sustainable models for Catholic schools serving poor and working-class families. I agreed to join the founding board and today I serve as Chairman of Seton.
So while I pulled back from engagement in politics, I kept plugging away at trying to improve the lot of families looking for the best way to educate their kids.
Anyway, because I had been around both politics and education, as facts on the ground began to change – as parents went from trusting to frustrated to angry – I was well-positioned to see it happen and understand the political implications. As I said above, at Families Empowered we were hearing regularly from parents who wanted more choice.
Because of the many friends I had been blessed to make over this time, I also started to hear from some of those friends active in politics. Kent Grusendorf came by my office to make the pitch that now was the time for vouchers. I remained skeptical and hesitant to re-engage, but Kent stressed that Gov. Abbott was going to push hard for vouchers. In fact, Kent said the Governor had publicly announced recently that he was planning to push for vouchers.
I remember thinking at the time, “bless your heart” but in retrospect I was wrong to be dismissive, as Kent was 100% right. I just didn’t appreciate how much Governor Abbott was committed to passing a universal school choice bill.
For the first half of 2022, TPPF had organized a series of Parent Empowerment Nights around the state to push for education savings accounts (ESAs). There was a large coalition behind these nights, including:
Liberty for the Kids (Kent Grusendorf’s organization)
Alex Cranberg’s ACE Scholarship Program (the largest private voucher group founded by Alex Cranberg)
American Federation for Children (founded by Betsy DeVos)
Americans for Prosperity (part of the Koch political network)
America First Policy Institute (a think tank run by Brooke Rollins, longtime TPPF CEO and later policy advisor to President Trump)
Convention of the States Action (an organization founded by Tim Dunn and Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler)
·Heritage Foundation (now run by Kevin Roberts, former CEO of TPPF),
Yes. Every. Kid. (a national education advocacy non-profit)
Texas Homeschool Coalition
The Miles Foundation (an influential and innovative philanthropy)
Moms for America (a grassroots organization of mothers)
EdChoice (a national education non-profit)
Cicero Institute (a think tank founded by Joe Lonsdale, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who relocated to Austin)
Texans for Free Enterprise (a group founded by Dallas philanthropist and policy advocate Doug Deason)
Independent Women’s Forum (an influential group of conservative women)
American Conservative Union (the sponsors of the annual CPAC conference)
Families Empowered
and a host of other groups who supported school choice in Texas and nationally.
Colleen started reporting that these rallies were getting bigger, and this effort was starting to feel like a well-oiled machine. Still, I remained skeptical.
But I am not a central player in the drama, so that’s enough about me. I share it only so that you are able assess my biases and viewpoints and adjust accordingly.
Let’s rejoin our narratives as we head into the 2023 Texas Legislative Session.