Preaching to the Choir: Greg Abbott Tours Private Christian Schools (Exclusively) to Make the Case..
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The governor has promoted ‘school choice’ at seven religious academies around the state. Why there?
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Preaching to the Choir: Greg Abbott Tours Private Christian Schools (Exclusively) to Make the Case for Vouchers
The governor has promoted “school choice” at seven religious academies around the state. Why there?
By Forrest Wilder
March 16, 2023
Who would school vouchers really benefit?
Governor Greg Abbott is helping to answer that question, not so much through his rhetoric, which is relentlessly on-message (“educational freedom,” “parental rights,” “school choice”) as through his actions. Over the last few months, the governor has been taking his case for school vouchers on the road, traveling around the state to talk up the benefits of education savings accounts, the wonky name for a program that would offer taxpayer dollars to parents who enroll their kids in private schools.
But it’s impossible not to notice that Abbott has only visited expensive private Christian institutions—all Protestant—in front of friendly audiences of parents who have opted out of public education. Of the seven schools the governor has visited on his “Parent Empowerment Tour,” not a single one has been a public school or a secular private school or a religious school affiliated with Catholicism, Islam, or Judaism. Not even a Montessori. If the goal was to reassure critics that Abbott’s embrace of vouchers wasn’t a recipe for draining the public school system while subsidizing the children of wealthy Christian conservatives in private schools of their choice, well, none of those critics were around to hear it. The governor was quite literally preaching to the choir.
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From Sarasota Phoenix, Issue 2, May 2018, by Jon Susce: “Orchestrated Chaos: Is local school board dysfunction part of larger scheme to discredit public schools?”
“David Brain is the head of a large real-estate investment firm called Entertainment Properties Trust. In 2012, Brain appeared on CNBC to discuss the real estate outlook nationally and with a specific eye on charter schools around the US. He explained that charter schools are ‘….a very stable business, very recession-resistant. It’s a very high-demand product.’ Later on during his interview, Brain was asked about the most profitable sector in commercial real estate investment in the US right now. Considering the gradual death of retail, it was an important question at the time and remains so today.
“Brain’s response to this question was pretty shocking: ‘Well, probably the best place to invest right now is in the charter school business. It’s our highest growth and most appealing sector right now of the portfolio. It’s the most in-demand and the most recession-resistant. And a great, sustainable opportunity with 500 schools starting every year. It’s a two and a half billion dollar opportunity set in rough measure annually.’”
And with the tax-payer money they take in, they buy (also known as "donate to"
politicians who'll close down more public schools, so they can have EVERYTHING. It's not about education, it's about seeing schools as investments and students as dollars.
