In the annual fight in Texas over school vouchers, one of the strongest, most consistent defenders of public schools is an influential group known as zpastors for Texas Children. They believe in the importance of public education as a democratic right and they strongly support the separation of church and state.
At recent legislative hearings in Austin, their executive director Charles Foster Johnson testified against a voucher bill that was passed in the State Senate. This battle occurs every year. Thus far, a coalition of rural Republicans and urban Democrats has managed to defeat vouchers in the House. Pastor Johnson and his colleagues have been a powerful group in staving off privatization.
[If you want to watch Pastor Johnson’s testimony, which was “from the heart,” and diverged from his written statement, watch here:
[Start the video at the 3:50 mark– that’s 3 HOURS and 50 MINUTES– move the cursor just shy of the left side of the middle. http://tlchouse.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=37&clip_id=12360 ]
Testimony Before House Public Education Committee
By Charles Foster Johnson of Pastors for Texas Children
October 17, 2016
Chairman Aycock, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you and your committee today about what we have witnessed in our fine neighborhood and community public schools throughout our great State. My name is Charles Johnson, pastor of Bread Fellowship, Fort Worth. I am also executive director of Pastors for Texas Children, a statewide organization mobilizing the faith community for public education support and advocacy. We do two things: we minister to children in our local schools and we advocate for just policy for our children with our legislators. We were birthed out of the Baptist General Convention of Texas three years ago and now have over 1900 faith leaders of all denominations in churches all across Texas.
We are in our schools every day and see children from every ethnicity, every socio-economic background, and all walks of life succeeding beautifully on their path to productive citizenship in our society. We see children discovering their God-given talent and giftedness at the hands of dedicated teachers answering the call of God to pursue careers as educators. We witness daily the sheer moral power of public education as a building block of our society. This is why we are compelled to deliver the message to whoever will listen that universal public education is God’s will for all people—not a “choice” accorded to a few through a school choice voucher. I’d like to share several reasons why:
Public education is a moral duty. Education is a gift of God for all people. Just like the first human did in the Bible story so long ago, every person gets to name God’s world. Just as God brought all the creatures to the human to see what he would name them, so classroom teachers in schools all across our land teach our children to name God’s world. It’s the only way we can fulfill the first commandment of God to “be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it.” Education is a core component of the public interest. It is God’s common good for all God’s children—not just for those who are smart and stable and economically secure enough to pay for it with a school choice voucher.
Public education is a democratic duty. The founders of this nation determined at the outset of our Republic that in order to have a democratic society, we must educate all our children—not just a few children from families affluent enough to pay for it. Public education is a cornerstone of our American way of life. It is what has made America great. Our neighborhood and community schools are the places where our American history is taught, where our children learn basic civics, where the Pledge of Allegiance is said every day, where citizens are made. In America, citizenship is for all people—not just those few fortunate enough to be chosen by a school choice voucher.
Public education is a societal duty. It is incorrect for some of our friends to say that the money should follow the child because it is “my money.” With all due respect, it is not “my money” in a just society. We have a responsibility to participate in the well-being of all people. Do I get to have my own private security guard subsidized by the public through a “safety choice voucher?” Do I get to have my private swimming pool underwritten by the people of Texas because I don’t use the public pool? In a just and equal society, do I get a “transportation voucher” because I walk or ride a bicycle? The love of neighbor has founded our social order in these United States. We practice that love of neighbor through our taxation to support investments in that societal infrastructure.
Public education is a constitutional duty. The Constitution of the State of Texas says this in Article 7, Section 1: “A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.” The members of this legislative body swore a Bible oath to uphold that provision. There is zero authorization for this body to do anything with private schools.
Public education is a spiritual duty. We believe wholeheartedly in religious liberty as a gift of God from all people. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison did not make it up. It is the principle upon which our nation is founded. So, we affirm that no overt religious instruction or activity should be advanced or established with tax dollars in our public schools. All faith is voluntary. It belongs in the home and the church—not in our public institutions. This government has no authority to advance religion in our public schools. Nor, on the other hand, does this government have any authority to meddle in our private and home schools through a school choice voucher. Any money that is diverted from the public trust to a private entity will be publically accounted for, thus inserting and intruding government into the voluntary associations of religious schools. God does not need Caesar’s money to do the Lord’s work. Never has. Never will.
But, faithful teachers take the love of God with them into our classrooms each and every day, ministering long hours at low pay while serving the poorest children in our midst. They instill moral character. They teach respect across the wide diversity of our population. They show unconditional love to all kids. They do this because they are called before God. This is why the dynamics that govern our capitalistic system do not operate in an educational environment. Market forces such as competition and cost benefit analysis simply do not apply in the formation of a human being. A classroom is a holy place of learning—not a marketplace of financial gain. To make commodities of our kids and markets of our classrooms is to misunderstand—and profane—the spirituality of education.
PO Box 471155 – Fort Worth, Texas 76147
http://www.pastorsfortexaschildren.com
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow, powerful. I wonder if this moved any of the elected minions of the billionaire oligarchs like the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, or the union-hating, poverty-wage paying, tax subsidized Walmart Walton family. Donald Trump isn’t the only lying, no-tax paying, wealthy pig feeding at the trough of public money.
Trump has thrived with government’s generosity.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/11/nation/la-na-trump-20110511
How U.S. Taxpayers Subsidize the Nation’s Wealthiest Family
http://www.jwj.org/how-u-s-taxpayers-subsidize-the-nations-wealthiest-family
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/walmart-government-subsidies-study#51652
The Gates Foundation is a shell for tax avoidance
“Through the foundation, Bill, Melinda and Microsoft maintain pharmaceutical patent investments, tobacco investments, investments in alcoholic beverages, petroleum investments, investments in experimental and controversial crops, and even investments in news/media. Gates need not even pay tax, though he keeps control of the assets and uses that control to influence private and public policy.”
http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Gates_Foundation_Critique
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“Vouchers” were the first tool sought by segregationists back in the 1950’s to counter the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private segregationists to the concoct the “education reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then (and now) as merely giving parents free “choice.” They’re still trying to sell it.
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
Reports from the NAACP and ACLU reveal the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and now the NAACP Board of Directors has ratified a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students and students with disabilities.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
And now the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State and New York State supreme courts and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions.
Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities and must (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC. Hillary Clinton could, if elected President, on day one in office issue an Executive Order to the Department of Education to do just that. Tell her today to do that! Send her the above information to make certain she knows about the Inspector General’s findings and about the abuses being committed by charter schools.
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It is a sad commentary when pastors understand the value and necessity for strong public schools better than the policymakers of the state.
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Within a decade every ed reformer will be pushing vouchers. It’s the natural and inevitable progression of “the money follows the child’ and seeing schools as service providers rather than public entities.
They’re 9/10s of the way there now.
I sometimes wish they’d do it. None of them support public schools anyway. How bad could it be if public schools just go it alone?
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Careful what you wish for. In Sweden, their education minister, charged with righting the wrongs of a market-based voucher system, begun in the 90s, which led to increased inequality and decreased PISA scores, said, “It’s a genie-in-the-bottle situation. How do we change a system that has gone on so long in allowing quite big profit in schools?”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-crisis-political-failure-education
Elitism and stratification increased in Chile, too, where Milton Friedman’s neoliberal economic reforms were implemented, including a school privatization scheme begun under Pinochet’s 70s dictatorship. They’ve been a democracy since he was ousted in 90, but they are STILL struggling to get back their public schools.
http://www.coha.org/the-failings-of-chile%e2%80%99s-education-system-institutionalized-inequality-and-a-preference-for-the-affluent/
Once public funds start flowing to privatized programs, the money grabbers (and the politicians who enable them) are not so quick to let go…
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To paraphrase that most important last line: To make commodities of our kids and a market place of our classrooms IS TO PROFANE EDUCATION.
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If a wide swath of minsters in Texas are speaking out against vouchers, we need to hear from more in other embattled states. I apologize in advance to those who have.
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