Gregg Abbott is in his third term as Governor of Texas. But only this year did he become a passionate advocate for vouchers. He failed in the regular session, then called four special sessions and failed again and again despite a supermajority of Republicans in both houses.

What happened?

Simple!

Jeff Yass, the rightwing billionaire, the richest person in Pennsylvania, gave $6 million to Governor Abbott in December. It’s the largest political contribution in the history of the state!

The Texas Tribune reported:

Gov. Greg Abbott received a $6 million campaign contribution last month, which his campaign is calling the “largest single donation in Texas history.”

The check came from Jeff Yass, a national Republican megadonor whose priority issues include school vouchers. Abbott spent 2023 unsuccessfully pushing for a voucher program and is now targeting state House Republicans in the March primary who thwarted his agenda.

Abbott accepted the $6 million donation — dated Dec. 18 — in a little-used account, suggesting he was setting it aside from funds raised for his reelection campaign.

Yass is a billionaire from Pennsylvania who is co-founder and managing director of the Philadelphia-based investment firm Susquehanna International Group. He is also a top proponent of “school choice,” or programs that allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school costs…

Yass has been called the richest man in Pennsylvania, with an estimated net worth of nearly $29 billion, according to Forbes. His firm was an early investor in TikTok, the social media platform that Abbott banned on state phones and computersin 2022.

When it comes to politics, Yass has also been a multimillion-dollar donor to the Club for Growth, the national anti-tax group that has boosted Texas Republicans like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Austin.

ProPublica ——wrote about Jeff Yass, and so did I. He funds candidates who oppose abortion and “critical race theory.” He funds charters and vouchers. He is a graduate of the New York City public schools, and a very ungrateful one.

Vouchers failed because 21 Republicans from rural districts stood strong against them. They know their public schools, and they don’t want to defund them. They know their teachers ad principals. They don’t want to turn off the Friday night lights. Abbott has promised to run pro-voucher Republicans against them.

Abbott has six million reasons to push vouchers.

Jan Resseger, dedicated champion of social justice, explains that the culture wars are a ruse that diverts is from far more important issues. Book-banning and attacks on diversity-equity-inclusion are outrageous, but even more so is our indifference to structural issues, such as adequate funding, persistent racial segregation, and the privatization movement.

She writes:

In Schoolhouse Burning, the important recent book about the history of public education since the Civil War and the protection of public schooling by the provisions of the 50 state constitutions, Derek Black declares: “Public education represents a commitment to a nation in which a day laborer’s son can go to college, own a business, maybe even become president. It represents a nation in which every person has a stake in setting the rules by which society will govern itself, where the waitress’s children learn alongside of and break bread with the senator’s and CEO’s children. Public education represents a nation where people from many different countries, religions and ethnic backgrounds come together as one for a common purpose around common values.” (Schoolhouse Burning, p. 250)

Right now, of course, Chris Rufo, the right-wing linguistic reframer and political provocateur, has taken upon himself the mission of undermining the very values Derek Black proclaims. Rufo and his political allies at the national level and across the statehouses are intentionally frightening parents—making them fear children who are different. They have made the topic of the day their hope to eliminate “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” to shut down any curriculum that honors the history and culture of children who are not part of the dominant culture, and to undermine our sense of responsibility for providing equal opportunity. Our statehouses and national politics are being sidetracked by ideologues seeking to silence classroom conversation about how our nation’s past has shaped the present moment and by lavishly funded lobbyists pushing politicians to grant families public tax dollars to pay for their children’s escape from the public schools. We are surrounded by a maelstrom of argument designed to make us forget about our responsibility to the public schools “where people from many different countries, religions, and ethnic backgrounds come together as one for a common purpose around common values.”

Responding to the education culture war provocateurs is essential for those of us who care about public schooling, but it is also a distraction from the difficult essential issues we hardly see in the news anymore. I was jolted by Erica Frankenberg’s concise updatelast week about the persistence of racial segregation in public schools across the states.  My surprise wasn’t about the existence of continuing racial segregation and its contribution to inequality; I simply hadn’t noticed any attention to this reality for several months.

Frankenberg, a professor of education and demographics at Penn State University, begins: “Brown vs. Board of Education , the pivotal Supreme Court decision that made school segregation unconstitutional, turns 70 years old on May 17, 2024.”  She continues with a concise history of the long resistance to compliance with the Supreme Court’s decision, and updates the situation as we begin 2024:

“Public school students today are the most racially diverse in US. history. At the time of Brown, about 90% of students were white and most other students were Black., Today, according to a 2022 federal report, 46% of public students are white, 28% are Hispanic, 15% are Black, 6% are Asian, 4% multiracial, and 1% are American Indian. Based on my analysis of 2021 federal education data, public schools in 22 states and Washington, D.C., served majorities of students of color. And yet, public schools are deeply segregated. In 2021, approximately 60% of Black and Hispanic public school students attended schools where 75% or more of students were students of color. Black and Hispanic students who attend racially segregated schools also are overwhelmingly enrolled in high-poverty schools.”

What is the financial consequence of racial segregation? Frankenberg explains: “A 2019 report by EdBuild… found that schools in predominantly nonwhite districts received $23 billion less in funding each year than schools in majority white districts. This equates to roughly $2,200 less per student per year.”

Every year the Education Law Center publishes the Making the Gradereport on school funding fairness. The news in the most recent Making the Grade, released in December, compliments Frankenberg’s brief on the impact of racial segregation. Here is the this year’s brief summary of the situation at the end of 2023: “Vast disparities in per-pupil funding levels persist with the highest funded state (New York) spending two and a half times more per pupil than the lowest funded state (Idaho), even after adjusting for regional cost differences. Far too few states progressively distribute funds to high-poverty districts: more than half the states… have either flat or regressive funding distributions that disadvantage high-poverty districts… (T)he worst funded states are often guilty of low effort, indicating a failure to prioritize public education.”

And instead of raising their investment in schools, many states have reduced budgetary allocations for public education: “Nationally PK-12 education saw the smallest annual increase in combined state and local funding since the Great Recession. Fourteen states reduced total state and local revenue for education at exactly the moment when schools needed more resources to deal with the unprecedented challenges of interrupted learning, virtual or hybrid schedules, and health and safety concerns. In Alaska, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming, declining revenues disproportionately affected high-poverty districts and caused these states to become either less progressive or more regressive.”

The Education Law Center concludes the introduction to its comprehensive report with this warning: “A fair, equitable, and adequate (state) school funding formula is the basic building block of a well-resourced and academically successful school system for all students. A strong funding foundation is even more critical for low-income students, students of color, English learners, students with disabilities, and students facing homelessness, trauma, and other challenges.  These students, and the schools that serve them, need additional staff programs, and supports to put them on the same footing as their peers.”

Persistent racial and economic segregation in U.S. public schools and inequity and inadequacy of public school finance are merely two of today’s educational challenges, but they among the most serious causes of educational injustice. We can be sure, however, that the culture war missionaries who want to eliminate diversity and inclusion, are not worried about segregation. And as they openly state their opposition to equity, we can assume that public school funding is of little concern. The culture warriors and their political allies have been busy expanding all kinds of private school tuition vouchers and fighting for the right of parents to insulate their children (at public expense) from exposure to the rich diversity that defines our society.

Underneath the noisy distraction of the culture wars, however, serious structural challenges for public schooling require our attention. Only a public committed to public investment in the common good and expanding the opportunity to learn for every child can ensure the future of the public institution that Derek Black describes: “Public education represents a nation where people from many different countries, religions and ethnic backgrounds come together as one for a common purpose around common values.”

If you are or ever were a teacher, this story will make you happy and proud of your profession. Kristen A. Graham, a veteran education reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, interviewed the teacher who opened up a new world for Cherelle Parker, the new Mayor of Philadelphia.

Graham writes:

When Cherelle Parker stood outside her Mount Airy polling place on Election Day, speaking emotionally about how she rose to the brink of becoming Philadelphia’s 100th mayor, she shouted out the village that got her there: her single, teenage mother, her political godmothers.

And Jeanette Jimenez, her high school English teacher.

“She was the one who told me that my life was a real live textbook case study on how you turn pain into power, and she told me to write about it,” Parker said. That encouragement from her teacher helped Parker — who endured poverty and trauma during her childhood in West Oak Lane — win a citywide oratorical competition and start down a path that would culminate in her being elected the city’s first female mayor.

A reflection in Black literature

Stuffed in a corner of a jam-packed room on the second floor of Jimenez’s Bella Vista home is a time capsule of Parker’s high school years.

Here’s a poem the future mayor handwrote on now-yellowing loose-leaf paper, “I Dream a World.” Here are photographs. There’s the 1990 Parkway yearbook, in which Parker proclaims in the quote next to her photo that she wants “to help Black men and women of the future to unite and remember one nation under the groove.”

She first met Parker in the late 1980s at the Parkway program, an innovative Philadelphia School District high school model with campuses spread around the city.

Jimenez, Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez wrote in 1990, “believes there is a creative way to reach every student, no matter how poor the performance, how bad the attitude, how difficult the home life.” Every young person wants to learn, Jimenez believed, then and now.

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At first, Parker — whose mother died when she was 13, whose father was not a presence in her life, who was raised by her grandparents — was skeptical of Jimenez, who had a reputation for giving a lot of homework, and making students read a lot of books. At Parkway, students could choose which classes they took, and Parker shied away from Jimenez.

Parker was “spunky,” a standout in pink jumpsuits and long fingernails, Jimenez remembers. And, eventually, Parker was curious enough about what was happening in Jimenez’s classroom to find out more. Kids in Jimenez’s classes took so many trips to libraries and plays and elsewhere that Jimenez kept a permanent stash of tokens for their ventures.

“We acted out all the plays before we went,” Jimenez remembers. “The kids loved the opera more than the prom.”

It felt as if there were “sunshine coming out” of Jimenez’s room, Parker told the Daily News in 1990, and eventually, she wanted to “walk toward the light.”

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Jimenez had a vast classroom library. Parker began to dig in.

“I never said, ‘You can’t do that, you have to read Shakespeare,’” Jimenez said.

Jimenez had Shakespeare available, but she alsohad works by Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison and Sonia Sanchez. Although the district had banned The Color Purple at one point, Jimenez put into kids’ hands books in which they saw themselves.

It was For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange, that sparked a love of literature, of Black authors, Parker told The Inquirer in 1990.

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“She saw herself as the protagonist in those books. It’s what made her think she could do this,” said Jimenez, referring to Parker’s rise to power.

She made Connie Clayton cry

Parker had a loving family who did the best they could with limited resources, but her life was complicated, Jimenez said.

“She had a grandfather who was very sick that she took care of,” said Jimenez. “She needed somewhere else to go, physically and emotionally and mentally.”

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She found that, partly, in literature and in Jimenez.

“She calls me her white mother,” said Jimenez, who is still vigorous, voraciously intellectual and amusing at 81.

Parker set her sights on the Philadelphia School District’s Black History Oratorical Contest.

Her first speech was “decent,” Jimenez said, “but it wasn’t good enough for me to put in the contest.”

Parker “was furious. I said no, and she didn’t take the no. She said, ‘I’m getting there,’” Jimenez said.

That “no” made Parker buckle down to write a speech that not only won the 1990 citywide competition, but also made then-Superintendent Constance E. Clayton weep.

Parker called it “Native Daughter,” a play on Richard Wright’s Native Son, and wrote about how Black literature inspired her to rise above her difficult life circumstances.

“I, Cherelle Parker, was a child that most people thought would never succeed,” a teenaged Parker wrote. “You know? They almost had me thinking the same thing.”

She won $1,000 and a trip to Senegal, but she also won something more: the attention of powerful adults, including City Councilmembers Augusta Clark and Marian Tasco, both of whom eventuallynourished her the way Jimenez did.

Parker initially hadn’t given much thought to college, but Jimenez and others encouraged her. Jimenezeven took Parker on a visit to Lincoln University to make sure she gained admission.

“I wasn’t chancing it, with kids, you never know if they are going to follow through,” said Jimenez. “We just sat at Lincoln because I thought they were the ones that would take her fastest.”

Know your audience

Jimenez grew up in South Philadelphia, raised by her Russian immigrant father, a photographer and architect. She graduated from Little Flower High School and Temple University, where fellow student Bill Cosby would practice jokes at Mitten Hall.

She thought she knew some things about teaching when she began working in Philadelphia, at Barratt Junior High in South Philadelphia. She was a white teacher teaching the Edgar Allen Poe poem “Annabel Lee,” describing a beautiful woman to her Black students as blond-haired and blue-eyed.

Her teacher colleague Lenore Johnson enlightened her.

“She said, ‘Have you looked at your audience?’ There was no course that taught you, know your audience,” Jimenez said.

It was a mistake she did not repeat. Throughout her career, at Barratt, and at Parkway, and at Bartram High, Jimenez responded to student interests, teaching about writing and literature and life in ways that kids responded to. Sometimes, that meant using rap to reach students. Sometimes, that meant stopping mid-lesson to ask her students whether they were bored, and course correcting if they were.

Retired from teaching nearly 25 years, Jimenez is still keenly interested in teaching and learning. She’s trying to pick up Russian, and she thinks it’s vital to discuss matters of race and institutional racism, and she worries about how social media is distorting people’s world views. She thinks small class sizes are necessary, and knows that if she were still teaching, she’d be using the recent Barbiemovie as a tool to explore contemporary issues.

Jimenez treasures mementos from Parker’s years as her student, but it’s not just relics of the mayor-elect that she keeps. There are the writings of a student who went on to become a college professor, the young woman Jimenez helped realize her dream of becoming a welder — now she’s a SEPTA supervisor.

“What I’m proud of is those people that I had that became their own true selves,” said Jimenez.

She counts Parker in thatcategory.

“My hope is that Cherelle will run the city as I run my classroom,” said Jimenez.

Jimenez is confident that Parker picked up the most important lessons she instilled in all her students: Everyone can learn. Know your audience. Find ways to inspire them. Value people’s authentic voices. Work hard.

“She has a great soul, a good brain, and the sense to surround herself with good people,” Jimenez said.