SB2 Could Become the Most Consequential Law Ever Passed in Texas
Yeah, I get it, that sounds too grandiose to be credible. But if the Comptroller gets a couple of key decisions right, SB2 could change the way we live.
Before we get started, dear reader, please recall that I have limited ability to predict the future (ample evidence of this fact is provided in earlier Substack posts). The world is immense and unfathomably complex, and it’s really hard to see where we are, much less where we are going. My prediction track record (51%) is slightly better than the odds of getting tails when flipping a coin (50%).
So don’t consider this story a prediction about the implementation of a new law; rather, think of it more like science fiction. A science fiction writer tells a story that respects the laws of physics, but takes us beyond our personal experience into a strange new world. This alternative world seems familiar and plausible, but is different in important ways from the world in which we currently live.
Similarly, I want to take you on a journey into a world that is plausible but not fully realized – and indeed may never come to pass. And on this fictional journey, Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are the breakthrough that drives our story arc, the narrative equivalent of the development of a warp drive, or the discovery of spice. With this new thing – ESAs – activities that were impossible before now become possible, even likely.
But as we shall see, in the case of SB2 and Texas ESAs, it’s up to the Comptroller to write rules that allow this breakthrough to occur.
This is a story in five Substack posts:
Education and Social Imaginaries of Motherhood
COVID and the Destruction of the “Big Lie of Homeschooling”
The Artists Formerly Known as Homeschooler and Teacher
How the Comptroller Can Allow SB2 to Reform Education and Restore the Family
How SB2 Can Save the World
That’s it. No biggie.
Education and Social Imaginaries of Motherhood
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor coined the term “social imaginary,” defining it as “the ways we are able to think or imagine the whole of society.” However, Taylor does not mean thinking about ideas; instead, he means thinking about practices - the actual ways in which people live in a society.
I would put it this way: a social imaginary is our shared understanding of reality as revealed through our individual actions.
It is impossible to separate the way we educate children from the practices of our society. Education creates social imaginaries, and is therefore critical to the formation of culture.
Not everyone would agree with this; many commentators on modern life decry the way in which education indoctrinates children. While I understand the sentiment behind these criticisms, they miss one important point:
Education is indoctrination
We indoctrinate children because they don’t know anything. (Teenagers are the obvious exception to this rule, as they are blessed with full and complete knowledge of all things in all places at all times, but let’s not dwell on this exception.) We adults work to fill their heads with doctrines – that is, things that adults believe to be true – because if we don’t those heads will get filled with a bunch of nonsense, much of which is wrong in ways it will take years to fix.
At some level, we all know that “indoctrination-free education” is a myth and that the complaint is usually about the indoctrination via free education provided by public schools. Every sane person wants kids to learn some doctrines; only lunatics rail against the oppressive nature of the multiplication tables.
So the question in education is not whether to indoctrinate children but what doctrines should be taught, how they should be taught, and who should teach them. And that is where the social imaginary comes in.
In particular, the social imaginary of motherhood.
For most of human history, the early indoctrination of children came from mom. She decided the what and how of teaching doctrine, and the who was her.
As so it was in the US, at least for a 150 years. Until the 1950s, the real practice of the vast majority of US families was that small children (5 years old and younger) stayed at home with mom and did not go to school. Consider this graph:
In 1950, about 85% of 5 year-olds and about 95% of kids under 5 stayed at home. For these kid’s moms, their primary day job was child rearing. (Note the big drop in 2020 - we’ll come back to that later.) During the 1950s, there was a huge push for kindergarten, which accounts for the surge in 5 year olds going to school.
Since 1950, the percentage of children not living with their biological or adoptive parents more than tripled (from under 10% to over 30% today), and total fertility rate of American women has about halved (from 3.0 vs. 1.6 today). Moreover, workforce participation rate for women skyrocketed; rates for women of traditional childbearing age, in particular, more than doubled between 1950 and 1990:
You see that over the same period, workforce participation by similarly-aged men slightly decreased.
This is not exactly news right? Of course not. But here’s my point:
Over a 40-year period, the social imaginary of motherhood changed dramatically. The homemaker mom was replaced by the working mom, and schools changed in response.
Since then, over the past 30 years, the working mom social imaginary has remained stable, reinforced by most every American institution. Businesses loved having an increased supply of workers as it drove down labor costs; schools loved having more students, as it drove up budgets; politicians loved growing schools, as it drove a larger public sector, and therefore their power and influence; universities loved career-oriented women since they drove more demand for higher education, as a degree became necessary in a more competitive workplace:
Women have been beneficiaries of these trends, and now feel empowered to pursue careers just as men did prior to the sexual revolution.
But over the past two decades, there’s been a growing sense of unease with the working mom social imaginary. Surveys of women showed that only about a quarter (28%) of married mothers with kids under 18 wanted to work full time, and that percentage only grows to a little less than half (46%) for unmarried moms. A majority of women still want to dedicate their time to homemaking or do part-time paid work, presumably to focus on their child-rearing responsibility.
Meanwhile, to make life more attractive to working moms, corporations and governments expanded their involvement in family life, funding expansions of child care and pre-kindergarten programs. These expansions further reduced the “mom” part of the working mom social imaginary to make more room for “working,” although they didn’t change the underlying reality that many if not most women prioritize children over career.
In short, our social imaginary of what it means to be a mom has dramatically shifted, and there have been growing signs that more and more women are unhappy about it. While women gained significant education and workplace opportunities, these opportunities set off an “arms race” where increased workforce participation reduced time to spend with their kids (since they had to spend more time at work), drove down wages (especially for low skill or working class jobs), and increased the cost of raising kids (since many activities that were provided by mom for “free” now came with a price tag, and demand for those services rose).
The combination of shrinking time budgets, stagnant wages, and growing expense budgets had begun to reach its apotheosis in the 2010s as the US experienced significant declines in marriage and fertility rates.
Schools in turn had became enablers and beneficiaries of this arms race, as they expanded into pre-kindergarten.1 They also broadened their scope to include food and nutrition, mental health, pro sports recruiting, gender discovery, sexual liberation, social justice, and an array of adjacent activities that captured the ephemeral and expansive imagination of the education establishment.
Fundamentally, the impulse to act in loco parentis pushed schools far beyond the three Rs into roles and responsibilities traditionally held by moms. And working moms were increasingly pressured by economic and social forces to cede those duties to “the professionals” so that they could focus their efforts on profit- and GDP-increasing activities.
To be sure, there are lots of women who are very happy with being a working mom, and they definitely benefit from being aligned with the dominant social imaginary. And that’s great for them.
But there is also a very large group of women of childbearing age - not some small, marginal group but likely the majority - who have felt increasingly alienated from the working mom social imaginary. They wanted to be a mom and homemaker first and foremost and engage in work-for-pay only on a part-time, side-hustle basis, if at all.
Alas, social expectations and economic forces have conspired to push them into the workplace against their stated preferences.
The tension between the working mom social imaginary and the individual desires and interests of these women was growing more intense. With the rise of social media, that tension grew further as they connected with each other and began to share their dissatisfaction and form communities of common interest.
It seemed like we were heading toward major battle between homemaker mom and working mom to be the dominant social imaginary of American motherhood.
And then came COVID.
Universal pre-kindergarten and small class size are locked in a brutal competition for the worst education policy of the past 100 years (although the Units of Study disaster is coming up fast). It is hard to overstate just how bad these policies are for children.