Steffen E. Polko is a retired professor of education at TCU in Texas. He wrote the following commentary for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Vouchers, he says, will doom community rituals, like Friday night football. Dividing students up by religion and other grounds will divide our communities and our country even more than at present.
He writes:
There appears to be some confusion regarding rural Texans’ opposition to school choice and vouchers. I think I may know why.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s espoused principal reason for promoting vouchers is to protect Texas children from the “woke” propaganda being disseminated by public school teachers. Let me assure the governor that teachers in upstanding, God-fearing communities such as Mineral Wells and Hico are not subjecting their students to “woke” ideology. In these communities, “woke” still means not asleep. This is not something that’s broken in small-town Texas, so it doesn’t need fixing.
Now, onto the most important reason. Vouchers pose a threat to high school football and could turn out Friday Night Lights. An education savings account program will reduce funding levels for public schools as students leave. The first thing to be hit will be athletic budgets.
Proponents note that there are few private school options in rural Texas. So, where will these students go? There are no options yet, but this will change with vouchers. Many churches face declining attendance and financial difficulty. If $8,000 per year vouchers are available a minister with 20 or more school-age children in the congregation will find it rational and financially prudent to start a school.
Let’s say I have 40 such children. If the state sends me $320,000 per year and I can keep expenses at $160,000, I will net $160,000 for my church. How do I keep my expenses so low? The key is technology. High-quality learning systems produced by nationally recognized educational providers such as Pearson are readily available over the Internet. The cost of learning management systems currently averages around $5 per student per month.
The state will require me to have two “teachers” for 40 students. No problem; this can be anyone in my congregation with a college degree and some time on their hands. Getting alternative certification from the state is relatively easy. My teachers need not be education experts because the learning management system does the heavy lifting. It provides instruction and creates and grades the homework and tests. The latest systems even use artificial intelligence to answer student questions.
The only job for the “teachers” would be to manage classroom behavior and help students use the software. A student leaving the public schools will probably get a fairly good Christian education. The public school will lose funding for athletic programs and perhaps a potential star quarterback. Ouch! For-profit schools will emerge employing a similar model. Using a hybrid instructional model and current costs, I calculate that a 200-student high school would bring cashflow of about $800,000 a year. Start 10 of
those and you have a nice chain of businesses. Could this be the real driving force behind vouchers? To recruit students, such schools could promise to teach artificial intelligence and the Python programming language to prepare students for a promising future in technology — or use some other clever hook. Texas has about 8,000 schools. The Texas Education Agency employs 1,000 people and spends around $2 billion per year to monitor the schools and hold them accountable.
I predict that vouchers will increase the number of schools in Texas four-fold. Will the Legislature increase funding by a factor of four to monitor this many schools? I think not. It will be a long time before state officials figure out if for-profit schools are delivering on their promise, and the owners will be very rich before they do. Good luck getting them and their money back from Barbados. Not only would church and for-profit schools poach rural athletes, but specialized voucher- and donor-funded sports academies could emerge. Let’s say someone starts a Dallas Football Academy. It could use an entrance exam similar to the NFL combine to assure it got the best athletes. The best coaches, fitness trainers, and other staff would be recruited.
These schools would have a direct connection to universities to give their athletes the best shot at a top-level scholarship. Such schools would dominate small-town teams and end the reign of, for example, the Aledo Bearcats. The state championship game would probably feature the Dallas and Houston football academies.
Rural Texas is our best bet to keep the state from making a huge mistake that is little more than a political stunt to get votes. Small communities have nothing to gain from vouchers and a lot to potentially lose, as does the rest of the state.
Steffen E. Palko is a retired associate professor of education at TCU. He lives in Fort Worth.
Read more at: https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/other-voices/article277689198.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Market based education plans work against rural and smaller communities. The most efficient and effective use of public dollars in smaller towns is to fund public schools as decent public schools make communities more attractive to home owners. All forms of privatization generally harm local communities and transfer public dollars into private pockets and often out of the local economy.
“Let’s say someone starts a Dallas Football Academy. It could use an entrance exam similar to the NFL combine to assure it got the best athletes. The best coaches, fitness trainers, and other staff would be recruited.”
Already happening in basketball. Schools like Oak Hill Academy recruit worldwide as a part of their program to produce NBA stars.
It’s going to be hilarious when all this comes to roost–when these states are faced with multi-billion-dollar costs in their voucher programs and public schools that are so strapped for funds that they can no longer function, not to mention precipitously declining college acceptance rates.
Darwin Awards all around
Bob: not hilarious. They already anticipate this, and are making plans to cut public schools to the bone the way they cut segregated schools back during the Age of White Supremacy. I don’t really know this, of course, but we are being guided now by people who openly suggest that it was the New Dealthat started the country down the road to ruin.
It’s all going to blow up in their faces. The morons.
My good friend Bob was raised in a small town in Kansas. He watched the rural population of his small town drop even as transportation got better. His father fought hard to keep the local high school open. He believed loss of the high school meant loss of the community. My own county saw a political debate over consolidating rural schools that was protracted and bitter. In our case, the rural schools were kept.
The modern Republicans want to ruin rural schools. Here is a chance for Democrats. They can slice off some of those rural votes where each vote is worth more by attacking these efforts. Tell the people the voucher programs are coming for their community ball teams. Tell them their town is in danger.
Interesting that sports might save public education
“How do I keep my expenses so low? The key is technology. High-quality learning systems produced by nationally recognized educational providers such as Pearson are readily available over the Internet.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . . high quality learning systems. . . ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . . such as Pearson . . . ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. . . readily available over the internet. . . ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ad infinitum.
Number of Christian school students in Texas, 75,516. Number of Catholic- 70,680. “Best Texas private schools offering football” are St. Anne’s and Cornerstone Christian. Men like Foster Freiss (now dead) can easily throw money to create sports programs at rural schools.
In central states, there was a period in history when Catholic schools dominated K-8 education. The constraint is money. How much of a money commitment are men like Anthony DeNicola and Rex Sinquefield willing to make. And, how much, the whale, Leonard Leo, is willing to channel to Catholic education instead of to his own company.
Scholars describe Hispanic families as traditional (anticipating blowback, no, not all). Families who want obedient children (and, wives) may well prefer religious schools.
Suburban Catholic high schools are often football powerhouses and, at the college level, e.g. Notre Dame.
A failure to take on the Catholic theocracy relative to its politicking for school choice results in an outcome we’ve seen.
If the theocracy pays no price for its politicking, it won’t stop.
Prof. Vincent Phillip Munoz, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, Prof. of Religion and Public Life in the Political Science Dept. of Notre Dame, the school of Amy Comey Barrett and Nicole Stelle Garnet who is described as the most influential legal scholar promoting religious charter schools.
I feel like a frog in a slowly warming pot that is reaching the boiling point. How do we pull together the majority of people in the USA to address critical issues such as the disbanding of the public ed. system, erosion of rural healthcare services, unabated climate disasters, unregulated capitalism, etc. Some how we need to unite and push back before it is too late.
Paula- it’s been hands-off of a major player in the school choice political campaign.
The executive director of the Colorado Catholic Conference was formerly with the Koch network and EdChoice. Catholic operations in both Fla. and Indiana publicly take credit for the initiation and passage of school choice legislation. In some states, the Catholic Conferences co-host school choice rallies with the Koch’s AFP.
Jefferson warned, in every age, in every country, the priest aligns with the despot.