I confess. I am anti-fascist.

I have been anti-fascist for as long as I can remember.

As a young child during World War II, I remember everyone saying that we–the USA–would defeat fascism, and we did.

All my life, when people promote hatred and violence, I sense fascism. It’s in my bones.

When a bully attacks someone smaller and weaker, I sense fascism.

Fascists always need someone weaker to label as the enemy, someone to hate.

When a government kidnaps people off the streets, takes them away without a warrant, and imprisons them without a trial, that’s fascism.

I believe in freedom of speech, freedom to practice one’s religion or no religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and the right of citizens to petition their government.

When a government decides who is not allowed to speak and censors them or gets them fired for what they say, that’s fascism.

I support the Constitution of the United States.

I believe our elected officials should promote the general welfare and ensure that everyone has good, affordable healthcare and access to decent housing. No one should die because they can’t afford healthcare.

I vote against candidates who encourage hatred for the weak and minorities.

I am anti-fascist.

I have always been anti-fascist.

Prosecute me if you dare.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects five fundamental freedoms: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to petition the government

I am reposting this because the 10:00 am post was incomplete. That happens. My error.

Leonie Haimson, leader of Class Size Matters, reviews the NYC mayoral race. Last weekend, Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race (he was polling under 10%). Time will tell if Trump gives him an ambassadorship, which was dangled as an inducement to Adams to leave the race. Trump wants Cuomo to beat Mamdani, who is a progressive and a democratic Socialist. The top plutocrats in NYC have gotten behind Cuomo because they fear Mamdani.

Mamdani is a dynamic young socialist who frightens the 1%. He has made many bold promises but is unlikely to be able to implement higher taxes on the richest New Yorkers or free bus rides. Most of the big decisions are made in the State Capitol, not City Hall.

Mamdani is no admirer of mayoral control or closing schools or charter schools. He wants a better public school system.

Haimson writes:

There is going to be a mayoral election in a little more than a month.  Since Eric Adams pulled out today, there are now three major candidates. 

 Andrew Cuomo, running as an Independent, has an education agenda focused on renewing Mayoral control, closing low-performing schools, expanding charter schools and gifted programs, and refusing to lower class size unless the state provides more funding specifically to implement the class size law. Here is a Power Point with more details on his positions on these and other education issues.  

 Curtis Sliwa, the Republican in the race, also wants to continue Mayoral control and expand charters, while continuing to co-locate charter schools in public school buildings.  His website education page doesn’t mention class size.  

 The proposals of both men are extremely reminiscent of the education policies during the twelve years of the Bloomberg administration.

 On many of these issues, they are diametrically opposed to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, who wants to amend Mayoral control to allow for more parent and community input, lower class size, and keep the number of charter schools as is, while auditing their practices to ensure more accountability.  Here are his detailed responses on these and other education issues on the NYC Kids PAC survey.

 Last Thursday, Cuomo answered questions via Zoom from NYC PLACE parent leaders, whose positions on most of these questions are aligned with his.  There is a YouTube video of this forum here.

 During the session, he seemed most passionate about the need to retain Mayoral control as is, several time saying it is “essential” and that “rolling back mayoral control is absurd”.  He argued the union is the biggest opponent to continuing the system unchanged, and he would need parents fighting with him to ensure that there are no governance changes when this comes to a vote in Albany.

 While expressing support to fund all the programs that PLACE supports, including more gifted programs and selective schools, he was insistent that he strongly opposes lowering class size, unless the state specifically provides more funding for that purpose.  

 No mention was made of the fact that the state is providing nearly $2 billion per year in additional Foundation Aid annually in part for this purpose, as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, or that Cuomo himself refused to fund the CFE settlement and for years denied NYC schools full funding while he was Governor.

Though Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat reported that  during the session Cuomo asserted that he would not cap enrollment at lower levels at “desirable” schools to reduce class size as a page on his website  says — a special priority of PLACE  — his answer to this question during the forum was actually somewhat different.  

 He repeated that he would exempt all schools from having to lower class size unless the city received more funding for that purpose and didn’t make any distinction for so-called “desirable” schools.  Even after being pressed on this matter, he said, “Either they have to give you the money or they have to give you an exemption.”

Cuomo also said he would expand the police force and the number of School Safety Agents in schools. Strangely, he wrongly claimed School Safety Agents were currently under the control of DOE rather than police. 

 Perhaps the biggest news from the night was that he said he would consult with PLACE leaders before selecting a new Chancellor.   For those who would rather not watch the entire video,  a transcript of his remarks is here. 

 

 

Leonie Haimson

Executive Director

Class Size Matters

124 Waverly Pl.

New York, NY 10011

phone: 917-435-9329

leonie@classsizematters.org

http://www.classsizematters.org/

Follow on twitter @leoniehaimson

Success Academy of New York City helped to write new charter legislation in Florida that made it worth their while to expand their corporate brand to Florida. The big change in the new law is that it allows charter schools to co-locate inside existing public schools with all their operating expenses covered by public funds.

Kate Payne of the AP has the story:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A charter school network backed by a billionaire hedge fund manager announced Thursday that it is expanding in Miami, after they successfully lobbied Florida’s GOP-controlled Legislature to pass a new state law easing restrictions on the privately run schools and freeing up more state subsidies for the operators.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has overseen a major expansion in state funding for school choice, presided over Thursday’s announcement in Miami alongside Success Academy Charter Schools CEO Eva Moskowitz and Citadel investment firm founder Ken Griffin, a GOP megadonor who has pledged $50 million toward the charter school network’s Florida expansion.

“I think Miami’s just the beginning,” DeSantis said Thursday.

Success Academy, a major charter network in New York City, and Griffin’s firm pushed for the new state law, which Florida legislators slipped into a budget package on the 105th and final day of what was supposed to be a 60-day session.

The measure clears the way for charter schools known as “schools of hope” to “co-locate” inside traditional public schools and qualify for millions of dollars in additional state funding.

Lawmakers created the schools of hope program in 2017 to encourage more publicly funded, privately run schools to open in areas where traditional public schools had been failing for years, giving students and families in those neighborhoods a way to bail out of a struggling school.

This year’s law loosens restrictions on where schools of hope can operate, allowing them to set up within the walls of a public school — even a high-performing one — if the campus has underused or vacant facilities.

Traditional schools across the state are struggling with declining enrollments, including in some of Florida’s largest metro areas, where school districts manage sprawling real estate holdings in prime locations.

Success Academy prides itself on high-performing schools that boost test scores and college preparedness among its students, many of whom come from low-income communities of color. But it has also been plagued by allegations of cherry-picking the families it admits and pushing out hard-to-serve students, according to reporting by the New York Times and others.

At Thursday’s announcement, DeSantis touted the school choice “ecosystem” created by the legislation he signed, which he predicted would open the door for the charter network to open new campuses across Florida and move into traditional schools in some of the state’s largest public districts, including those serving Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando and West Palm Beach.

“We also, with schools of hope, do have an ability when some perform poorly, where that can basically be taken over by a charter operator,” DeSantis added.

Moskowitz thanked the governor, saying she is expanding her schools in Florida because of the new legislation her network helped shape, a move she said will help some of the state’s neediest students.

“I’m not used to being welcomed. I’m not used to people liking high standards,” Moskowitz said, referring to the more adversarial environment for charter schools in New York City.

By contrast, under Florida’s new law, public school districts now have to provide the same facilities-related services to schools of hope as they do their own campuses, including custodial work, maintenance, school safety, food service, nursing and student transportation — “without limitation” and “at no cost” to the charters.

Mina Hosseini, executive director of the Miami public education advocacy group P.S. 305, called the move a “corporate takeover.”

“Miami’s public schools are community lifelines, not corporate assets,” she said in a statement.

___ Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Was the remaking of schools in New Orleans a great success or a hoax? Is I John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, analyzes the conflicting narratives here.

Like Diane Ravitch, who explained that there was “No Miracle in New Orleans,” I was upset by Ian Birrell’s Washington Post article which agreed with Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who “boldly said that the hurricane was ‘the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.’” I felt better after she cited Gary Rubenstein who explained that Birrell was an international reporter who probably didn’t know “that there has been an ongoing battle over education reform in this country where the ‘reformers’ have all kinds of tricks for misrepresenting data to advance their agenda.”

During the 20^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I had been reviewing previous research on the take-over and charter-ization portfolio model of the New Orleans schools. I had been invited to two conferences held by the Tulane Education Research Association (ERA), and to crash at the home of CEO Neerav Kingsland, who arranged for me to visit many schools and interview numerous district leaders.

My memories of the resulting conversations are very similar to the narratives documented in 2012 by Anya Kamenetz, who was then a reporter with National Public Radio.  Kamenetz investigated the evidence for both – that the portfolio process could a “Beacon” for hope in high-challenge schools, or a “Warning” about test-driven, competition-driven school reforms.

She reported on both the large increases in test scores, as well as the effects of segregation by choice, the misuse of test scores, and the inevitable results of a system where 45,000 students were trying to get into 18,500 slots. The damage done by those behaviors was mostly inflicted on the low-performing Recovery School District (RSD).

Then, interviewing the ERA’s Douglas Harris, she found that he had “bad news” for the higher-challenge RSD. He acknowledged that there had been several years of swift improvement, followed by a plateau this past year.” Harris said, “The increasing trend in scores is not all achievement.” He explained, “People were taking these scores as gospel. They had completely bought into the idea that scores equal learning.”

Kamenetz then explained:

Harris isn’t talking about outright cheating — though more than a third of the city’s schools were flagged by the state between 2010 and 2012 for cases of plagiarism, suspicious levels of erasures [of failing grades], and similar indicators.  … He means something subtler: a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice. “You’re learning how to adjust the curriculum, teach to the test.

Kamenetz then cited a professor at North Carolina State University, who had observed and interviewed teachers at “a ‘KIPP-like’ charter school in New Orleans. She reported that:

There aren’t many projects, discussions, or kids reading literature. They are really teaching what will be tested at the exclusion of all other materials. I had a science teacher tell me that if there was an earthquake in New Orleans, she wouldn’t have the time to cover it if it weren’t on the test. … 

There is extreme effort to control, rather than engage, students in the classroom,” she says.

Sarah Carr exemplified the same type of objective nuance in her book Hope Against Hope, which acknowledged several positive results while documenting the “human cost” of failures.  Carr was sympathetic to the argument that failing schools need to be closed down, but she concluded, “at some point there needs to be some degree of stability.” For instance, only about 10% of Teach for America teachers remained in their school for five years. And she observed:

There were some kids I saw that, even a couple of years out from Katrina, were still getting bounced from school to school to school as they were closed or transitioned out or taken over by different operators. She then concluded that to the extent that NOLA reforms were a success story, “it’s a story of micro-level successes.”  

Around that time, when it seemed like even the fervent believers in evaluating teachers using test-growth models were acknowledging that it had failed, Doug Harris and I had similar exchanges over two points. First, why should we believe that test-score increases, especially in the first years of the unregulated NOLA takeover, represented increased learning?

Second, English Language scores surged for three years, 2007 to 2010, but stagnated until 2014 when growth declined to what it was before Katrina. 

Harris argued that that plateau was evidence that the learning was real because previous gains didn’t disappear.

I was far more impressed by Rutgers’ Bruce Baker’s evidence as to how and why the ERA’s models were “problematic” when trying to account for demographic changes. Baker noted that after Hurricane Karina “citywide school census had plummeted from 65,000 to 25,000,” meaning that. “There’s just way too much that changed as a result of the storm in students’ lives to make confident comparisons.” Baker concluded, “The main drivers of improvement” were “increased school spending and a less impoverished student population post-Katrina.”

Then, and now, I concluded, that the ERA would need to be as transparent as possible in analyzing future outcomes if it sought to back up their viewpoint. Plus, I remained frustrated by their failure to accept the burden of proof as to whether running controls on test score metrics, especially for poor children of color, provided accurate estimates regarding increases in meaningful learning

In 2025, Harris’ and Jamie Carroll’s 20^th anniversary reportincluded the chart we discussed about the decline in output growth since 2024. But their conclusion is:

The New Orleans reforms led to large gains in average student achievement and increased rates of high school graduation, college entry, and college graduation in the first decade after they were implemented. Student outcomes have stabilized since then.

But, recent reports seem to be excessively focused on post-Covid increases in outputs, and it would hard for me to understand a connection between those gains and the test-prep, the teacher-firing, and school closing approach from a dozen years before.

Reading recent studies, I have only found one chart on outcomes from 2014 to the Covid pandemic.  The Louisiana Department of Education, Data Library, Date & Reports, 2016-2024 District Performance Scores in 2015-16 were 84.9 for New Orleans. By 2018-19, they were down to 67.8. 

The historian in me wonders if there would have been a different discussion if the ERA had featured a graph showing big gains from 2007 to 2010, which correlated with so many opportunities to manipulate data and significantly increased funding, followed by stagnate growth for nearly a decade.   

To Harris’ and Carroll’s credit, in 2025, they noted, “There were additional troubling signs of inequity in the first several years of the reforms: schools apparently selected students rather than students choosing schools. The expulsion rates increased 1.5 – 2.7 percentage points (140-250%) in the early years.” 

Harris and Carroll found increased segregation by race and income in high school, but not elementary schools. And they noted a 2019 policy change that “prioritizes admission at most elementary schools for applicants who live within a half-mile of the school. We find that this gives White and high-income students an advantage in securing a seat at high-demand schools.”

They note the decline in pre-K availability prompted by the district’s choices, as well as less of a focus on the arts during the first decade of the reforms, and in 2018, arts educators reported feeling ignored and under-resourced compared to educators in tested subjects. And Harris and Carroll explain the problems that vouchers created. 

As was true previously, Harris and Carroll were careful to warn against the belief that similar reforms would have worked in different times and places.

But, Harris kept praising “growth” measures that account for where students start at the beginning of the year. These accountability measures, however, almost surely contributed to the finding:

Heavy workload is a top reason why teachers leave New Orleans schools; teachers reported working an average of 46 hours per week. This combination of less preparation, lower job security, less autonomy, and higher workloads—to go along with lower salaries (see Conclusion #4)—would increase turnover in any city and any occupation.

Above all, I couldn’t understand why they still supported mass school closures and takeovers, that had supposedly:

Driven essentially all of the post-Katrina improvement. This was especially true in the first decade after Katrina; low-performing schools were replaced by higher-performing ones, which gradually lifted average student achievement.

Harris and Carroll acknowledge that, “it could be that students attending schools that are closed or taken over experience negative effects.” While they noted that “support to students in closed schools helps them end up in better schools the following school year,” even though providing such support to all remains a challenge.

And they don’t deny the harm done by failing to listen to school patrons, and reducing the percentage of Black teachers from 71% to 49% by 2014, as well as the reduction in teachers’ experience, and an increase in turnover.

At least Harris and Carroll conclude:

Local leaders will have to address remaining distrust among key stakeholders and disagreement about the roles of the district and other key actors. State control of New Orleans schools ended in 2018, but the local district did not regain many of the powers that it held pre-Katrina, including school staffing, curriculum, and instruction. … New Orleans created an entirely new type of local school district. Strained relationships and confusion about roles among the district, school leaders, and the community remain. 

My reading of the ERA’s twenty-year evaluation of New Orleans’ market-driven reforms is that I wish they would return to Harris’ previous acknowledgement that those who had imposed them “completely bought into the idea that scores equal learning.”

On the other hand, the 2025 report may be good for public relations, persuading some corporate school reformers and international journalists, but it’s not going to persuade school patrons to have more trust in their reward and punish model.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump could fire the last Democratic member of the supposedly independent bipartisan Federal Trade Commission. When a Democrat is elected President, he or she can fire all the Republican members of supposedly independent commissions. The Supreme Court is paving the way to give Trump unchecked power of all government agencies.

Justin Jouvenal of the Washington Post reported:

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to fire the sole remaining Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission, the latest victory in his aggressive push to exert greater control over the federal bureaucracy.

The justices overturned a lower court injunction that reinstated Rebecca Slaughter to her position with the agency that oversees antitrust and consumer protection issues while litigation over her removal works its way through the courts.
The ruling — while provisional — is significant because the high court also said it will hear arguments on overturning a 90-year-old precedent that allowed Congress to set up independent, nonpartisan agencies insulated from political interference if they do not wield executive power.

In 1935, the justices ruled that President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not fire a board member of the FTC, William Humphrey, simply because he opposed the president’s New Deal policies. Congress had stipulated members could only be fired for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” The case is known as Humphrey’s Executor.

The current Supreme Court has all but overturned that precedent in recent rulings. The justices allowed Trump to fire Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in July and members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board in May. Trump gave no reasons for the officials’ dismissals, despite statutes saying they could only be removed for cause.
“Because the Constitution vests the executive power in the President,” the majority wrote in the May decision, “he may remove without cause executive officers who exercise that power on his behalf, subject to narrow exceptions recognized by our precedents.”

The next big case that tests Trump’s power and the Court’s deference to him is his effort to fire Lisa Cook, a Democrat who is a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Trade Commission. He accuses her of mortgage fraud, with no evidence.

Clayton Wickham of The Texas Monthly described the danger that vouchers pose to rural schools, whose finances were already precarious. In rural areas, these schools are the heart of their communities, as they are in suburbs and used to be in urban districts.

Wickham writes:

The only time I can remember hearing sirens in Marathon (population 271) was for a school send-off. Six weeks into the 2024 academic year, I stood outside our K–12 public school with the student body and my fellow teachers on a dazzling West Texas morning to see our girls volleyball team off to regionals. Sheriff’s deputies, the fire department, and a fleet of pickups and Suburbans all lined up to escort the Lady Mustangs out of town. I was admiring the motorcade when I turned around and realized that my sixth-grade students had fled the school grounds and were sprinting down Avenue E—escaping!—in their Crocs. Panicked, I cried out after them.

“Don’t worry, they’ll come back,” another teacher assured me. They were only circling the block to catch the bus a second time.

Teaching in a small town is unlike teaching anywhere else. In many ways, the local school is the heartbeat of the community. There’s a trust, familiarity, and neighborliness that is hard to find in cities and suburbs. Often the largest employers in rural communities, schools do more than just educate local youth. In Marathon, the school organizes town dinners, hosts intergenerational dances with cumbia and country and western music, and packs the sweltering gymnasium on game night. At a time when school board meetings across the country have devolved into vicious disputes about book bans and “woke ideology,” many rural public schools remain uncontroversial cornerstones of their communities.

“Drive across West Texas or the Panhandle and you’ll see the names of school mascots on the water towers—ours says ‘Spearman Lynx,’ ” Suzanne Bellsnyder, a rural mother and public school advocate, told me. “That alone shows how central the school is to who we are.”

More than a third of Texas students attend rural schools, and despite their communities’ support, many of those schools have been on the brink of financial ruin for years. Not far down the road from Marathon, Alpine Independent School District and Marfa ISD are both running deficits of around $1 million, despite having some of the lowest teacher salaries in the state. Nearby Valentine ISD operates out of an unrenovated 1910 schoolhouse and has recruited six teachers from the Philippines to keep its doors open. The Marathon school is also feeling the pinch. We sometimes teach two classes at once; we rely on online coursework to meet curriculum requirements; two of our fluorescent lights emit a sinister drone the district can’t afford to address; and our track has completely peeled away in places, revealing the layer of concrete underneath.

In 2023, Governor Greg Abbott held public-education funding hostage because a coalition of Texas Democrats and rural Republicans refused to pass his universal voucher program. But this spring the levee finally broke, and lawmakers passed two landmark education bills. One, House Bill 2, offers rural schools a long-awaited lifeline, investing $8.5 billion in public education over the next two years. The second, Senate Bill 2, earmarks billions to fund private school tuition through education savings accounts (ESAs), taxpayer-funded accounts parents can use for private school or homeschooling. Some fear it may mark the beginning of the end for public education in rural Texas.

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For decades, rural lawmakers opposed vouchers for a pretty obvious reason: Most rural communities in Texas have few private schools, if any. Take the Trans-Pecos, where I live. The region is roughly the size of South Carolina, but if you leave out the El Paso metropolitan area, it had only two accredited private schools in 2022, according to data compiled by ProPublica.

School choice advocates argue that new private school options will emerge to meet demand. “When we insert capitalism into anything, it increases productivity and decreases cost,” said Republican House Representative Joanne Shofner, of Nacogdoches, this fall as the voucher debate raged. “It’s just good all around.” And if rural communities really love their local schools, said Mandy Drogin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank, then rural educators should have nothing to worry about. “Parents want to be able to send their child to the school down the street and have them receive a high-quality, values-aligned education,” Drogin said. “If that’s what the public system is providing, then their children will continue at that school.”

Trying to reconcile the optimism of school choice evangelists with the dire warnings from public-education advocates can be bewildering. Defenders of public education point to evidence that the ESA program will harm student learning, deprive underfunded Texas schools of vital per-student dollars, subsidize tuition for thousands already enrolled in private schools, and likely distribute hundreds of millions to rich and upper-middle-class families. On the other side, school choice advocates—many of whom have ties to deep-pocketed right-wing donors—present ESAs as a win-win, giving parents agency over the state funding allocated to their children’s educations each year without, in Abbott’s words, taking “a penny from public schools.”

But experience in other states suggests ESAs will constrict public education funding, and the research on their efficacy is disappointing at best. “Catastrophic” is how education researcher Joshua Cowen describes voucher findings from the last decade, citing learning loss comparable to the impacts from COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina for students leaving public school systems. According to the ESA bill’s fiscal note—a nonpartisan document compiled by the Legislative Budget Board that estimates how much a bill will cost to implement—the Texas Education Agency predicts that private school capacity could increase by 10 percent yearly to accommodate the influx from public schools. But in the first year, most of the students receiving ESAs will likely be children already enrolled in private schools. “There’s not going to be a mass exodus of kids in your community to private schools tomorrow,” Cowen said.

Still, Arturo Alferez, interim superintendent of Marfa ISD, says money is so tight that he worries about the financial impact of losing even one student. His district’s enrollment plummeted by 43 percent, from 341 to 194 students, from 2019 to the 2024—25 school year. More than half of Marfa ISD students are economically disadvantaged, but because property values are rising in Marfa—a fine art hub that draws visitors from around the world—the town gives more than $1 million in local revenue to the state each year under Texas’srecapture, or “Robin Hood,” policy. I reached Alferez by phone about thirty minutes after our scheduled interview time; he’d had to fill in for the district’s bus driver. “Our property values are going up, but we’re losing students,” he said, “and that puts the district more and more in a hole.”

Unlike most small towns of its size, Marfa ISD does have a private school competitor. Wonder School Marfa is a small, mixed-age, unaccredited Montessori-style “microschool” for elementary-age students. The school’s director and sole teacher, Emily Steriti, taught in a Montessori program in Marfa ISD for years before striking out on her own and founding Wonder School Marfa in a church basement. For Ariele Gentiles, a mother of three in Marfa, Wonder School was a godsend. Her middle son has autism and did not respond well to the environment at Marfa ISD.

“We took him into the big school under the overhead fluorescent lights with all the kids, and he just screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed, wouldn’t let us leave,” Gentiles said. “We made it about two weeks of maybe getting to school every other day before I was like, ‘Okay, this is not working.’ ” The small, low-key environment of Wonder School Marfa worked better for her son, she said, and Steriti’s Montessori-based classroom allows him to work above grade level while still learning alongside kids his own age.  “If there was no Wonder School where he could be and could thrive,” Gentiles said, “we probably wouldn’t be in Marfa anymore.”

Wonder School’s tuition is modest, but Gentiles said it’s still a sacrifice for her family, whose income depends on her part-time copyediting and her husband’s work as a fabricator. Depending on Wonder School’s eligibility, Gentiles plans to use either a private school or homeschooling ESA to help cover the $400 monthly tuition. ESA participants can generally receive around $10,000 toward private school tuition, with extra funding available for students with disabilities, while homeschoolers can receive up to $2,000 per year. Though she’s looking forward to the extra funds, Gentiles feels conflicted about ESAs in general. “It’s a very knotty thing to untangle as someone who wants to champion public education and sees the total value in it,” she said.

There is only one private high school option within a hundred miles of Marathon (or Marfa, for that matter). Alpine Christian School, a small K–12 school with a shooting range and a horse arena, offers a classical education “based on a biblical worldview.” Board member Rudi Wallace said school leadership has spoken with families hoping to switch over from the public system using ESAs. He added, however, that “not every student or family would fit” at Alpine Christian. The statement of faith laid out in the school’s handbook professes a belief in “the biblical and biological definition of two genders and of God’s design for marriage between one man and one woman.” When asked if the Alpine Christian would turn away children of gay parents or from different faith backgrounds, Wallace said that admission decisions are made on a “case-by-case basis.” According to the handbook, Alpine Christian looks for “families who share beliefs and goals similar to those identified in the school’s statement of faith and philosophy of education” and may decline admission due to “incompatibilities” in one or more of those areas. 

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Rural public schools will inevitably lose students to ESAs, but legal scholar and education-policy expert Derek Black says the existential threat to rural schools isn’t private competition. It’s how the state’s new, rapidly expanding entitlement program may constrict public school funding over the next decade. The fiscal note for Senate Bill 2 predicts that Texas will spend around $11 billion on ESAs in the next five years, and that money has to come from somewhere.

Sustainability is also a concern for state representatives. Gary VanDeaver was one of the two Republicans to vote no on vouchers, even when it was clear Senate Bill 2 was a done deal. VanDeaver, whose district, in northeast Texas, is almost entirely rural, is rooting for vouchers to succeed, but he remains concerned about the long-term budgetary impact of funding parallel education systems. “The day will come when we are not going to have the surpluses that we have, that we’ve enjoyed for several sessions in the state,” he said. “When that day comes and we see a downturn or even a leveling off in the economy, how are we going to fund everything that we made promises to fund?”

All Texas public schools have to worry about revenue loss from vouchers, but rural districts are plagued by unique challenges. Because of their typically small property tax bases, they rely more on state funding to keep the lights on. Unlike large urban and suburban districts, small rural districts cannot capitalize on economies of scale to cover fixed costs like salaries and electric bills. “It costs as much to pay a teacher to teach five kids as it does to teach thirty,” Debbie Engle, who recently retired as superintendent of Valentine ISD, told me. “But we don’t get the funding for thirty, so we’re trying to do more with less.”

The job of a rural superintendent is not for the faint of heart. Engle has chased javelinas off her school’s playground and smashed a rattlesnake’s head in with a brick. In small districts, superintendents often double as principals, coaches, teachers, substitutes, or even maintenance staffers. My former boss, Ivonne Durant, had already come out of retirement three times before retiring again this spring, at the age of 78. (“I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment,” she joked.) Before moving to Marathon, Durant faced all kinds of challenges during her decades in Dallas ISD—carjackings, slashed tires, racist incidents in the workplace—but the administrative workload at a small district took her by surprise. “Here, for the first time, I found the true meaning of ‘from the boardroom to the classroom,’ ” Durant told me. “If I was going to bring a big idea to the board, I had to make sure that I could carry it out myself. I don’t care how many times I heard people say, ‘Well, why don’t you delegate more?’ How do you delegate to teachers who already have too much on their plates?”

This May, after six years of stagnation, the passage of House Bill 2 offered rural superintendents some long-awaited breathing room. While it provides far less than the $19.6 billion Raise Your Hand Texas—an education-advocacy nonprofit—estimated schools needed to maintain their 2019 purchasing power, the bill’s $8.5 billion funding package remains the state’s single largest investment in public education in recent history. The bill included a considerable salary boost for experienced teachers in small and midsized districts. But the Texas Senate only raised annual per-student funding, known as the basic allotment—the most flexible revenue stream for public schools—by less than a percent. Instead, the bill requires targeted investments in areas like school safety, special education, and district operating costs, growing the list of underfunded mandates and limiting administrators’ ability to move funds around according to their schools’ needs. “The House passed a good bill, but the Senate desecrated it,” said Engle, referencing the low per-student funding.

“Our legislators love to write bills about education and all the things that they think we should be doing, and they leave out that local elected official,” said Randy Willis, executive director of the Texas Association of Rural Schools. “Texas doesn’t like Washington telling us what to do, but they don’t mind telling school boards how to run their districts—so we’re left trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”

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