School Choice Narrative – the Rise of Texas Public Policy Foundation

But what about the children?

This narrative begins in the late 1980s, with a physician-entrepreneur named Dr. Jim Leininger. Dr. Jim (which is what everyone calls him) is a driven, soft-spoken, thoughtful, and deeply religious man who achieved substantial financial success in the medical device industry.

After making a fortune, Dr. Jim turned his attention to education and school vouchers. Vouchers, as popularized by Milton Friedman, are simple in concept: parents get public money they can use for the education of their children in any setting they choose.

With a voucher system, parents are in control: they can send their kids to public school, private school, they can homeschool, or do whatever they choose to educate their kids. The only constraint is that the funding must be used for education.

From Dr. Jim’s perspective, public schools in the late 1980s had drifted away from their original mission of teaching basic skills and essential knowledge (like reading, writing, math, and civics). Moreover, after a series of landmark Supreme Court rulings on issues like school prayer, public schools had become secular even to the point of being anti-religious, something that was a big concern for a devout Christian like Dr. Jim.

To address this problem, Dr. Jim set out to change the law. At that time, there was no “think tank” at the state level he could work with to develop a specific policy, much less detailed legislation. So, as you might expect of a driven entrepreneur, he created one: Texas Public Policy Foundation, or TPPF.

Today, TPPF is the most powerful and influential conservative state think tank in the State of Texas (and perhaps the top state think tank in the US), with an annual budget of more than $10 million. It boasts a remarkable array of fellows, a generous and powerful board, and an impressive track record of successfully shepherding legislation through the Texas Legislature.

Although it has a very broad policy agenda today, TPPF at its founding in 1989 had a singular focus: writing and helping pass school voucher legislation in Texas.

Of course, getting legislation passed in Texas is not as easy as it might have sounded in a high school civics class. There is a lot of money at stake in public education, and in Texas those interests are very well organized and politically savvy.

For a decade, TPPF and Dr. Jim tried to get vouchers passed in Texas, without success. And one reason was another man of great wealth and influence who was doing everything he could to stop vouchers: Charles Butt, the heir and Chairman of HEB, an enormous, powerful, and beloved supermarket chain based in San Antonio.

Charles is also a driven, soft-spoken, and thoughtful man, but unlike Dr. Jim he supported the secularization of public education. While he came from a fervently evangelical family – his brother used to travel around the state on weekends preaching at tent revivals – his mother was a teacher in public schools.

Now whether because of or despite his family’s history, one point is clear: Charles believes there should be a strict separation of church and state. And to him, that means no public funding should ever flow to any religious institution, but especially to religious schools.

So Dr. Jim worked hard to pass vouchers, and Charles worked hard to stop them.

If there is any universal truth about elected legislatures, it is that killing a bill is much easier than passing one. It took years of work just to get committee hearings on TPPF’s voucher bills. Eventually, after more than a decade of effort, in 2005 Dr. Jim finally got a bill out of committee and the House held a floor vote on his voucher bill. He believe that 2005 would be the year his hard work and persistence paid off.

Sad to say for Dr. Jim, vouchers lost by the narrowest of margins. But in reflecting on this loss, he must have concluded that the only way vouchers would ever make into law would be to change the legislature itself because in the 2006 election cycle, because Dr. Jim then mounted a full-scale attack on opponents of vouchers in primary elections.

At the same time, Charles Butt, who helped block vouchers in the legislature, reciprocated with his own full-scale attack on voucher supporters, and the battle was engaged. Two Texas titans went toe-to-toe to win at the ballot box.

And Charles won. He defeated key voucher allies like Rep. Kent Grusendorf, won several open seats, and flipped other seats to Democrats thus creating a solid anti-voucher alliance. He also institutionalized his victory by creating a new non-profit organization, Raise Your Hand Texas (RYHT), to celebrate and protect his spoils.

From that point RYHT and its sister organizations became (and remain) a potent force in Texas politics. It was the private voice of the enormous Texas public education industry, and it was well-funded and well-managed, as one would expect of any Charles Butt-led organization. And as display of its power, RYHT set up shop on the most valuable real estate in Austin, closer to the Capitol building than TPPF, closer even than the leader of the Republican establishment, Texans for Lawsuit Reform.

Still, the attention paid to the Leininger-Butt fight ignores a crucial point: public schools in Texas in 2006 had strong support parents, their core customer. Even if Texas parents worried about the public education system generally, they liked their specific public schools. Overcoming the accumulated goodwill in Texas public education would be a huge political challenge. And with someone as powerful and well-respected as Charles Butt leading the opposition to vouchers, passing them after that seminal year was perceived as politically impossible.

Therefore, after the 2006 election vouchers dropped off the Texas political map, and Dr. Jim with them. The Austin press (always reliably on the side of state power) had been particularly brutal to him, painting Dr. Jim as some kind of monster who wanted to hurt kids. It was a gross misrepresentation, but when you step into the political arena, people are going lie about you, and repeated attacks are hard to take. I can only assume that for a soft-spoken, private man like Dr. Jim, continuing to fight must not have seemed worth it, especially once his prospects of winning had dimmed.

Nevertheless, school choice did not die; it just took the form of charter schools, a less controversial option and a sort of “consolation prize” that the legislature passed in 1995. Charter schools also had the benefit of side-stepping the religious question because charters are also public schools, controlled by the state and therefore similarly secular by law at that time.

Because there was growing demand for more options, charters flourished. What started as a small program to create new schools focused on underserved kids in low-income urban areas quickly grew to be a major force in Texas education, today educating more than 375,000 Texas children.

(I will cover more of this later, but I know my way around charters. I was active with helping several Texas charter schools grow during their early years, most notably KIPP, where I led the effort to design a growth program to take their then-two Houston schools to more than 40 schools. And in full disclosure, I always worked as an unpaid volunteer and I never served on the board since the construction business I led built for KIPP, and I donated back any profits. In any event, I’m no longer active in the charter school movement for reasons beyond the scope of this monograph. We now return to our previously scheduled narrative.)

However, even with their rapid growth, today charters educate fewer than 8% of Texas public school students. There was still a need to reform the remaining 92%, and that need gave rise to the accountability movement.

Under the guise of accountability, over the next 14 years public education became more and more regulated from Austin. As part of this movement, the state began forcing students to take more and more high-stakes tests, with teachers evaluated based on the results of those tests.

The big business arm of the Republican establishment loved them some accountability. The idea of an industry-driven system, heavily regulated by Austin bureaucrats, was exactly what they knew and loved. After all, if rules and regulations worked in business, why shouldn’t that same approach work in education?

But if accountability increased the power of Austin bureaucrats, it also dramatically increased the power of local school administrators and school boards at the expense of classroom teachers. It was simply a problem of scale: any large scale, hugely complex, highly restrictive system designed to meet all the education needs of a diverse state like Texas necessarily disempowered the average public-school teacher. Accountability turned kids into widgets and teachers into widget makers and superintendents into highly paid CEOs of monopolized widget factories.

Superintendents and school boards soon recognized that lobbying Austin was their highest impact activity, and the public education trade associations, like Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) and Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) teamed with advocacy groups like RYHT to create an Austin lobbying juggernaut.

Since accountability was the ultimate state-driven, top-down reform strategy, driven by “experts” and vendors, lobbyists only had to convince a handful of powerful legislators and education bureaucrats to change a system serving millions of kids. And, in a perverse way, Austin soon became a benefit to local school boards and administrators, passing state mandates that they wanted and had the authority to enact locally. Rather than making changes and being held accountable for those decisions, savvy public education leaders got Austin to do their dirty work.

And best of all (especially for the big education vendors like Pearson), the system never worked perfectly, so it always needed reform which meant more new products to develop and sell. In addition, for the reforms that were “working,” the wolf was always at the door and only a well-placed lobbyist could protect those hard-won student achievement gains.

So a seemingly endless cycle of trial-and-error ensued, with Texas children serving as the “lab rats” of the education industrial complex. Testing companies saw their profits soar, administrators gained more power, all while teachers and parents grew more and more confused and frustrated with each turn of the wheel.

And that wheel might still be spinning even today, if not for the COVID-19 pandemic.