Podcast Transcript: Recap of the 89th Texas Legislative Session: A Historic Session for Public Education
Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 6
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Listen to Podcast EpisodeMorgan Smith: Welcome to a very special live recording of the Intersect Ed Podcast, where the stories of the public education policy and practice meet.
I’m your host, Morgan Smith.
Today, the morning of June 3, we are just a few blocks from the Capitol, where the 2025 legislative session just wrapped up. I’m joined by four guests who will share their thoughts on what took place over the 140 days of the 89th Legislative Session. Let’s meet them now:
- Scott Braddock, journalist and political analyst from The Quorum Report
- Jaden Edison, education reporter from The Texas Tribune
- Ed McKinley, a bureau reporter for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, and
- Bob Popinski, senior director of policy at Raise Your Hand Texas.
Before we get into it, 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 here we are the morning after Sine Die. The dust is settling. We know the big ticket items that did make it through vouchers and school finance, and we’re definitely going to talk about those, but I wanted to hand it over to our beat reporter, Jaden first to just talk a little bit about what didn’t make it this session.
Jaden Edison: Yeah. Well, I think the primary thing on everybody’s mind is the STAAR test lives on, which is the state’s standardized exam. Lawmakers seemed to be in agreement on some form of alternative assessment on how to measure the academic performance of kids, but obviously disagreements on specifically how that should happen as well as how the state should handle when school districts disagree with the way the state attempts to hold them accountable, excuse me, through their A through F accountability system. And so there was one proposal that sought to give the Education Commissioner a lot more authority as it pertains to ensuring that school districts don’t sue when they disagree over certain changes. And so that was kind of the big thing. I think that once again, I think Representative Diego Bernal, who’s actually the vice chair of the public education committee, he had talked about earlier in the session. Every year we talk about getting rid of the STAAR test and there seems to be agreement, but this will ultimately be one of the sessions that ultimately it didn’t happen again. And so something that’ll need to be probably will likely be revisited down the road.
We all have to imagine other things that come to mind, really, for me, go with House Bill 2, the big $8.5 billion school finance package, because there were a lot of things that made it into the legislation, but as you can imagine, in how many pages Bob? Almost 300, almost a hundred, almost 300-page bill. You have to imagine there’s a lot of things during negotiations that get left out of that process as well.
Top of mind for me, you talk about pre-kindergarten eligibility, excuse me, for students with disability, children with disabilities, that was something that didn’t make it, which ultimately means that if you have a child with a disability who doesn’t qualify for free and other doesn’t meet any other criteria, then ultimately the school is going to continue to kind of pay for those services. I think about there was a fine arts allotment, which was a big thing. I know some folks had actually showed up and testified about the importance of the state providing more funding for fine arts courses, which are integral to student success when you’re not talking about core subjects and talking about the things that get students excited and passionate about showing up to school. And so those are just some of the things, obviously, a lot more that we could talk about here, but some of the things that are top of mind right now.
Morgan Smith: And I guess with HB 2, there are some things embedded in there that we are in a wait and see when it comes to what the commissioner’s rules are going to be like. We did podcast episodes on teacher certification. Jaden mentioned pre-K. Bob, can you walk us through what we might be looking for in terms of the commissioner’s rules?
Bob Popinski: Yeah, absolutely. They landed the plane, this legislative session. They had to, after not doing anything the prior legislative session. And so they had a lot of issues that they needed to get resolved, including the $1.7 billion shortfall in special education. So the big package within House Bill 2 and Senator Bettencourt’s bill that also got passed, that’s identical language is this new way of funding special education. And so it’s going to take time to develop, but what they’re doing is putting in another $850 million in special education over the next two years. The commissioner is going to have some time to develop this new system of service groups and intensity of service levels for special education students, but they also double the college career military readiness funding bonus. They increased the transportation weight and they get to some of that funding increase. They need to backfill that $1.7 billion shortfall. But what didn’t make it, which was in some of the supplemental bills, is if we remember the school health and related services funding shortfall because of some of the litigation that took place, they needed roughly about a billion dollars to kind of fill that in, that didn’t end up passing in the supplemental bill. So we still have a long way to go. We got some of that shortfall back, but not all of it, but it’s going to take time to implement. -page school finance package, I mean,
Morgan Smith: And I wanted to, while we have you talking about the 300-page school finance package, I mean are public schools going to feel some relief from this? Can you give us kind of an overview of what it does?
Bob Popinski: Yeah, absolutely. Big picture, it is $8.5 billion in new funding for public schools. It flows in various different ways and it’s going to impact schools differently, but it is a big step in where we need to go. Remember we started the session needing $19.6 billion just to maintain the same purchasing power as 2019. So inflation has doubled since 2019. And so this goes a long way. Are some of the headlines going to change as we go through the process because schools are still going to maybe have to close certain campuses or layoffs staff or teachers along the way?
Yes, we still might see some of those headlines, but the headlines that I think a lot of the legislatures want to see out of this as well is that $3.7 billion goes to teacher pay raises depending on experience and the size of your district. So anywhere between $4,000 and $8,000, if you are a teacher at a school district with less than 5,000 kids, $2,500 to $5,000 per teacher, if you’re a teacher at a school district with above 5,000, there’s some money in there, $500 million or $45 per ADA for staff allotments. So districts can give pay increases for staff other than teachers. There’s $1.3 billion in there, about $106 per student for a new allotment called the allotment for basic costs. And we can kind of get into why they developed this here for fixed cost.
And then as I mentioned, $850 million for special education, they increased the school safety allotment, almost doubling it per student, another $430 million there. And then there’s an array of other funding formulas in there. But when you’re looking at what school districts actually have to be flexible kind of moving forward and kind of making their day-to-day operations meet, it really is that $1.3 billion in that new allotment for basic costs. It’s the $45 for staff. And then at that point, it’s all programmatic, right? If they want to draw down additional funding for an extended school day, they’re going to have to apply to TEA. If they want to get some stipends to get their teachers through residency programs, they’re going to have to go through TIA. If they want to do the teacher incentive allotment, they’re going to have to apply to TIA. So it’s a lot of programmatic work wrapped up into House Bill 2 and a lot less flexibility for school districts.
Morgan Smith: And that’s interesting to me because six years ago in 2019, that was the last time lawmakers increased the basic allotment. And I’m curious, what our reporters up here think, and maybe I’ll throw it to you first, Ed, what have you noticed just in the changes in conversation around school finance at this time?
Ed McKinley: I think it ties into something that Jaden brought up earlier with the STAAR test bill where I mean, you think about there are things that there’s broad agreement on in the ledge, which we’re all looking at directly behind us, which you’re not seeing in the podcast, but we’re literally staring at the building and the folks over on the right hand and the left hand, there’s a lot of agreement on things like eliminating the STAAR test or wanting to support schools. But I think that when you zoom out a little bit, there’s a big difference in terms of the folks on the House side and how much kind of faith and trust they have in delegating decisions to the local school boards and the folks on the Senate side, they’re wanting to be a lot more prescriptive about it. So the House favored a much larger increase to the basic allotment than the Senate. The Senate preferred all these sort of targeted investments and strategies to make sure that it went to their particular goals. And as Bob was saying, that leaves a lot of, not a lot of wiggle room for districts to use flexibly for the sorts of expenses that arise. But yeah, I mean I think it’s reflective of an ideological difference between the two chambers that was also present in the STAAR tests where what role does a standardized test play when you have just completely different views about how much you can trust school districts to educate kids? Yeah.
Morgan Smith: Well, let’s get into that. The House versus Senate dynamic, we had new faces in the House, new leadership, Scott who won the session?
Scott Braddock: Senate, oh, the Senate, every time on every issue, the Senate, on every issue that I mentioned, it was the Senate on every issue. The Lieutenant Governor, and you alluded to it, he does not trust superintendents and school boards to make these decisions. And that’s what I kept hearing out of the conversations that House and Senate leadership were having about this and the way in which House Bill 2 was handled. And you and I talked about it a little bit previously. It was done in a way where the Senate didn’t even have to show their cards first. It was done in a way that was very secretive. I think that was frustrating. And what I mean by that is that not just traditionally, but procedurally, the way it has always worked is on a big piece of legislation like this, the House would lay out their plan, have a hearing about it, it would go through the process in the House, and the Senate would then do the same thing, but with their plan, they would say, here’s what our plan is. They would’ve a hearing about it, it would go through the process, but instead, it got stuck.
And I want to talk for a second about why it got stuck because House leadership, and this is a big conversation that’s always had in politics, business, all of life, one skill that it seemed that the speaker either didn’t have or wasn’t using, and I think it was the latter one skill that you’ve got to have in all of these facets of life is knowing what your leverage is and then how to use it.
The President, Donald Trump’s very good at that, the deal maker (sometimes). And the deal was that, and how many times did House leadership say this? And over the last two years, how many times did the Governor and the Lieutenant Governor all say, we can create a school voucher program, a school choice program at the same time that we make a historic investment in public education? Sort of ended up happening, but it didn’t happen that way in the process.
Those two things did not move through the process together and House leadership either when the speaker said that he wanted to make a historic investment and that we could do it at the same time as vouchers, he either meant that and just wasn’t very good at this as far as the process, or he didn’t really mean it at all, and he was willing to just make whatever deal with Dan Patrick. Y’all can decide for yourselves on that.
But the fact that the voucher bill was passed so quickly and it just left the School of Finance stranded, created all the leverage in the world for the Senate and not just on education issues across issues. I mean the school funding ended up two years ago, so many people were upset about school funding being linked to a school voucher program. Now this session, it became linked to a ban on THC.
What do those have to do with each other? Well, the only thing they have to do with each other is that the lieutenant governor was trying to crack down on THC and he was holding money for school’s hostage to be able to get it done. And it wasn’t just that he was holding it hostage, he was also just writing his own plan without even holding a hearing in the Senate, which was very frustrating. I kept hearing, and for members of the House, it was very frustrating. The word they kept using was “acquiescence”, why are we acquiescing to the Senate on everything? The Lieutenant Governor basically just wrote his own plan himself. He didn’t trust the school boards to make any of these decisions. You remember when the House plan was laid out? Originally the speaker had a press conference with superintendents by his side and they were talking about how great this was going to be, and they ended up spending roughly the same amount of money.
But I had one of my friends whose expert in school of finance said this could be simultaneously the biggest and worst school finance bill that we’ve ever had because there’s no flexibility for the districts in the way that they’re doing things. And when you talk about that sort of programmatic funding, that’s the point that it gets to is that when you’re talking school funding, and the Lieutenant Governor’s very good at this. He makes it about politics. He’s very good at it in helping people understand school finance the way he wants them to understand it. School finance gets real complicated. That’s why guys like Bob have jobs, but here’s the deal and I’m all for that. But the deal is that with the Lieutenant Governor, he makes it makes school finance equals teacher pay raises. That’s it.
In 2018 when he had a close election in the closing days of the election, the last month of that cycle when he barely won his race, just like other statewide Republicans that year, his closing argument to voters in rural Texas, he was running nonstop radio ads about teacher pay raises. It wasn’t about sort of the red meat conservative issues. It was about that. And they got him across the finish line. And so that’s the lesson that he took politically from that election was that works. And so when it was time to do this school finance bill, that’s what he wanted to focus on and talk so much in focus, so much on teacher pay raises. But it was my understanding in talking with a lot of folks about it, the school finance plan that the House had put forward actually would have allowed for school districts to raise teacher pay even more than the Senate plan. But the House leadership never talked about it that way.
And it ended up not being House versus Senate at all because the Senate hadn’t even come forward with their plan just yet. I had reported out some of the details of what they were going to do, and then the speaker was asked about the Senate’s plan is starting to emerge. He was asked about it at a news conference and without even seeing the plan fully publicly yet, the speaker said, oh yeah, the Senate plan is great. Well, I don’t think he had checked with his House members about that because there were some of them who were pretty upset. So on each and every issue, the Senate just dominated, and you can chalk it up to either a speaker who was just a rookie, he’s green. I don’t think he can say that Dustin Burrows has been in the House for a decade now and has been one of the key players in House leadership as the calendars chairman. Or you could say it was a speaker who was mostly concerned with, and I think this is maybe oversimplifying a little bit, but I think it speaks to what he felt his sort of directive was from the members when they elected him as speaker.
His main directive was to not have a special session at all costs because two years ago they had, did you know this two years ago in that building, the legislature that year was in session more than Congress because if you count and you have to, (they sure do) if you count the impeachment trial and the fact that Congress wasn’t in session as much as they normally were that year, they were actually there for about a month more than Congress. So these are folks who signed up for a part-time job that pays 600 bucks a month and they don’t want to be here. I mean, most of them, they’re not just gone today. They were gone yesterday as soon as they could get out of town. And so that helped also to create Senate leverage because at this point, the little governor, he has no other life. He’s happy to be here all summer and the House members don’t have that luxury.
Ed McKinley: I think there’s a couple points worth raising just to kind of add some nuance to that. I mean, I think you could say that it was rope a dope or strategy or whatever, but the Senate definitely had a stated preference earlier on in the session of a lower total dollar amount invested in public ed than the House did. And instead, we actually ended up getting more than was even in the original House bill too. So there was at least some give and take on that. And I mean, I think the point that you rose about Dustin Burrows at that news conference saying that he supported the Senate plan before he had actually seen the details of it. I mean, my understanding of how that played out is he heard that the bottom line had been increased and said, okay, done deal. We got our win. That was what we were looking for. And I think maybe he underestimated the importance of how those funds were going to be spent, which is the flexibility that we were talking about. And it’s worth mentioning too, Bob listed this off in the beginning, but there is 1.3 billion for sort a fixed cost allotment. What’s the formal name? A B, C,
Bob Popinski: ABC. Yeah, it’s the “allotment for basic costs.”
Ed McKinley: I mean, this is functionally an increase to the basic allotment,
Scott Braddock: Not
Ed McKinley: Calling basic allotment.
Scott Braddock: No, it isn’t, though, because they’re telling them exactly how they have to spend it and mean.
Ed McKinley: It’s a backdoor way to provide the school districts with more flexible funding without Dan Patrick having to admit that he caved on that.
Scott Braddock: I mean, in some ways. But when the speaker goes out and he endorses a plan when his members voted 142 to 5 for a different plan, that’s a mistake on his part as speaker, as speaker. And that’s the way to not be a speaker next time around.
Jaden Edison: But also to be clear, when we talk about the function of the basic allotment, the plan actually lays out, I think, I don’t want to say a wrong number, but there’s a handful of specific things that school districts can use, specifically use those dollars for, and to also understand that the flexibility of the actual basic allotment goes beyond the handful of things that are outlined in there, right? We’re talking, and I think that’s kind of what kind of gets lost in the conversation is why school districts talk about the basic allotment so much is because you specifically look at a particular school district. If you’re in West Texas, what are the specific, you might have a need where, okay, we got to pour more of the BA into instructional materials. Another district, we need to put it more toward athletics, another district somewhere else in Texas where it’s like we’re going to pour that overwhelming majority of this into all of our salaries, which is usually what happens anyway. So I think, again, in talking to school officials, I don’t think you’ll talk to a superintendent who’s going to say, we won’t use that money. I think people, I heard Representative James Larico actually framed it on the floor. He said he would vote for a bill that provided a $1 increase to schools, but the function of the base allotment, there seems to be some kind of misunderstanding of how that actually works. And it really is when we talk about flexibility, the most flexible avenue to provide districts with more funding to address the unique specific needs of their campus. And what we learned this session is that there’s not a trust from particularly lawmakers in the Senate that districts are going to handle that power and flexibility in ways they best see fit.
Ed McKinley: And definitely so I mean, the point I was really trying to hit home is we’ve spent the last two years with the governor saying schools are indoctrinating kids. There’s groups that are publishing studies about how much superintendents are getting paid. There’s this narrative that schools are indoctrinating, kids are wasting funds, they’re trying to make your kid trans or there’s furries or whatever. And so it would be weird politically if the people who were pushing those things then said, oh, let’s just turn around and hand the schools money to use it however they want. That would be completely out of touch with each other.
So the Senate was holding firm for a long time on no discretionary funds. I mean earlier versions of the bill. I remember they wouldn’t have even been able to use the increases in discretionary funds, wouldn’t have even covered the benefit costs that would’ve gone up under statute to administer the teacher pay raises that they were requiring under the bill. And so there was an evolution on the bill to try to address some of these concerns. Scott’s point about the House getting rolled overall is definitely true, but there are some flexible funds and they do address some of the main core needs that schools said that they needed.
Bob Popinski: The legislature never makes school finance easier. They always make it harder. And so what they’ve done here with this almost 300 pages worth of finance is created more allotments and more complexity. The simplicity of the basic allotment is it flows through your district characteristics, it flows through your student characteristics, and it gives you the amount of money based on all of the formulas we’ve set up over the last decades when you’re adding these little pots of money saying, here’s your $106 for your basic costs now that’s it. That’s it. Until the session comes back two years from now, if you have different student characteristics, you’re getting the flat amount. And so what they are essentially doing is you have to go hat in hand back to the legislatures every session because your utilities have increased, and that becomes a problem for the future.
Jaden Edison: I was going to say, I think Ed made a great point. I get lost even from my standpoint, I didn’t know how they were going to handle the disagreement over the basic allotment and the actual creation of the new allotments. That was something I didn’t see materializing in the way that it did. So certainly we, looking at it from that standpoint, if you’re a school district, if you’re looking at kind of, I think you would probably prefer that solution to at least have something to address some of the inflationary pressures that have been hitting your district than nothing at all. So I think Ed does make a great point.
Ed McKinley: If you talk to people who are in the room, I think people will acknowledge when they’re speaking candidly, that effectively what it is is a way for Dan Patrick to save face, but to give schools at least something to use flexibly.
Scott Braddock: Yeah, but I mean, you said that they always make, Bob said they always make school finance more complicated, but wasn’t that not true in 2019, we had gone all those years of creating all these different funds and the way that money flows to school districts and all that, and they did a lot of work in 2019 to not make it simple but simpler. And now you have leadership moving back and it took a long break from doing school finance, so they had some time to think about it. So over that six years, they went back to this sort of, not just, they went back to this anti-local control model of Dan Patrick and Dustin Burroughs and the crew in that building are going to write the budgets for ISDs and they have to come and ask for their money. The idea of local control is just, it’s over with.
And the Republican party I always have, my Democratic friends will say, I thought Republicans for local control. And I said you have to stop saying that because it’s been a long time, at least about 10 years. Another one of my friends who watches all this, a veteran of the process, said that I think it had always been for years that Republicans would say, when it came to these issues, I’m all for local control. And then, they would explain why they’re doing something different. It was last session that they didn’t even feel the need to deviate from the principal. They would just do it and not say, well, I’m for local. They would not say they were for local control, they would just be against it. And that has now bled over into the school finance debate.
Bob Popinski: TEA needs 85 new staff to administer all of these programs. I mean, that’s how much they’re growing the agency and these grant-type application programs.
Morgan Smith: So I want to shift to the other huge piece of public education legislation: vouchers.
Jaden Edison: Forgot about that.
Morgan Smith: So I want to shift to talk about the other huge education legislation that passed this session, the voucher bill. Did Governor Abbott get everything he wanted in that? What guardrails are in place, and what challenges do you guys see on the horizon?
Bob Popinski: He signed it about a month ago already, which seems like forever ago. And it’s a universal voucher program, and there’s some guardrails in it that we can talk about. And it starts in the 26 27 school year at a billion dollars. And we’ll see how many kids will apply, and we’ll kind of go over those numbers here in a second. But if you look at some of these out-year costs, which the comptroller’s going to have to track under the legislation is that by year 2030, it could balloon to $8 billion for that biennium, depending on how the legislature comes back every session to put money into it. But right now, it is a billion-dollar program.
It is available for all private school students, for all homeschool students, for all public school students. They have to apply, there’s four tiers that cascade down depending on where you fall within the family of income for four on the federal poverty guidelines. And there’s some guardrails within that. If you make more than 500%, you can only get 20% of the overall funding amount in any legislative session. And so, in addition to kind of guard rails for what the eligible expenses are, private schools have to be accredited for two years before you can start pulling down voucher money.
So they did put a lot of guardrails within the system, but from Raise Your Hand’s perspective, it’s always kind of been bad policy for the state of Texas for all sorts of reasons. And the number one reason is that a vast majority of the kids in other states that use a voucher already attended private school anywhere between 70 and 80% of voucher recipients in other states already attended a private school. And that’s what it’s shaping up to be this time around.
I think what the fiscal note kind of looks at is maybe 25,000 public school students will get the ESA within the first year, and the rest will fall to private school students already attending a private school and homeschool students. And so that is the big high-level issue that we’re facing is what did we do here? Was this the program to get students out of failing public schools or was this a program to give funding to students that were already attending private schools?
Ed McKinley: Just to hammer home Bob’s point, not only is it shaping up that way, it’s essentially impossible. If you look at the number of available private school spots, the number of difficulties for people who are trying to access the voucher who are from a public school, you have to apply potentially this fall for enrollment at a private school without knowing if you’ll have the voucher because they won’t have the system set up yet. You have to get admitted, you have to figure all that out, and then you have to find out you got the voucher, which probably won’t cover the full cost, and then maybe you’ll be able to attend. Maybe you won’t. Maybe they’ll have a spot for you, maybe they won’t.
Meanwhile, if you look on the flip side ofto kids who are already in private school, I think it’s like 275,000 or kids who are already homeschooled, which is more than 600,000. Those kids are already in the educational environment that qualifies them for the voucher. In other words, it’s free money. So why would all of those kids not apply? And they fill up all the opening spots in private schools with the voucher kids. That’s like 30,000 kids or whatever. The wait list here is going to be gigantic filled with kids that are already at private schools or kids that are already homeschooled. And under the law, the comptroller’s office for the next biennium is required to request in the legislative appropriation enough funding to cover every single kid on the wait list. I mean, in terms of just what the future holds and comparing the rhetoric from when the bill was passed to what is likely to happen. It’s just very hard to picture how this isn’t going to balloon gigantically
Scott Braddock: Is the, I have a question. Is the wait list going to be long? How do we know that?
Ed McKinley: Because it’s free money for Yeah,
Scott Braddock: But how are people going to know about it? If you think about all of the devil’s advocate, if you think about all of the under-enrollment we have and Medicaid and different various programs where it’s quote free money, people have to know about it. And a lot of the people that have been, I would say used as props in the debate where we say we’re going to get the poor kids out of failing schools. I don’t know that their families even are going to know about this. I mean, is the state going to do, are they required to do some big, some big
Ed McKinley: Advertising thing very directly? They can use the money from the billion-dollar fund, the comptroller’s office. A political office can
Scott Braddock: Do that, but are they going to do it?
Ed McKinley: I mean, they have the ability, and there are private companies that are accessing, I think it’s like what, 5%, so $50 million for some middleman company to promote themselves and access the fund. And they have a vested interest financially in the fund’s growth. And the comptroller’s office politically has one in the fund’s growth. So I mean, no, there’s nothing saying you have to hire X marketing firm in New York, but everyone benefits from it and they’re allowed to do it.
Scott Braddock: Well, I mean, I would say to get started, all of the companies you’re talking about, those vendors that are involved, they’re going to make money no matter what off of the program if they’re administering the deal. And the first people who are going to know about it are those people who, the ones you said who are already in private schools, and oh, by the way, you get a discount if you apply for this.
Ed McKinley: And in other states, we’ve seen private schools that have just started telling their kids, apply for the voucher.
Scott Braddock: Go get it. Yeah, right.
Jaden Edison: And I think too, the wait list is- you’re going to have a wait list of kids who are in private schools too.
Scott Braddock: Sure, I agree.
Jaden Edison: I mean the difference in the Texas program, which is interesting to know, if you look at Tennessee for example, they just passed their voucher program, and their rollout actually happened in the same year in terms of they passed the program and then right away they’re already starting implementation here. And to Ed’s point, they’ve had a huge waitlist already. Texas actually has a lot different implementation than other states in that they actually are waiting an entire school year before they roll out the program. It sounds like what you were talking about kind of talks about specifically if you’re saying you’re going to primarily help low-income kids, it’s just going to help them. When we’re talking about the waitlist, I don’t think that necessarily implies that it’s only going to be those kids on the waitlist. We’re going to talk about kids who are probably already in private school.
And just one more thing that often gets lost in this, right? This was the narrative, the entire legislative session as it pertains, we primarily want to help low-income kids, and students with disabilities, many of whom have maybe both of those situations. These programs, as we talk about the modern version of them, started out with the kind of targeted focus on those particular kids. You look at Milwaukee and Cleveland, DC, I mean, they all had a specific focus toward the most vulnerable kids, right? Yeah, exactly. And so if that was specifically the goal, then you’re able to, other states have already laid out models on particularly how specifically try to serve those particular demographics of students. And this is completely different.
And again, lawmakers, they’ve been very clear about their intentions. I mean, Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Patrick have specifically talked about their disagreements with how schools go about teaching race and America’s history of racism or how they accommodate trans students. And so this is as much about that, maybe even more so than it is the other things about specifically helping low income families. Because again, if that was specifically your primary goal, and again, they may point to the eligibility system and criteria, but I think that’s important to notice the history of these things is you have programs that were specifically targeted that way. You go back before that, you get to the era of Brown V Board of Education where you had entire school districts. You look at – Google “Prince, George County, Virginia”, where an entire school system was shut down for a handful of years to keep schools from being integrated. All those things are connected in a way. I don’t think you can talk about what’s happening here in Texas today without pulling and referencing a lot of that history.
Ed McKinley: And to touch on what you were talking about, some of the curriculum concerns and the bills that have passed over the last few sessions, I think that’s going to be a really interesting thing to watch play out here is like there are some of these private schools that they teach critical race theory. They can do whatever they want over there, just like the classical schools that are teaching this anti-woke curriculum that somebody like Dan Patrick or Greg Abbott might agree with. But just in the previous conversation, we were having about how prescriptive the ledge has gotten towards schools and how much TEA has had to grow to administer it, all of those guardrails, those hoops that schools have to jump through, private schools don’t have to do any of that. They don’t have to do the school safety requirements that public schools do since you’ve all day. So that’s going to be very interesting. I mean, on one hand they’re saying we want schools to be more tightly controlled, but on the other hand, they’re providing this flexibility that parents can go to whatever school they want.
Bob Popinski: And what was the sticking point for the assessment and accountability bill House bill for what tests the students would take? So what tests do the voucher kits get to take a nationally norm reference test? What tests do public school kids have to take criterion reference the STAAR test? That was the major sticking point in all of this. And so we are setting up two distinct systems here that over time is going to even grow wider in margin in addition to the type of certified teachers, we have public school teachers. And within the next three or four years, you have to have a certified teacher in every foundational curriculum, classroom, private schools. You don’t have to have a certified teacher at all. Right? That was passed this session in House Bill 2. And so we’re creating a two vast different systems here. And at some point when you saw those funding increases that $8 billion potentially here in a handful of years, that’s when the fight’s really going to start coming in because how do you attract and retain teachers when if you do have a system that’s growing, whether it’s in charter schools or private schools, how are you going to keep and attract and retain teachers?
Jaden Edison: Would y’all agree that? And it’s interesting you bring that up, the STAAR component. I almost got the sense that that was really top of mind for someone like Chairman Buckley, Representative Buckley, who leads the House Public Education Committee because I think the House, especially, you hear from so many more members. Top of mind is Representative Gina Hinojosa, who has been very vocal about opposition to the STAAR test. And that was some of the debate on the floor where it was like, well, why are we not asking private school kids to take the STAAR test and Representative Buckley’s like, we’re trying to get rid of that too.
Scott Braddock: It seemed like the House got rolled on that too. I mean, on almost everything. And on the question of the testing and the question of the funding, I mean, what did you say? $8 billion within five years. To me, as someone who watches the budget discussions all the time, these amounts, that’s the amount that they’ll want to do for tax compression. For “tax cut”. That’s the amount that they would want to do at some point for public ed is the 8.5 they did. This time around. You’re talking about real money. And so for a lot of the advocates for public ed at the Capitol, as the voucher thing is passing, they kept saying, yes, the governor’s going to get his thing, even if he has to call Donald Trump and get him on live with the members that morning and say, “Hey guys, go win one for me”. Which he did do, which was kind of surreal, but Hey, it’s 2025.
Jaden Edison: That was huge, by the way-
Scott Braddock: Yeah, I mean they got -pause on that for a second. Even after everything else, the governor had done a scorched Earth campaign in the primary last year and nonstop always with the school, what did he call educational freedom and the school choice and all this stuff that he was doing throughout the session. On the day of the vote in the House, he still had to call for backup from the biggest gun in the Republican party. And I had that morning. The way that the Republican or Democratic caucus meetings work, of course is that’s a private meeting. We can’t go in there. I’m usually at home when they’re doing those meetings. I can’t go in. I just know everybody who’s in there. So they start texting and they say, Hey, what’s going on? And one of the members texted me that morning, he said, well, he just put Donald Trump on the phone. I said, really? And the next thing I got was the video.
The video was texted to me by one of these members. We were first to put that out at Quorum Report before the governor eventually did it. But yeah, there was still some talk to your point, there was still some talk that Republicans might side with Democrats at least on some details of how to do this right? And maybe have a statewide referendum, ask people of Texas what they think about it, put it on the ballot. But once Trump called in, all that starts came out of that opposition. They were ready to just do whatever they were told later. Of course, a lot of those Republicans were asking the question, can I get it in writing that the president’s really going to endorse me in my primary next year? Although I think some of those suburban Republicans might not want that endorsement. We’ll see how it goes.
But yeah, I mean the pressure campaign to get that done, but then back to that whole thing about funding, the advocates kept saying that once they got passed that they would say, okay, well look, they’re still going to do a giant school finance bill, so that makes it okay for now. And in a way, in Texas, we have succeeded ourselves stupid. We can do anything we want. We have all the money in the world. What did we have? A 3$3 billion surplus last time, 25 billion this time. And the legislators, lawmakers, policymakers can do whatever they want because they have enough money. To your point, the real fights will start when they don’t. Right. It could be two years, four years, six years, eight years from now when we have a real deficit budget. And I think we talked about this last time we were here, they don’t have almost any muscle memory for what it’s like to have a deficit budget in Texas. They have not had to make big cuts since 2011 and a House and Senate. I think there are only, and we’ll have some more retirements this time around. So by the time we get to next session, I mean there are 30 members who are still in office now who even know what it’s like to have a budget cutting session that they had in 2011. By next session, there may be none. I can count to as many as eight senators who might not be there next session. I would think we will have a few retirements in the House, 10 to 15. There’s always some turnover and some people get beat in their primaries or general elections as well. I can imagine Democrats could pick up as many as five to six seats next time around. There’ll be new blood people who don’t have any experience for it. And by that time, we may be looking at what just starting to turn into a big fiscal crisis and a manmade crisis because these guys did it to themselves.
Ed McKinley: Just to circle the square there,
Morgan Smith: Just if you guys, our time is kind of wrapping up, but I am, Scott kind of brought us around to our predictions for what are we all going to be sitting up here talking about ahead of next session?
Ed McKinley: Yeah. Well, it’s worth putting a fine point on it that the program won’t increase automatically. The ledge is going to have to come back and approve more funds. And I think it’s easy to imagine if there’s a big waitlist and the comp charter’s office is saying, give us 5 billion more. There’s going to be a big conversation about it. But so far, this has been a campaign. It’s been political campaigns, it’s been advocacy campaigns. And the governor and his folks clearly believe this is a winning issue politically. And you can gripe about the way survey questions are phrased or whether or not Texans would support this or whether it would win in a statewide referendum, which it hasn’t in other states. But clearly they think this is a political winner, but now the rubber is going to meet the road. They’re going to have to actually administer this policy. And I think that the specifics of how they do, so our teachers are getting fired from maybe a religious school for being gay, and that school is being funded with public funds. When stuff like that is actually happening, are people comfortable with it and are they willing to express political consequences for the folks that are building up this program? And on the flip side of the political spectrum, they just banned pride clubs at public schools. Private schools can still have pride clubs like our Republicans going to be comfortable with that when they’re funding them through the voucher program. So I think that those sorts of nuts and bolts questions are going to be really important as we move from the campaign into actual governing.
Jaden Edison: And it transitions from, again, all the rhetoric that we’ve heard all session is that particularly when it comes to vouchers, right? This is going to serve our priority category students, students with disability, students with low-income families. We’re going to get that demographic report when the report, excuse me when the program launches 26, 27 school year, we’re going to be able to see a lot of, we’re going to be able to basically compare what the talking points were during the session and what actually happened. Does Texas follow in the footsteps of other states where the primary beneficiaries are students in private schools? All the evidence points to that being the case. But obviously we’re going to be able to have data to kind of look and assess what is the Texas story of this particular issue. And then obviously, I think we’ll also be talking again, we’ll be talking about accountability again down the road as it relates to STAAR and how to best host. I’m very curious to see what happens between now and the next legislature as it relates to the tension with districts and accountability. But certainly, things that’ll be interesting to continue to watch.
Bob Popinski: Absolutely. Before we get to next session, teachers and students have to sort out a whole bunch of bills that pass this session too. So I thought I’d just rattle off a few. Starting in the next year or two, within House Bill 12, teachers are going to have to post their syllabus. You’re going to have to have an annual posting of what you’re going to do each semester. Middle school students are going to have to take two more semesters of physical education, physical activity. You’re going to obviously go through the state board, but grades 4 through 12, the communist regimes curriculum is going to have to get decided. SB 1191, we’re going to have a statewide standard GPA for the first time. We’ve got the 10 Commandments bill that’s going to move through the process and probably litigation. And most schools already have this, but if they don’t, they’re going to have to have a cell phone ban policy. And so all of these bills with about 1200 education bills are filed every session about a hundred or so passed. Again, we’re going to still have to sort through all of that. So we got rulemaking coming up. We’ve got to kind of find some hidden gems that are in these bills, and we’re going to have to sort through hundreds of pages worth of language. And so as all of these bills roll out, what actually impacts teachers and kids immediately is what we’re going to have to pay attention to.
Jaden Edison: Library books.
Bob Popinski: Library books. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Morgan Smith: Well, that is a wrap on our time up here together. Thank you guys so much for participating. Thanks to everyone in our audience. Thanks.
Thank you for listening. To continue to stay informed on critical public education issues, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand’s Across the Lawn newsletter at www.RaiseYourHandTexas.org/Get-Involved.
Today’s sound engineer is Brian Diggs, our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt and our episode producers are Amanda Phillips, Jay Moreno, Anne Bannister, and Karen Wang.
