By Lacey Riley, Denton County Republican Party Chair
I am absolutely for school choice, but I was always of the belief the purpose of school choice was to create competition in public schools by having the funding follow the student. In other words, in order to be funded, a public school had to provide an education acceptable to parents so they would send their children to that school and it would be funded.
The school choice bill in its current form does not do that. It actually creates a $1 billion entitlement that doesn’t affect current school funding. That being said, I’m not sure the free enterprise concept of competition can really be applied to the public school system.
For example, the Lewisville Independent School District essentially has school choice. A parent can put their student in any school in the district if there is space in the school. Unfortunately it is hard to get into to the best schools due to capacity limitations. Even though Denton County is the third fastest growing county in the country and the population of Flower Mound has almost doubled since I’ve lived here, the census in LISD is declining and it is selling off land and closing schools as a result. Meanwhile, the private schools and the two Hillsdale College-affiliated charter schools (Founders) are bursting at the seams. Has this caused LISD to increase their academic standards across the district? Have any of the test scores improved? To me, this is fact-based evidence the concept of creating a competitive environment through school choice doesn’t really work.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I think it has more to do with getting back to the basics and focusing on academic excellence in our public schools as they exist today. In reality, not many people are going to be able to leave the public school system even if every student could get a $10,000 voucher.
I don’t have children, but this does affect me, it affects all of us. My profession is having a total crisis right now. The number of college grads signing up to take the CPA exam is at an all-time low. We had to dumb down the exam once and now it’s going to happen again. I took the whole exam in 2 1/2 days, now the exam is four parts given one part at a time at six-month intervals. Many CPA firms are now outsourcing to other countries to hire staff out of necessity. President Trump is creating thousands of new jobs, but we don’t have the people to fill the demand that’s coming because of the lack of preparedness through our public school system.
One thing that really bothers me about this school choice bill is that actual Republicans are using a Democrat shaming tactic to defend it. As in, “you are siding with the Democrats if you don’t support this bill.” Please argue it on the merits. If you can’t do that, then why are you supporting it? Republicans are not the party of groupthink – please remember that. Parents need to read the bill for themselves (House Bill 3 and Senate Bill 2), because it most likely will be passed this legislative session.
Of course Democrats don’t support any form of school choice. They need to have an uneducated, government-dependent voting base, that’s why they support open borders and illegal immigration. They are actually claiming math is racist.
We have upcoming school board elections in May and it really is important to get conservatives on our school boards, because school choice is only one part of the equation. Unfortunately, there is very little participation in our local elections which have huge impact on our quality of life.
