By Bob Ray Sanders
bobray@star-telegram.com
Choice.
It's a word I've heard, and I think understood, practically all my life beginning from the time my parents first implored me to choose my friends carefully and "choose the right path."
As a kid, I learned
choice could be painful if one wasn't chosen (or was the last to be picked) for a neighborhood baseball or football team.
I know what
choice means when we're talking about a cut of beef.
And I most certainly understand the term
pro-choice in reference to a woman's right to an abortion.
What I sometimes get confused about, although not very often, is when
choice is used in relation to education. You see, much of my life I've heard the cries -- sometimes literally -- for
choice either
in public schools or as an alternative to them.
When it refers to education, the word has tended to have a negative connotation for me.
In the not-too-distant past,
choice was an alternative to
forced integration. The theory was: Just let kids go to the schools closest to their homes in their segregated neighborhoods or choose another school, if it was not already at capacity.
Of course, the perception among many in those days was that if parents chose schools for their children, they would do the "natural" thing. As the late Rev. W.A. Criswell of Dallas' First Baptist Church once explained voluntary segregation to me: "Birds of a feather flock together."
Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, while vowing to make the next legislative session "the most conservative session in history," announced an education plan last month that includes "school choice."
Using a Catholic elementary school near the state Capitol as a backdrop, Dewhurst joined with Senate Education Committee Chairman Dan Patrick, R-Houston, to unveil a thinly veiled attempt to get state money to private schools.
Trying to avoid being accused of promoting a "voucher system," their plan calls for tax breaks for businesses that donate money to private school scholarship programs presumably to be used for poor students or those in low-performing public schools.
Dewhurst was quoted by The Texas Tribune as saying he had no problem with children's parents receiving "a payment from the state and are able to select which school they go to." But he said that when he talks about "choice," it could mean "choice to choose schools within a district, potentially across district lines. It's charter schools. It's virtual schools. It's online learning. It's the secular and religious schools in the private sector."
Let's cut through the subterfuge. There is limited choice within districts now -- the limitation being that individual schools can accommodate only a certain number of students. That would be the case when talking about any inter-district transfers as well.
What we're really talking about here is putting state dollars into private schools, a large percentage of them parochial.
Once again, instead of finding more money for public schools, we have state leaders looking for ways to deprive public education of much-needed funding. It seems it wasn't bad enough that these same leaders voted to cut public education by $5.4 billion in the last legislative session, with no real plan on the horizon to restore it, much less increase funding.
Dewhurst, who lost a bid for the U.S. Senate last year partly because he wasn't far enough to the right, indeed may become more conservative. But the people of Texas should not allow his political persuasion or ambition to have a negative impact on the state's public schools and the almost 5 million students they serve.
The state's governor and its new commissioner of education also are on record supporting school choice. That's their prerogative, and presumably their conservative mandate.
What all these leaders must understand is that come election time, Texas voters will have the right to exercise their
choice.
Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.817-390-7775Twitter: @BobRaySanders
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