In a 1997 column, the venerable progressive pistol Molly Ivins set her sights on the future of Texas education.
In the coming years, she imagined, the state might pass $1 billion school voucher program. And the results would fall short of boosters’ promises. Few rural students, low-income students, or students with complex needs would gain access to the state’s elite private schools.
This week, the first of her predictions came true, as billion-dollar education savings account program finally cleared the Texas Legislature. The state where everything is bigger will, fittingly, enact the nation’s largest-ever first-year scholarship program.qww
Ivins’ three-decades-old concerns echoed Wednesday in the Texas House chamber, through a debate that stretched into early Thursday morning.
So did the usual rebuttals. Not all private schools are elite. Many serve middle-class families and charge modest tuition. A scholarship program will allow more of them to serve more students of limited means, who, after all, will be prioritized under SB 2. More private schools serve rural communities or specialize in serving students with disabilities than the typical talking points assume.
These late-’90s arguments have swirled around the Texas statehouse for months.
In 2025, they’re about as ill-fitting and out of place as a pair of JNCO Jeans.
The pressing questions today are whether Gov. Greg Abbott’s hard-won policy victory can create the nation’s largest and most diverse market for K-12 education services.
- Texas is already home to some interesting new education ventures, like GT School, that challenge existing school conventions and use technology to radically rethink how students use their time.
- Compared to similar programs in other states, the ESAs created by SB 2 would offer ample funding allocations (85 percent of the combined state and local funding an average student would receive in public school) and flexible uses beyond school tuition.
- The state has a deep well of statewide, local, and regionally focused philanthropists with a history of investing in education, including new schools, tutoring initiatives, advocacy and family navigation. Their investments can spur the growth of new options, as well as support systems that help families and educators take advantage of them.
The magic lies in combining these ingredients effectively: Encouraging entrepreneurs to keep creating new, better, unconventional learning options that respond to family needs. Marshaling philanthropic investments to create new options and ensure families can access them. Providing families with resources and flexibility to mix and match new learning options with tutoring, learning centers, public school classes and more.
That won’t happen overnight. It isn’t guaranteed to happen at all. But makes for a far more compelling vision of the future than winning an argument from 1997.
In Brief
A handy market summary shows Texas will become the 30th state to offer some form of public subsidy for private education.
First Texas, now the nation.
A post-COVID retrospective on the new momentum for state education choice policies concludes: The education divide between red and blue states is far starker than it was five years ago.
The debate over whether to expand the supply of childcare by deregulating options, subsidize demand by increasing public funding, or some combination of the two offers some insightful parallels for thinking about K-12 education markets.
New York City schools try to get a handle on why families are leaving. The two most widely cited causes, among families surveyed, according to Chalkbeat: More rigorous instruction, and a desire to leave the city altogether.
Los Angeles Unified School District’s enrollment is falling so quickly it may soon be surpassed by Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s former home, Miami-Dade, as the nation’s second-largest school district.
Similar declines, fueled by demographic change, are a time bomb for districts across the country.
Anthropic reports on how students use its AI assistant, Claude. Important nugget:
Students primarily use AI systems for creating (using information to learn something new) and analyzing (taking apart the known and identifying relationships), such as creating coding projects or analyzing law concepts. This aligns with higher-order cognitive functions on Bloom’s Taxonomy. This raises questions about ensuring students don’t offload critical cognitive tasks to AI systems.
The report also suggests AI adoption is far more common in the so-called hard sciences than in the professional schools, humanities, business or education. 
The story of school closures during the pandemic is one of institutional failure and false certainty among those in charge. In its wake: Declining trust.
Astra Academy, a new network of private schools, aims to design a new approach to teaching and learning.
This conversation offers a historical perspective on the decline of “college for all.”
This marks the 10th anniversary of a retreat from federal school accountability. What have we learned?
Why has the southern surge of student achievement gotten so little attention?
Parent Corner
Two polarizing issues involving young people and narcotics: The explosion of ADHD diagnoses and the growing risk of cannabis-induced psychosis.
In both cases, parents often feel we, and our kids, are swept along by societal currents we can’t control. Carrie E. Bearden counsels:
Like so many things our children are exposed to now, the vastly changed landscape of cannabis products and their availability is an experiment none of us consented to in an informed way. The best we can do is try to make our retroactive consent (and that of our kids) as informed as possible.
In a similar vein, a recent study finds adolescent cellphone use may be positively associated with wellbeing. Don’t believe the hype.
