School choice will have enough allies in the 83rd legislature for it to pass. Past attempts may have suffered from overwrought strategy. The good news is that past mistakes are easily fixable.
Three sessions ago school choice failed because the final legislative form it took wasn’t particularly conservative. Liberals don’t generally want school choice, yet a common strategic mistakes was made in this push – that of wooing enemies more than allies.
In Texas, the more Texans get to know conservative legislation, the better chance it has of passing. However, there is a common political reflex alive in older generations of Austin Republican and conservative insiders. They often think that, somehow, liberals secretly wield the real power and therefore require the lion’s share of the tender-loving-care in any significant conservative legislative push.
This attitude is similar to the Nixon-Kissinger détente foreign policy of the late 1960s and 1970s in which a powerful but inferior rival was given too much credit, and as a result grew in influence. President Reagan promptly and decisively reversed this foreign policy, reminding the stronger power of its superiority and the weaker power of its inferiority. The USSR was gone in a decade.
Last session a much better school choice bill was presented, one all conservatives and many liberals could get behind. The bill would have left alone the public schools but would have allowed parents who wanted to send their children to private schools a roughly $6,000 tuition voucher. This system did not compel schools, public or private, to accept students just because they applied. They still had to earn admittance. Neither did it demand private schools accept public school mandates, recognizing that well-meaning but disastrous liberal social policy in public schools has created much of the demand for school choice.
The practical effect would likely have been private schools emerging in all areas to provide a more parent-conscious, better quality alternative to the public school. Eventually this could create competition between the old public school and the new private alternative, improving both and creating a natural division of labor.
The strategic problem with this bill was that passage was attempted the insider way – at the last minute, with as little publicity as possible.
The obvious problem with this strategy is that the two power sources in politics – special interests and voters – provide the clout for legislation, and they often oppose one other. Special interests know about their own legislation and often would rather as few Texans knew about it as possible. For this reason, the quiet passage of a special interest bill is often optimal. It ensures that only a bill’s power source knows about the legislation, while its opposition stays blissfully ignorant. This is why insiders pass bills in the dead of night.
The other power source in politics, voters, are engaged by advertising campaigns – the earlier and heavier, the better. The public only wins when it overwhelms the insiders opposition, and it only overwhelms insider opposition with wide publicity.
In the case of school choice, its opposition is the massive public school bureaucracy and its many legislative lackeys. They are petrified of the accountability and declining market share school choice would deliver the public school system.
If the big, public campaign of three sessions ago were married to smart policy like that of last session, the 83rd legislature could pass a school choice bill.